On 01/02/2012 10:05 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
So when the user tells portage to emerge (not merge) something it goes in world as obviously that's what the user wanted. Presumably the user knows what they are doing and can deal with both pieces. If the user would rather have software hold his hand, that user is better served by Windows or Ubuntu or any number of user-centric distros, but probably not by Gentoo. This isn't elitist, it's just the way things are. Portage's job is to listen to *you*, not to to tell you what you want. The automation portage provides is just the logical conclusion of what should happen in future after you emerged something.
That unspoken agreement is only beneficial if I have the means by which to tell portage what I want it to do. The problem lies at a higher level: I think I'm telling portage to update a package, but that's not what --update means. It's hard for me to tell portage what I want it to do, so the fact that it assumes I know what I'm doing isn't constructive.
I wouldn't call it elitist or blame anyone for the change; the entire premise for my argument is that people make mistakes. But I do think it's bad engineering: 50% of users are going to think it works the wrong way no matter which one you choose, but only one of them screws up your system when you get it wrong.
