Comments for Striving for greatness

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Roger

Roger — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:12:12 +0000

@Giuseppe: I had two problems with the Arch documentation. The first was that it turns out you should use the “unofficial” installation documentation for your first install not the “official” documentation (they are links right next to each other and you’d never guess this). Gentoo only has one set of installation documentation.

The second was that the Arch doc did describe things in detail, but would keep going over multiple ways of doing the same thing, and multiple tools for the same functionality. I don’t need to be told about 8 different disk partitioning tools – just the recommended one to use (the others can be a footnote).

The doc was also out of sync. Arch doesn’t install ifconfig if you follow the install guide, and the systemd/udev it ships renames network interfaces so you won’t find eth0 on the system. It took quite a while to work out what the heck was going on!

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Giuseppe Pes

Giuseppe Pes — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 10:47:35 +0000

@Roger, I did try Arch which has terrible documentation compared to Gentoo.

I have used both Arch and Gentoo, I prefers the latter as it provides an higher control over the system. However, the Arch documentation, in my point of view, is the best you can find among the different Linux distributions, it almost covers every single topic in deep details. Unfortunately, I can not say the same for the Gentoo documentation, it lacks in details and it just cover the main topics.

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Pavlos Ratis (@dastergon)

Pavlos Ratis (@dastergon) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 02:37:52 +0000

Hey,
I have wrote some blogposts about how to get involved in Gentoo http://goo.gl/T9Kxi and in Gentoo Bugday: http://goo.gl/NSO0U . There are also some lists in the posts with open bugs that are good to begin contributing.

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Manuel

Manuel — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 07:35:05 +0000

Maybe you should add existing bug reports to your blog entry, too. This reduces the effort generated by creating ebuilds from scratch.

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Roland

Roland — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:58:08 +0000

I remmeber one thing that Tahoe LAFS needs patching to work on Gentoo, but only a very small patch (from very friendly people).

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Roland

Roland — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:55:45 +0000

Tahoe LAFS would be cool. I have a running 24/7 node here on Gentoo. The link to is unter my name.

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by gerardogc2378

gerardogc2378 — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:39:29 +0000

In this time we have two great ways Gentoo and Arch Linux. Both with pros and cons. I prefer Gentoo to servers and Arch to Desktop. My big problem is time Gentoo is based on sources and beauty flags to compile anything. Arch is quickly to upgrade and use, many similar files are there into both. Arch has systemd, systemd is awesone. Gentoo is system v (init). I like both. i recommended both.

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Enrico Tagliavini

Enrico Tagliavini — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:37:33 +0000

If I can add mine: Kolab

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Donnie Berkholz

Donnie Berkholz — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:43:01 +0000

I deleted collectd from the post, apparently right after clicking publish, but I guess the rss feed doesn’t update.

Comment on Opportunities for Gentoo by Roger

Roger — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:58:10 +0000

I am a developer (including lots of mobile at the moment) and abandoned Gentoo for Ubuntu many years ago. Part of the problem was the drama at the time, but the biggest contributor was not marking packages as stable. I ended up having to manually update that file to say it was okay to use unstable versions and the list kept growing. The Gnome release stability was lagging by over a year, and I eventually got fed up with the baby sitting. I fully understand why not marking things as stable in a timely manner happens – it is far easier to leave things at the status quo than take the risk (and ensure testing etc).

Due to the stunts Canonical is pulling I’d really like to move away from Ubuntu so I checked in on Gentoo again. A piece of open source I make has a version from 10 months ago marked as stable (there have been 6 releases since, and all are better/more stable). As far as I can tell no version of Gnome 3 is marked as stable. And who knows what is going on with SQLite 3.

I did try Arch which has terrible documentation compared to Gentoo. However the experience with AUR was the breaking point – I wanted Google Chrome and it required far too much hoop jumping (compare with Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Suse). Debian testing was stale (eg only had Gnome 3.4). Fedora refused to install into an existing partition I had made.

I should also point out that I have multiple machines (beefy workstations, puny old ones, headless servers, laptops), and also work with other developers so issues with any distro get magnified multiple times over.

There is some combination of freshness, convenience and breadth where Ubuntu does a remarkable job of hitting my sweet spot – YMMV. As a developer they have worked out just right.

Things to make Gentoo work better for me include addressing the stability/freshness issues and making administration of multiple machines easier (eg propagating make.conf changes and installed packages).