What do you NOT like about Gentoo?

audiodef

This is meant to be a constructive topic - not for flaming Gentoo because it screwed something up. There's a "Why do you like Gentoo?" thread and I thought a thread dedicated to constructive criticism of Gentoo Linux should also exist, for balance. This is mainly intended for people who like and use Gentoo - people who don't, please post elsewhere.

For example, some packages fail to emerge without an error message. Literally. It will fail and say blah, blah, blah, "(no error message)" (I realise logs may exist elsewhere, but it would still be nice to be given a reason for the failure).

So, what bugs you about Gentoo? What would you like to see done differently? Etcetera, etcetera, hooray, let's go.

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mattydee · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 6:32 pm Post subject:

For me, the most frustrating thing is that I couldn't find a detailed list of exactlywhat packages were in the kde meta packages.

Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough though.

gerard27 · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 7:44 pm Post subject:

@mattydee,
Read the ebuild text!
And do this also for other packages.
It will tell you a lot.
Gerard.
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WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

The time it takes to compile a package...

Ink_arni · n00b Joined: 17 Jan 2008 Posts: 19 Location: Europe

jonnevers · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 6:36 pm Post subject:

audiodef · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 6:44 pm Post subject:

Portage needs to alert you if you're unmerging a package that other packages depend on - by default. As it is, if you just emerge --unmerge (package), it will happily oblige. Even people like me who like to mess around with our systems and we at least kinda sorta know what we're doing can't keep track of the hundreds of packages and their dependencies that might be installed, so this type of warning seems like a must-have.

And if possible, Portage should attempt to explain in more detail what went wrong and how to fix it when something fails to emerge. I can see how this might be a bit of a challenge, but it would be well-worth it if it can be done.
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Ink_arni · n00b Joined: 17 Jan 2008 Posts: 19 Location: Europe

audiodef · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 7:58 pm Post subject:

Windows and MacOS will pop up a dialog when something crashes, even if it's "DaBigBadProgram has unexpectedly quit because an error of type -1 occurred".

Shouldn't Gentoo have this, to at least give us a clue to use to figure out why Flumdebox has crashed?
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Naib · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:34 pm Post subject:

Overlays!!! simple as that
They are a FANTASTIC blessing BUT they are sooo broken atm

too many ebuilds common to other overlays causing unexpected b0rkages.
no easy way of finding out what overlay a particular package may reside in (short of posting here and hoping for the best)

That aside they are great! allowing a user to maintain their own local set of custom ebuilds (for new packages or for bugzilla prepping), allowing gentoo dev herds todo work in a isolated tree and not working on the live tree

improve overlay usage within portage and BAM!
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jonnevers · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 10:11 pm Post subject:

tanderson · Retired Dev Joined: 11 Apr 2007 Posts: 193

forkboy · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 11:40 pm Post subject:

I don't like how long things take to enter the stable branch. Lets all keep using firefox2!

platojones · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 11:51 pm Post subject:

forkboy · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:08 am Post subject:

platojones · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:13 am Post subject:

notHerbert · Advocate Joined: 11 Mar 2008 Posts: 2228 Location: 45N 73W

audiodef · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:40 am Post subject:

Gentoo NEEDS, NEEDS, NEEDS to keep track of software while uninstalling, so that uninstalling a package at least asks if you want to also uninstall its dependents. For example, I tried Gnome and XFCE and those damn things are STILL hanging around and STILL keep coming up in world updates even though I've tried removing individual packages. Portage is great at installing dependencies, but sux ass at keeping track of what to remove that isn't needed or wanted any more.

So something like emerge --unmerge --allpackages Gnome would be great, especially when you can throw in an --ask flag to make sure you don't remove something you want.
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notHerbert · Advocate Joined: 11 Mar 2008 Posts: 2228 Location: 45N 73W

We already have that.

WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

digrouz · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 10:29 am Post subject:

I don't like the fact that sometimes you have to wait a long before having a software update to be marked as stable by example firefox 3...

Also sometimes when you use overlays it's a pity to update a whole system.

Somethings I would like gentoo to be more focused on desktop environment and softwares, at least for the probably most used like KDE, Gnome, Firefox, OpenOffice.
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d2_racing · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 11:29 am Post subject:

Me too, I don't like that Firefox 3.0.x is still mark as testing. But Since I upgraded to Firefox 3.0.3, I had to revdep-rebuild a lot of package because of certain lib, so I understand why.

What is the status of GCC 4.3 or even GCC 4.2 ?

I'm using GCC 4.1, but it would be nice to have some feedback about which one of the version will hit stable in a couple of months.

For the rest, emerge -s could be tweak to have more speed

I love Gentoo.

yngwin · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 11:39 am Post subject:

Geralt · Apprentice Joined: 14 Jun 2008 Posts: 150

What I don't like is that emerge --sync does not protect folders of PORTDIR_OVERLAY by default, if they happen to be in the portage folder.

Of course I fixed the problem now by moving my overlay in the local subfolder.

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 12:02 pm Post subject: