Somehow I do not quite agree to that Paul. Some strange problems could be found by letting people work gentoo as their first Linux experience.
Your words sound like Gentoo should be an _elite_ (meta-) distribution and I do not think that's going to do Gentoo any good. This is a know 'bug' that has been around for many years in the Linux community. We should be willing to help people where we can. Beside, have you ever seen such nice documentation online? Yes, I tell people that switch from Windows to use SuSE or Redhat. I started with Slackware as my first distro. It was hard, but I think it's the only way I could get the knowledge I have now. As long as we don't get stuck because of a certain sence of being a "hard core linux distro". I do NOT want this project to bleed to death over such elite feeling. regards, Bram -----Original Message----- From: Paul de Vrieze [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: vrijdag 4 april 2003 15:32 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? On Friday 04 April 2003 13:00, Jose Gonzalez Gomez wrote: > Agree with you, but... (there's always a but :o) ) > > First of all, maybe I should mind my own business instead of talking > about how things could be better or putting pressure on some developers > that do things for free, so please take this as just an oppinion and > kind chatting, as I don't intend at all to criticize your work (what the > [EMAIL PROTECTED], I think you are doing a great work) > > So back to the point, I think all of this you have talked about > could be solved in the following way: > > * About the optimization flags, don't give the "idiot" users the > chance to change sensitive compile flags. Maybe they could only > change the processor they are compiling for with --march-XXXX and > nothing else, I don't know. Or even detect the processor (I think > this can be done easily) and automatically compile for it without > any further optimization. Ok, they won't have a fully optimized > system, but at least they will have a system optimized for their > processors, and this is more than they will ever have with another > distros. This way the number of bugs caused by agressive > optimization flags could be drastically reduced for "idiot" users. Why would we want idiot users. I personally believe gentoo should not want to be an all-users distro. Please let the noobs run redhat, mandrake, caldera, suse whatever. The installation manual is an excelent way to filter out those users who are not quite ready for gentoo yet. This will make sure that the traffic on gentoo-user is not quadrupled (and all devs and knowledgeable people leave it). It will also make sure that the amount of invalid bugs doesn't increase considerably. Gentoo is a linux distribution for power users by power users. Everyone is welcome to use gentoo, but as yet it could mean that users who are not qualified get disappointed. That's bad luck for them, but I don't really care that much. For gentoo we need people who are going to help to make the distro even greater than it is now. People who really need a graphical install are not going to be those people. > * About the bug reporting, maybe it could be created some automated > reporting tool. Gnome has one, I don't know if works well, but > it's an idea. > There are allready too few developers. Automated bug reporting generates incredible amounts of noise. Many emerge failures are caused by user error (nonintentional), that many people on this list are happy to help them resolve, but are not bugs. > By the way, I have curiosity about this... do you all the developers > work for free in Gentoo?. Again, I should mind my own business, but I > think you have a great product here, and you could start promoting it > and selling it to companies, basing the marketing in the improved > performance obtained in Gentoo. Gentoo still could be free, but you > could make some good money for selling services associated with Gentoo. > Have you ever thought about that? While I'm not a gentoo developer I believe no-one get's paid for gentoo, not even Daniel. Paul -- Paul de Vrieze Researcher Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~pauldv -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
