I HATE Portage

Liathus · Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2003 2:48 pm Post subject:

Except that when you have a block you have to manually unmerge the packaging that is causing the block first. Thats the case I was refering to.

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

True, I have noticed that now that you mention it. You could possibly get around that by doing an:

emerge -B foo-1.0

This would build the package only but not install. Than if the compile went ok, unmerge block and emerge the binary.

Haven't tried it, but it should work since -B is for building packages independantly of world.

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28

avenj

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

*.rpm == dependency resolution nightmare

*.ebuild == sigh or relief

just my experience

I readily admit, this may be due to my lack of expertise in the .rpm system. However, that's exactly what's so nice about portage....I don't have to be a portage expert for it to 'just work'.

theBear · n00b Joined: 13 Oct 2003 Posts: 1

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28

aridhol · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2003 5:51 pm Post subject:

Couldn't Protage just print:

A package is being blocked. Do you want Portage to fix this automatically? y/n [y]

And then Portage does all the work instead of forcing the user to build everything before the block, then unmerge the blocker then emerge the nev version of the library or whatever it is that is supposed to be emerged next.

Since there seams that there is a standard way to fix blocks why not just make portage do it? I really don't get that.

Anybody who doesn't trust portage with fixing blocks can just answer no or change the default (ask + def. Y) into something else (ask + def N, don't ask + def. Y, don't ask + def. N) or something. Can't be too hard to implement.
_________________
72 of Pitcairn Islands 49 inhabitants use Seti@Home
"If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy you buy another one."
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

avenj

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28

avenj

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28

avenj · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2003 12:24 am Post subject:

No, I openly admit I have a bad attitude ;-)

(I really don't intend to. I just have a decided lack of patience.)

PowerFactor

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

jarek · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2002 Posts: 28

raid517 · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 946

At last, I am not alone! Sorry for not reading through all of the last 3 pages but it's true, portage does suck. (Although as someone else pointed out it sucks a tad less than anything else currently avalable). At first I set out to with total faith in portage, innocently believing I could/should trust it implicitly.

However I have found that doing soo tends to break more things than it fixes. If you do a regular (once a week) emerge -u system and porage tells you there are xyz packages that need updating, then those unfamiliar with the limitations of portage (as I originally was) might be tempted to go for broke in order to keep their system up to date. After all this is what Red Hat's Uptodate does, it tells you when there are new packages and when they need updating

So all things considered and given that no real description of the purpose of these updates is supplied (are they security updates, do I need them, how do I know if I need them or not?) the temmptation is to go with the updates and hope the developers fully understand the concequences of how the updates are likely to perform accross multiple platforms and over a variety of configurations.

All too often however this has seemed to very much not be the case, with packages - often still of an extremely dangerous alpha/beta nature being marked as suitable for general release.

After having seen twice now portage literally kill it's own gentoo install because it appeared to reccomend that some update or other was a good idea, I have resolved to restrict the usage of portage purely to updating applications, such as Mozilla, Xine, Evolution and so on - and only do major system updates (i.e. an emerge -u system) whenever there is a major Gentoo release. I do not think portage can at this stage be trusted for anything much else.

As for dependency handling, well even that isn't so hot. I can no longer count the number of times an ebuild has faild due to some folder, or directory or other not existing. That folder or directory 9 times out of 10 referers to a dependant application or library - and it is only when you opt to individually emerge this missing component that you are able to complete the rest of your ebuild sucessfully.

Moreover portage appears to have an inordinately large failure rate, with perhaps often as much as 1 in 10 applications failing to emerge and compile sucessfully. I have had discussions about this with other forum members - and pretty much the common response was 'oh, your harware much be faulty, or really suck or something...' Which I found a hugely annoying response. Hardware failures are unpredicable, they always happen at random points. Portage/ebuild failures are not, if a package fails to build sucessfully, you can usually bet your bottom dollar that it will always fail at the same point. How can hardware be responsible for this? Indeed how can it be responsible, if maybe a week later after an emerge sync the problem with the package just goes away?

I am not putting portage down... Not really.... It is certainly a fine idea... But at the moment it is very clear that it is far from perfect...

It does suck less than anything else out there, but what that says about everything else is maybe not so good.

I don't think I could imagine life without portage at the moment. But I sure hope i see some improvements in the comming months... However, I guess as it is so new, all of these limitations are only to be expected.

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

raid517:

I think most of the problems your highlighting are not 'portage specific.' They have more to do with the fact that gentoo is a source based distro. I haven't had as much poor luck as you, but in a fresh install I'd say on average I have explicitly install about two packages do to portage trying to emerge in the wrong order. And, yes, there are still packages that won't compile on my system.

If you look at an *.ebuild, it's nothing more than a string of commands setting up the compilation and install of source with dependancy checking. If it won't compile on your system 9 times out of 10, this is not gentoo's fault or oversight, it is the developers. But this is the nature of source, it's impractical to expect source to compile 'perfect' on all combinations of hardware/software.

It's also impractical to compare portage to binary installs....they're already compiled. A more accurate comparison would be between say, portage and compiling your entire operating system by hand (a la LFS), even if you discount the dependency checking and package management ( a HUGE thing to discount) portage is an amazing system.

Caco_Patane · n00b Joined: 23 Apr 2003 Posts: 13

PowerFactor

avenj · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2003 4:15 pm Post subject:

raid517 · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 946

Dude I'm not looking to pick a fight. I am a Gentoo user, just like most of the folks here. I am simply expressing the limitations I have found. It's all well and good to just stomp, close your eyes and say these things aren't real and aren't happening. I wonder though how constructive such an approach really is?

All the folks here aren't making this stuff up. I am sure like me they have far better things to do with their time.

As far as there being a lot of unpredicabe beta and testing stuff tuff on portage, if you do regularly do an emerge -u p system, you often see packages made avaiable that are marked as beta, r1, r2, r3 and r4 and so on (in my simple mind I have always assumed these to be release candidates or betas). The only protection from these packages is the package masking system,. However even with this in place you are still regularly exposed to a lot of beta software The only difference being that what you get is ealier version of this beta software (r1 as opposed to r3, or r4 and so on) which is potentially only more buggy than the later versions. (Maybe the r1 etc classifcations mean something else - but they are in any case very frequent and not at all always predicable).

As for not updating often enough... How frequent is often enough? Once a week? Once a day? Once an hour? I have tried all three approaches... Neither made all that much difference. I don't know what killed my previous two gentoo installs, except to say that it happend on each occasion after an emerge -u system. Whatever got changed during this process killed my Gentoo install. (Weird lock-ups, no X, completely borked compiler and so on).

As for filing bugs about packages that fail to compile due to unsolved dependancies, I have reported this to Gentoo bugs on a number of occasions. The first 6 or so times I reported it I was hopeful of a resolution. However it happens too often to spend a large propotion of my time simply reporting bugs to Gentoo bugs. After a while, like many such anomalies, you simply learn to live with it.

Well anyway I'm sure some folks will want to shout about this, but I'm afraid I really don't have the energy to be drawn into an argument. Gentoo is cool... man even portage is cool... But it seems it is still early days and that it has a long way to go before it reaches any real kind of maturity.

As I have said, all of the folks here can't be wrong. No one is dissing Gentoo or portage. My plan is to never use another Linux version. But it is no apt-get, not yet at least.

Q

avenj · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2003 6:16 pm Post subject:

raid517 · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 946

Well to be frank I really don't have the time. What is it you want me to do? If you feel it is significant PM me and we can go off subject and discuss it further. If you wish to make distinctions between limitations and bugs that is all well and good, but these so called 'bugs' are often limitations that prevent me from enjoying my Gentoo install fully. So call it what you will, to me any most other non developers it is pretty much not much more than semantics.

Maybe when you can accept that I am not dissing gentoo, that I am actually just recounting my own personal experiences with it, we might then be able to have a rational discussion? I find it difficult though to deal with Linux people who refuse to see any limitations, faults, call it what you will, with whatever flavour of Linux they are currently occupied with. It is as I have said before the three little monkeys approach to operating systems, i.e. see no evil, say no evil, hear no evil. To a casual user this approach seems to smack a lot more of zealotry than common sense and does much to discourage them from discussing the limitations they find of key elements of the OS on open forums such as this.

I commend the original poster for having the courage to speak his mind, because plainly in doing so he was opening himself up to attack.

As much as I enjoy Gentoo - and portage when it works - (and please don't spoil this for me by attempting to draw me into a long and negatively focused debate) I reserve the right to criticise (constructively) whereever I see fit. If you feel all criticism of this nature is a bad thing, then I am sorry for that, and for you.

As for Gentoo being no apt-get, I am talking purely in terms of my experience of success rate and dependency handling. On this regard - and again in my experience, apt-get beats portage hands down.

There are many positive things that outweigh the negatives I have found in using Gentoo - and that is why it is my conviction that I will probably never use another Linux version again. So if this is not a sufficient compliment to your efforts, then I don't know what else I can say.

But I think it is important for users to recount their experiences so that developers might be able to spot areas of weakness and areas where some improvement might be possible.

It doesn't mean we are all Gentoo haters (it would be odd if the only full time OS I use was one I hated) just that we have not all had the same fault free experience of Gentoo that you appear to have had.

Later...

Q

ebrostig · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2003 7:27 pm Post subject:

I've had very few problems with Portage. Some of course is inevitable when you are on the bleeding edge.

Whenever someone finds issues with Portage that they feel is:
a) a bug
b) mis-implemented feature
c) Lacking a feature
d) Anything else where portage is involved and the result is not what you expected

file a bug!!!

I can't stress this enough, if you find something and don't file a bug on it, don't expect it to be fixed. And if you choose not to file a bug on the issue, don't come here and complain and then say you don't have time! The time this thread has taken is far more than what it would have taken to file a bug.

Come on people, be real. Portage is not flawless, nor is Gentoo as a distro. But at least do the favour back to the community of filing a bug when you find a problem.

Erik
_________________
'Yes, Firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'