Disclaimer: I am not a Gentoo developer; I have never been one; It is unlikely that I will ever be one. All of these opinions are my own.
On 29 Mar 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] spake: >> Catalyst builds are not supposed to be *interactive*. If you are >> hitting these problems, you're doing something wrong and/or >> stupid. Most of the time, getting blockers is a result of using an >> old stage3 seed to build a livecd with a newer snapshot. > > Actually some of them actually were bugs in the ebuilds, though most > errors I had were when I didn't knew of the package.use bug. Take > this one http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172622 Bugs in ebuilds are why the release engineering team is very careful about what snapshots they use when building releases. > Even if they are not supposed to be interactive, is there a good > reason for not allowing that? I think large emerges often results in > errors, no matter what stage3 seed is used. Besides, many emerges > are so much easier with interaction right? Take > http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-539520.html In order for a release of any system to be "high quality", it's build process must first be "repeatable". That is, you should be able to take the same set of inputs and produce the same result -- this is a trivial requirement of the scientific method. Interactivity does not lend itself to repeatability. That is, things usually work better when a human is not one of the inputs. ;) If you are finding yourself needing interactivity in Catalyst, then you should step back and examine your process. If you've had to "help" catalyst with more than just configuration directives, then you likely don't have a "pure" result. I often have to re-try a build several times because of whacky Portage behavior or broken ebuilds, but because of pkgcache, ccache, and kerncache I rarely ever feel penalized for it. In fact, the most I usually have to do is *erase* selected items from the cache to force a rebuild. Only on very limited occasions have I had to mess with an "in-flight" build, and probably not at all since catalyst 2.x. Having been a professional swiss-army-geek my entire adult life, I've developed rather strong opinions about process control, software packaging, and system administration. I have to say that, for the most part, I think the Catalyst guys have the right idea. -- Stephen
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