Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
I think you're massively underestimating the requirements of the
average user, what with the tree as complex as it is these days. Most
users now:
* Have to use external repositories
* Have to handle at least some keywording overrides themselves
* Have to have some way of managing huge metapackages
* Have closer to a thousand than a hundred installed packages
* Aren't involved in development work
* Expect their systems to work
These are very different use cases than those for which Portage was
designed.
Well ... am I an "average Gentoo user?" I'm certainly an *experienced*
one. I've got a modus operandi that works for me and what I want to do
with Gentoo, which is essentially run cutting edge but usable (by me)
scientific and algorithmic composition and synthesis workstations. So
what I have on my systems is mostly "~x86", lots of local USE flags
enabled in /etc/make.conf, a "package.use" that turns on "doc" on things
when I want the documentation installed, and a fair number of other
things built from upstream source. So
1. I use external repositories, mostly for things that aren't in
Portage. In almost all cases I download them as source directly from
their home page.
2. I'm not sure what "keywording over-rides" are. I do occasionally put
something in "package.mask" that refuses to compile, but in general
everything on my boxes is ~x86 and I've never gotten a system so broken
that I couldn't fix it without a re-install.
3. I'm not sure what "managing huge metapackages" means ... I don't
recall having to do that.
4. $ esearch -FInv ^|grep ^\*|wc -l
540
$
Yeah, on a log scale, that's closer to 1000 than it is to 100. :)
5. I'm not really involved in much development work except a lot of
testing. The projects I'm building on my own are mostly very simple
things. But I certainly wouldn't say "I'm not a developer".
6. I expect my systems to break and I expect to be able to unbreak them
myself when they do. For the most part, they would work for someone who
just wanted to surf the web, send and receive email and edit documents
in AbiWord or OpenOffice.org.
So ... am I an "average Gentoo user?"
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