Hi,
M. Edward Borasky wrote:
OK ... here's my thinking. I visit DistroWatch every day and look at the "Top Ten":
1 Mandrakelinux 1346 2 MEPIS 1329
3 SUSE 1083 4 Fedora 1056
5 Ubuntu 1024 6 Debian 960 7 KNOPPIX 860 8 Gentoo 655 9 Slackware 565 10 Damn Small 549
What's wrong with this picture? Well ... I would expect Mandrake, SUSE
The only thing that is wrong with it, is, that this is a statistic of a single website and not reality. ;)
No, the big surprises here are Ubuntu and Mepis. Both are "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer", IIRC, both are Debian-based and both are "desktop oriented". If Gentoo is to make it into the top five, which to my way of thinking should be Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Gentoo and Fedora, we need
Ok, take a little break and think: Why would we want to be in the Top 5? Why would we want to be the most used distro in the world? I don't know, I (personally) don't want Gentoo Linux to be one of the most used distros. I'm not against it, but I surely won't cry if we aren't...
We aren't a corporation that has to 'survive', because our 355 devs can only live by 'producing' Gentoo Linux. We do it for fun. (At least I hope so.) I can't speak for others, but I don't think that I would have more fun doing stuff for Gentoo if we had 5 billion users...
1. More marketing/branding
Again, why?
2. Desktop orientation
Why? Gentoo runs perfect on my server, and lots of people are happy too.
3. Stability and security (I think we're there already)
(No, I'm not asking why ;)) I also think we're there already.
4. As many packages as "sarge".
Why? Installing a package with emerge $packagename is great, but not for every little hello world upgrade... I don't know how many packages sarge has, but are ~10'000 packages not enough for a normal 'end-'user? If we don't have your favourite package in portage, because we think nobody uses it, you're free to create your own ebuild (which is not that hard) and put it into your portage overlay.
Is there a "gentoo-marketing" mailing list? :)
Why should there be one? We don't try to sell our products to you.
How difficult would it be to integrate Debian source ("dsc") packages
and source RPMs into Portage?
Ok, that was hard. Everytime i hear the word 'rpm' i feel the wish to vomit.. I love portage and it's ebuilds because they are text-based. Mixing up three different package management systems would be a huge sin.
My modus operandi in installing Gentoo is to do the appropriate stage3 install for the subarch, followed by loading the desktop from the appropriate package CD, followed by "emerge --sync; emerge -uvD --newuse world", followed by installing the add-on packages unique to my applications, scientific computing and algorithmic composition and synthesis of music. The whole process takes close to a full weekend on my ~ 1GHz P3 and Athlon T-bird. I've got it down to four "bash" scripts plus canned "/etc/fstab", etc. files, though, so I can sit and watch.
GLI might be interesting for you, it also has/will have a 'XML-file-based frontend'.
Before anybody begins to flame: This is my and only my opinion. Blame me :P
Greetings,
blubb
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