On Sun, 2003-11-09 at 23:49, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > The "Gentoo is difficult" thing has been a pet peeve of mine for a long > time, so please excuse the lengthy reply... None of this is intended as > flame, merely as an opposing viewpoint. > > On Sun, 9 Nov 2003 21:47:37 -0600 "brian connolly" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > | From a business perspective... you've just set up 10 possible hurdles > | to lose users and patrons. If it were Vegas, that'd be that game no > | one played. > > On the other hand, by removing those steps, you're removing ten possible > places for a user to set up their system in the way that they want it, > and adding in ten possible places to annoy the user with sub-optimal > defaults. I would find it very inconvenient if I lost control of any of > those stages. If you disagree, no problem -- that's what GLIS is for. GLIS has not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be about removing choices from the user! We have designed the back end so that it can accomplish anything that you want to do manually, but faster and easier. We do NOT remove capablility. Currently there is no LVM support, but it will be added in, we are only at v0.1. When it is there, you will be able to do anything that you want the same as before, but you won't have to wait while stuff compiles. The only limitations will come on the front end, and only if you are using a "basic" or "easy" installer. The installer that andrew and I are working on will have 3 modes, "easy," "medium" and "advanced." Easy will have a lot less choice and assume reasonable defaults for the user. Medium will be for a windows power-user/linux newbie. Advanced will be comprehensive, and if you don't know what you are doing, you'll be in trouble. So don't ever equate "pretty" with "less-useful" because if done right, it will let you do everything you want to do, your way, but it will be more efficient and less prone to error. That is the heart of Gentoo, your way, right the first time, and efficient.
> For me (speaking as a user with a half dozen Gentoo boxes), Gentoo has > by far the easiest install of any distro that I've tried. Other than > LFS, it's the only distribution that let me set up my discs the way I > wanted them (LVM with lots of partitions, and a mixture of jfs and ext3) > without making me have to second-guess what some fancy 'user friendly' > tool might be doing behind the scenes. The Gentoo install doesn't try to > force a load of unnecessary software on me (it's easy enough to fix it > so that vim gets installed rather than nano). There aren't any ports > open on the default install. I don't get the distribution's choice of > desktop environment forced upon me by default. I don't get some awful > generic kernel -- I get one that has what I want and only what I want in > it. I don't have to compile my editor manually because I can enable or > disable all those extra features using USE flags rather than having to > rely upon a distribution's default settings. As GLIS develops, you will be able to do all of those things, but you will be able to do them better! In fact, the only thing that GLIS doesn't do already is LVM, everything else you can do! > I get exactly what I ask for, and nothing more, which for me is perfect. That's GLIS. > Similarly, if you don't feel like making your own kernel, and would > rather stick with a fairly generic, sub-optimal kernel, then genkernel > can do all the work for you. GLIS can do this for you if you want, or if you want to compile manually, we can do that too. Nathaniel -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
