On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 19:23, Peter Elliott wrote: > On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 10:44:24 +1200 > > Christopher Sawtell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > OK, First things first:- > > > > How many people on the list would be seriously interested in this? > > yes. > me too please. > this is a really neat idea. Thank you.
> i'm sure lots of us have been held back from trying gentoo because of the > one_working_box_only and dial up connection combination. this idea sure is > the way to get us over that hurdle. The other problem which keeps folks from using Gentoo is that you do need to have a resonably modern machine. imho it's probably not very feasable to try to run it on anything much less that a PII/300. > a query re maintainability - how often is it necessary to do updates of key > parts of the system? I'm going to give you a horrid non-answer, because it's the truth of the matter. Key parts only _need_ upgrading when a vulnerability or bug _which affects you_ is discovered, and in practice that's about all. On the other hand your _want_ to stay on the bleeding edge all the time, might force you to be at it almost continuously. I seem to remember that somebody said that they did an 'emerge --update world' about every two weeks. Personally I don't feel that compulsion. > or big beasts like kde & co? Whenever KDE & co make a major release which you find irresistable. So far I, and I've been running Geentoo since version 1.1a, about a year or so iirc. I have found 3 KDE releases "irresistable". For reasons that I found to be unfathomable the upgrade from the KDE 3.0 series to the 3.1 series was a total disaster, but that has been the only one. I ended up re-installing the whole kit and kaboodle form scratch. Fortunately I was able to save a lot of the source files on another machine. So we had a Saturday till Wednesday session running in the background. On the other hand the last upgrade of both the X server and KDE was completely without drama. As Nick Rout mentioned earlier it is perfectly ok to upgrade your system in the background with the niceness set so that the compiling doesn't upset your day-to-day use of the machine. The last KDE upgrade took from Saturday till the following Wednesday morning, and we used the machine during that time without really noticing much change in performance. Remember that this is a proper unix-like o/s so you can always stop a process with the stop signal and then make it continue later. I did that several times during the last major upgrade. Otherwise it's really a matter of how you relate to your need to be on the bleeding edge. -- C. S.
