Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
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? -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Jakob Buchgraber wrote: Why don't you join the portage team and try to persuade the current portage devs and help to implement the killer features? The main problem with such projects is that you cannot do some stuff in an easy way, that's the reason you have from scratch rewrite of 2.0 codebases many times. You take the wisdom from the design errors you had the first time and move to a better design. So instead of saying that portage is missing features and developing your own pm you could be even more productive and help improving portage. Not really. Why don't ya do that? Because he knew that it would take less rewriting from scratch. now, having paludis and pkgcore around makes even portage improving since you can compare different ideas and have more inputs on how things could be done. lu - I like independent implementation, xine and mplayer won't be that good w/out each other. -- Luca Barbato Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Jason Stubbs wrote: That's not entirely true. The main trouble with refactoring portage code is that there is no defined public API and so even the littlest changes are likely to break things in gentoolkit and several of the portage gui front end packages. What about branching, doing the dirty stuff and let others fix their code? lu -- Luca Barbato Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Friday 16 March 2007 18:58, Luca Barbato wrote: Jason Stubbs wrote: That's not entirely true. The main trouble with refactoring portage code is that there is no defined public API and so even the littlest changes are likely to break things in gentoolkit and several of the portage gui front end packages. What about branching, doing the dirty stuff and let others fix their code? I've worked on a branch in the past as has Brian and a lot of the code that went into 2.1.0 was done in a seperate branch. However, a lot of bugs that got fixed in the release branch never got fixed in the development branches and so switching wasn't really viable. For 2.1.0, a lot of the work that was done ended up being completely redone in the release branch. In hindsight, if the team had have worked together as a team on a dev branch and only critical bug fixes went into the release branch while the dev branch was being readied it would have worked. Proper coordination would be needed but I guess it still could... -- Jason Stubbs -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
darren kirby wrote: Exactly. LSBs insistence on using RPM as the One True Package Manager seems incredibly daft to me. It was RPM-hell that steered me towards Gentoo all those years ago in the first place. I cannot put into words how much I loathe RPM. Seems to me if Gentoo wholesale adopted the LSB then it would be little more than another Redhat/SuSe clone no? And nobody here wants that, do they? Portage (or the tree as Ciaran puts it) is _still_ the chief reason I use Gentoo, and I rather think it will always be... just another Gentoo luser, -d You too huh? I left Mandrake because the upgrades were a mess to say the least. They were also slow to come out. I hope Gentoo will get all this mess straightened out because I have no clue what I would have to move too. Dale :-) :-) :-) -- www.myspace.com/-remove-me-dalek1967
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 09:58:50PM +, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. I was certain that Gentoo's direction was influenced by the people working on Gentoo; not ricers. Do you have any examples of when the ricers changed the direction of things in Gentoo. Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... Drop your theories about the forums from this list please, it's really far OT and creating a quite unproductive atmosphere. Thanks, Wernfried -- Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org pgpBGpeQb9yG1.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Wernfried Haas napsal(a): On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 09:58:50PM +, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... Drop your theories about the forums from this list please, it's really far OT and creating a quite unproductive atmosphere. Thanks, Wernfried And do the same about Sunrise, these unfounded attacks really serve no good purpose, there's noone promoting ricing on Sunrise project. -- Best regards, Jakub Moc mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG signature: http://subkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0xCEBA3D9E Primary key fingerprint: D2D7 933C 9BA1 C95B 2C95 B30F 8717 D5FD CEBA 3D9E ... still no signature ;) signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:33:54 -0400 Dan Meltzer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Paludis had nothing to do with that. It was a Portage change that required the update. hansmi's log was from 1-06-2007. The change in portage was added 1-23-07. This was before the discussion and portage fix, when the reason was pure paludis. (http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/portage?rev=5760view=rev) The reason was never pure Paludis; indeed, empty keywords for Paludis was ununmaskable with Paludis for a short time. Genone has been claiming about -* for literally years. It's just that that was when someone eventually got around to fixing it. -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 09:49:39 +0100 Wernfried Haas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 09:58:50PM +, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. I was certain that Gentoo's direction was influenced by the people working on Gentoo; not ricers. Do you have any examples of when the ricers changed the direction of things in Gentoo. Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... Drop your theories about the forums from this list please, it's really far OT and creating a quite unproductive atmosphere. Well no, that's the point. If we're discussing Gentoo's problems, as some people wish, we might as well discuss them... It's hardly a sane way of approaching things to say Ok, we're having an honest discussion about how to fix Gentoo, but you can't talk about x, y or z... -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
* The repeated abuse of silly phrases like Gentoo is about choice, Gentoo is about the community and Gentoo should be about fun to attempt to rationalise insane policy decisions. Choice, community and fun are all very well, but without a quality distribution they're worthless. The primary goal should be a good distribution, with the rest as things that come about as a result. See I tend to disagree somewhat here. Quality is good, I don't think anyone will argue against that (I mean how could you!). However I don't think quality comes from frustrated developers. I believe that keeping developers happy and sane (ergo having fun) has a positive affect on quality. I also think that our community (both users and devs) is probably our best asset. I think sacrificing that great community for quality is a mistake. Luckily quality and community generally aren't at odds most of the time. I'm not sure that differs much from the meaning I interpreted from Ciaran's point. I don't believe he is discounting Choice, community and fun as much as he is saying that without a good distribution these are irrelevant. So, to quote from the two of you, the primary goal should be a good distribution (quality is good), in order to keep developers happy and sane. -- Warwick Bruce Chapman
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Caleb Cushing wrote: What on earth is going to be a major visible improvement to a command line based package manager that any average Gentoo user is going to realise? The average user probably only uses a few commands: emerge -u/p/a/v/--sync/package/world/system and then use package.keywords/mask/unmask so there are really no fundamental differences that the average user will notice How about the speed of search's? the speed of resolving dependancy's? how about the speed that it takes to calculate a dependancy listing after you've already done it once? portage is SLOW. So speed... how about getting it to the point where it could be made to incorporate a graphical frontend if wanted. There are loads, i can name 3 off the top of my head, new ones are always popping up in unsupported software in the forums as well. how about providing me a list of packages that are masked instead of making me read and unmask them one at a time. That pretty much defeats the object of them being masked in the first place So all you can really come up with is speed? If a power user yourself can only come up with speed what is an ordinary user going to think of... *sigh* -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:19:52 + George Prowse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What on earth is going to be a major visible improvement to a command line based package manager that any average Gentoo user is going to realise? The average user probably only uses a few commands: emerge -u/p/a/v/--sync/package/world/system and then use package.keywords/mask/unmask so there are really no fundamental differences that the average user will notice If you think that that's all a package manager should do, you have a serious lack of imagination. Most users need or would heavily benefit from far more. See http://ciaranm.org/show_post/95 for some modest ideas that have turned out to be useful. All well and good (and I agree that those would be nice) but none that today's average Gentoo user is going to notice as a major visible improvement. --depclean has improved dramatically so the --uninstall will be just another way of doing it. And that really means that portage is no easier/harder than it was 3 years ago when USE=~x86 emerge foo was consigned to the dustbin Except that now users have to deal with more like a thousand installed packages, and have no sane way of doing simple things like: * Unmasking everything needed to get a particular KDE release in one go great for power users and devs but again, the average user will see no improvement * Uninstalling a package along with its now-unused dependencies * Uninstalling a package along with everything depending upon it Yup, i agree with you there, --depclean seem to be mostly working properly so that is not so much of a problem but --uninstall-with-deps would be great Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... It seems to most that the forums is the only part of Gentoo that is - and always has been - running smoothly Smoothly is not productively or effectively. But they do it VERY productively and effectively - look how fast they ban the troublemakers and trolls. Maybe they should control the lists...? Methinks you should sheath your swords for lack of argument on this one (Henry V - Act 3 Scene 1) -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
George Prowse wrote: Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:19:52 + George Prowse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What on earth is going to be a major visible improvement to a command line based package manager that any average Gentoo user is going to realise? The average user probably only uses a few commands: emerge -u/p/a/v/--sync/package/world/system and then use package.keywords/mask/unmask so there are really no fundamental differences that the average user will notice If you think that that's all a package manager should do, you have a serious lack of imagination. Most users need or would heavily benefit from far more. See http://ciaranm.org/show_post/95 for some modest ideas that have turned out to be useful. All well and good (and I agree that those would be nice) but none that today's average Gentoo user is going to notice as a major visible improvement. --depclean has improved dramatically so the --uninstall will be just another way of doing it. If the target is today's average Gentoo user, how about a big disclaimer to go with every emerge -Du world in the form of This is a list of suggestions. New versions come with new bugs. Take some responsibility for your system stability and don't upgrade carelessly. In fact, emerge -Du world should imply --pretend ;) (Also, mandate that there be a link to upstream changelogs (or a summary thereof) in a packages changelog in portage. Help users make informed decisions about upgrades. Some devs already do this e.g. joshuabaergen for xorg stuff and dsd for gentoo-sources - although I generally have to go hunting for those because emerge -l doesn't show changes between slots) j. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:11:49 + George Prowse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you think that that's all a package manager should do, you have a serious lack of imagination. Most users need or would heavily benefit from far more. See http://ciaranm.org/show_post/95 for some modest ideas that have turned out to be useful. All well and good (and I agree that those would be nice) but none that today's average Gentoo user is going to notice as a major visible improvement. --depclean has improved dramatically so the --uninstall will be just another way of doing it. 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. * Uninstalling a package along with its now-unused dependencies * Uninstalling a package along with everything depending upon it Yup, i agree with you there, --depclean seem to be mostly working properly so that is not so much of a problem but --uninstall-with-deps would be great depclean is something else. It's much broader in its impact. It has its uses, but the correct tool is not always a hammer. Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... It seems to most that the forums is the only part of Gentoo that is - and always has been - running smoothly Smoothly is not productively or effectively. But they do it VERY productively and effectively - look how fast they ban the troublemakers and trolls. Maybe they should control the lists...? And look at how much development work goes on there. If the forum mods were in charge, reporting QA violations would get the reporter banned for a personal attack and trolling. Methinks you should sheath your swords for lack of argument on this one (Henry V - Act 3 Scene 1) So now you're quoting Shakespeare as an argument? -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Fri, 16 Mar 2007 01:36:19 +1100 Jonathan Adamczewski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (Also, mandate that there be a link to upstream changelogs (or a summary thereof) in a packages changelog in portage. Help users make informed decisions about upgrades. Some devs already do this e.g. joshuabaergen for xorg stuff and dsd for gentoo-sources - although I generally have to go hunting for those because emerge -l doesn't show changes between slots) GLEP 46, if you care to pick it up and push it through... -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:11:49 + George Prowse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you think that that's all a package manager should do, you have a serious lack of imagination. Most users need or would heavily benefit from far more. See http://ciaranm.org/show_post/95 for some modest ideas that have turned out to be useful. All well and good (and I agree that those would be nice) but none that today's average Gentoo user is going to notice as a major visible improvement. --depclean has improved dramatically so the --uninstall will be just another way of doing it. 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. So where is the visible improvement? Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... It seems to most that the forums is the only part of Gentoo that is - and always has been - running smoothly Smoothly is not productively or effectively. But they do it VERY productively and effectively - look how fast they ban the troublemakers and trolls. Maybe they should control the lists...? And look at how much development work goes on there. If the forum mods were in charge, reporting QA violations would get the reporter banned for a personal attack and trolling. Methinks you should sheath your swords for lack of argument on this one (Henry V - Act 3 Scene 1) So now you're quoting Shakespeare as an argument? Nope, as a suggestion. Note the lack of an argument part and the quote you missed out: But they do it VERY productively and effectively - look how fast they ban the troublemakers and trolls. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:31:08 + George Prowse [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. So where is the visible improvement? For Portage, there hasn't been any for a very long time. The last serious improvement for end users was package.keywords etc, and whilst that was one step forward a long time ago, for Gentoo to regain an edge it needs at least dozens more like it every year. Do you know how many Gentoo users are leaving for Ubuntu or Fedora because Gentoo no longer offers an edge? Gentoo can no longer rely upon the competition sucking... Nope, as a suggestion. Note the lack of an argument part and the quote you missed out: But they do it VERY productively and effectively - look how fast they ban the troublemakers and trolls. Which, even if it were true, is besides the point if doing so prevents any development from getting done. And just how much development gets done on the forums? -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:30:36 +0100 Jakob Buchgraber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You're avoiding my point. The improvements that are being made are, by and large, insignificant. Portage doesn't need a few little tweaks now and again. It has to start delivering a whole load of major new features (there's no one killer feature), and quickly. Why don't you join the portage team and try to persuade the current portage devs and help to implement the killer features? So instead of saying that portage is missing features and developing your own pm you could be even more productive and help improving portage. Why don't ya do that? Because Portage is beyond repair. The code and design are so bad that it's easier to start from scratch. Which, funnily enough, is what I ended up doing. -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:30:36 +0100 Jakob Buchgraber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You're avoiding my point. The improvements that are being made are, by and large, insignificant. Portage doesn't need a few little tweaks now and again. It has to start delivering a whole load of major new features (there's no one killer feature), and quickly. Why don't you join the portage team and try to persuade the current portage devs and help to implement the killer features? So instead of saying that portage is missing features and developing your own pm you could be even more productive and help improving portage. Why don't ya do that? Because Portage is beyond repair. The code and design are so bad that it's easier to start from scratch. Which, funnily enough, is what I ended up doing. So why don't you start rewriting, refactoring and improving the portage source? It definitely doesn't make sense to create a competing package management system. Cheers, Jay -- Join Linuxfriendlyhardware.org project on irc.freenode.org#lfh (german) Registered Linux User #373457 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:33:12 -0300 Mauricio Lima Pilla [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thursday 15 March 2007 14:15:05 Ciaran McCreesh wrote: Which, even if it were true, is besides the point if doing so prevents any development from getting done. And just how much development gets done on the forums? If you are going to attack the forums in each message you send to this list, why don't you just add it to your signature? Why are those responsible for the forums unwilling to accept any feedback or criticism, instead attacking the attacker or accusing the attacker of merely being one of my pawns? Or, when it happens on the forums, making unspecific vaguely worded threats to ban anyone that does it? At least the Portage developers *admit* that their codebase sucks. For Gentoo to get back to delivering something, its problems need to be acknowledged and addressed. This is something that is consistently not happening. -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thursday 15 March 2007 14:46:46 Ciaran McCreesh wrote: Why are those responsible for the forums unwilling to accept any feedback or criticism, instead attacking the attacker or accusing the attacker of merely being one of my pawns? Or, when it happens on the forums, making unspecific vaguely worded threats to ban anyone that does it? At least the Portage developers *admit* that their codebase sucks. We are always ready to listen to feedback and constructive criticism, but your constant trolling against the forums can't be classified as such. -- Mauricio Lima Pilla [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 18:40 +0100, Jakob Buchgraber wrote: So why don't you start rewriting, refactoring and improving the portage source? It definitely doesn't make sense to create a competing package management system. How is this useful, honestly? Ciaran's exercising his strengths: the paludis team have been taking a long hard look at portage, what it does, and what it should do, and making a spec/requirements doc out of it, and then coding to that. Portage itself is a bit of a frankenstein (an evolved proof of concept, if you will) -- its evolution hasn't really been designed. The portage developers have, over the years, done their best to try and refactor and improve the source. But let's be honest, starting from scratch given the requirements up front is a *very* valid approach. I think Ciaran should be applauded on paludis. Thanks, Seemant signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:40:05 +0100 Jakob Buchgraber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So why don't you start rewriting, refactoring and improving the portage source? It definitely doesn't make sense to create a competing package management system. I think you underestimate just how much rewriting and refactoring would be required in order to produce something sane and scalable. Starting from scratch really was the only real option to get anywhere significant in a reasonable timeframe. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:40:05 +0100 Jakob Buchgraber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So why don't you start rewriting, refactoring and improving the portage source? It definitely doesn't make sense to create a competing package management system. Because it's far simpler to start from scratch. Refactoring is only possible if the initial design is at least vaguely sane. With things as they are now, making a change is nigh on impossible because there's no way of evaluating the impact. A complete rewrite has already shown itself to be a viable and effective approach. Approaches based upon refactoring have had significantly less success. -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:40:05 +0100 Jakob Buchgraber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So why don't you start rewriting, refactoring and improving the portage source? It definitely doesn't make sense to create a competing package management system. Patches welcome, I think is the appropriate response :) Seriously, if you want portage to be re-factored, just go ahead and do it; there's nothing to stop you. -- Kevin F. Quinn signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Kevin F. Quinn wrote: On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:40:05 +0100 Jakob Buchgraber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So why don't you start rewriting, refactoring and improving the portage source? It definitely doesn't make sense to create a competing package management system. Patches welcome, I think is the appropriate response :) Seriously, if you want portage to be re-factored, just go ahead and do it; there's nothing to stop you. Good answer. :) Ok. I have to admit that I have no clue of python (but of other languages), but if somebody is going to refactor portage I'll learn python and try to help as much as I can. As I think (from a technical point of view) portage is one of the (if not the) most important aspects of Gentoo. Lot's of people started using Gentoo because of portage as one of the main reasons (including me). It was really a nice piece of software (from a users point of view) at the beginning, but when I used it more frequently and tried to manage the packages on my system I started missing some features that other distributions and paludis have. E.g. I really like the dependency uninstalling feature and the support for different repos and ... So I just think something has to be changed e.g. making paludis an official gentoo project and mentioning it in the docs, but keep portage as the default pm. If portage can't get improved, then people have to get informed that there is a better alternative, because I know a lot of Gentoo users having never heard about paludis and I also didn't know that it even exists until a month ago. Cheers, Jay -- Join Linuxfriendlyhardware.org project on irc.freenode.org#lfh (german) Registered Linux User #373457 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Friday 16 March 2007 02:47, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:40:05 +0100 Jakob Buchgraber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So why don't you start rewriting, refactoring and improving the portage source? It definitely doesn't make sense to create a competing package management system. Because it's far simpler to start from scratch. Refactoring is only possible if the initial design is at least vaguely sane. With things as they are now, making a change is nigh on impossible because there's no way of evaluating the impact. That's not entirely true. The main trouble with refactoring portage code is that there is no defined public API and so even the littlest changes are likely to break things in gentoolkit and several of the portage gui front end packages. -- Jason Stubbs -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems (was: Introducing the Proctors - Draft Code of Conduct for Gentoo)
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:30:37 +0100 Alexandre Buisse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I quite agree with the Patriot act comparison, and I would be interested to know what you think our real problems are. Not a complete list, but probably a good starting point: * Portage. Gentoo hasn't delivered anything useful or cool for two years or so. Things like layman are merely workarounds for severe Portage limitations (not a criticism of layman). Delivery to end users is based around what's possible with Portage, not what people want or need. In the mean time, managing a Gentoo system has become much more complicated due to the increased number of packages on a typical system and the increased requirements for the average user. Combined with serious improvements in the competition, Gentoo's benefits are rapidly diminishing. Until there's a general admission that Portage is severely holding Gentoo back, anything delivered by Gentoo will be far below what could really be done. It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a big deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is indicative of how low people's expectations really are. I don't claim to know everything that users want from the package manager. I know that everything in [1] has been described by at least one user as a major advantage for not using Portage. Unfortunately, most of these aren't things that can be delivered easily with the current codebase. (Incidentally, since someone will probably try this argument: I held these beliefs long before I started work on a Portage alternative.) * Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code than a mere package manager. * Low QA expectations. Gentoo's QA isn't any worse than it was two years ago. However, expectations are much higher due to improvements in other distributions, and the increase in tree complexity makes mistakes much more severe. Mistakes can be classified as those that can be detected automatically (things are improving in this area -- for one example, adjutrix is being used to detect forced downgrades), and those that can't. Reducing the latter involves education and ensuring that developers are aware of expectations -- developers shouldn't be relying upon the QA team to do QA. Unfortunately, some developers simply won't fix QA mistakes. When something like this happens: 11:16:24 @genstef hansmi: bah fix your qa stuff yourself if you think I am wrong. I wont do something I dont agree with something has to be done to prevent the developer in question from continuing to hurt the users. * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. * The repeated abuse of silly phrases like Gentoo is about choice, Gentoo is about the community and Gentoo should be about fun to attempt to rationalise insane policy decisions. Choice, community and fun are all very well, but without a quality distribution they're worthless. The primary goal should be a good distribution, with the rest as things that come about as a result. * Finally, of course, the widespread refusal to accept what the real problems are, when it's much easier to blame everything upon a few people or groups. It might be nice and easy to think that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and is secretly harbouring Bin Laden, particularly when a few disreputable news channels are going around saying it's true, but we all know how acting upon such delusions works out... [1]: http://ciaranm.org/show_post/95 -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:30:37 +0100 Alexandre Buisse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I quite agree with the Patriot act comparison, and I would be interested to know what you think our real problems are. Not a complete list, but probably a good starting point: * Portage. Gentoo hasn't delivered anything useful or cool for two years or so. Things like layman are merely workarounds for severe Portage limitations (not a criticism of layman). Delivery to end users is based around what's possible with Portage, not what people want or need. In the mean time, managing a Gentoo system has become much more complicated due to the increased number of packages on a typical system and the increased requirements for the average user. Combined with serious improvements in the competition, Gentoo's benefits are rapidly diminishing. Until there's a general admission that Portage is severely holding Gentoo back, anything delivered by Gentoo will be far below what could really be done. It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a big deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is indicative of how low people's expectations really are. I don't claim to know everything that users want from the package manager. I know that everything in [1] has been described by at least one user as a major advantage for not using Portage. Unfortunately, most of these aren't things that can be delivered easily with the current codebase. (Incidentally, since someone will probably try this argument: I held these beliefs long before I started work on a Portage alternative.) Well, I assume most everyone on this list has read the blog post about Gentoo being unsuitable for servers. If not, I can hunt it down, but it's a starting point for discussions about Portage and package managers. I'll just throw out a couple of my own comments: 1. As far as I'm concerned, the one thing that absolutely positively should have happened now but hasn't is some scheme where you have something like Red Hat/Fedora's green checkmark/red bang indicator on your desk, indicating whether your system is up to date, and a classification of the available updates into security, bug fixes and enhancements. I don't ever remember how long Red Hat has had that, and I know Debian and the other apt-based package managers have something similar, even if it's just a command-line level. On Gentoo, even with the latest Portage, I do emerge --sync; emerge -puvDN world and just get a list. There's no way to tell which of those are must-haves for security without reading changelogs. 2. Just last year, the organization that is developing the LSB (Linux Standard Base) standards got around to forming a working group on package management. Bluntly put, everybody's package management sucks in some way or another, and there are three major Linux package management systems (RPM, apt and Portage) in addition to Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP and R all having their own package management systems. But ... the Red Hat/RPM/yum folks were there ... the Debian/Ubuntu/apt folks were there ... and I think the Perl and Python people were there ... Gentoo wasn't! There doesn't seem to be any Gentoo representation on the Linux Standards Base at all! So a standard Linux will end up being some usable compromise between Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, Novell/SuSE, Perl/CPAN, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Python and PHP. * Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code than a mere package manager. The tree, like an ordinary tree, is a complex adaptive system, including code, developers and users. I obviously don't have the same insight as a developer, but I think it's in pretty good shape. As near as I can tell, it's second only to Debian in terms of its size. There may be more RPMs world-wide than there are .debs or ebuilds, but they *aren't* all together in one place. * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. You may not know what the user base is, but you can probably get a pretty good idea of how *large* it is relative to Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and openSuSE by doing some simple web page hit statistics research using publicly-available tools and data. And I think you'll be amazed at how small that base is. Distrowatch was right about that part -- Gentoo share of mind is dropping and dropping rapidly, although I don't think it's because of misbehavior in the community. I think it's because: a. Daniel Robbins left and went to Microsoft,
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On 14/03/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:30:37 +0100 Alexandre Buisse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I quite agree with the Patriot act comparison, and I would be interested to know what you think our real problems are. Not a complete list, but probably a good starting point: * Portage. Gentoo hasn't delivered anything useful or cool for two years or so. Things like layman are merely workarounds for severe Portage limitations (not a criticism of layman). Delivery to end users is based around what's possible with Portage, not what people want or need. In the mean time, managing a Gentoo system has become much more complicated due to the increased number of packages on a typical system and the increased requirements for the average user. Combined with serious improvements in the competition, Gentoo's benefits are rapidly diminishing. Until there's a general admission that Portage is severely holding Gentoo back, anything delivered by Gentoo will be far below what could really be done. It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a big deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is indicative of how low people's expectations really are. I don't claim to know everything that users want from the package manager. I know that everything in [1] has been described by at least one user as a major advantage for not using Portage. Unfortunately, most of these aren't things that can be delivered easily with the current codebase. (Incidentally, since someone will probably try this argument: I held these beliefs long before I started work on a Portage alternative.) Well, I assume most everyone on this list has read the blog post about Gentoo being unsuitable for servers. If not, I can hunt it down, but it's a starting point for discussions about Portage and package managers. I'll just throw out a couple of my own comments: 1. As far as I'm concerned, the one thing that absolutely positively should have happened now but hasn't is some scheme where you have something like Red Hat/Fedora's green checkmark/red bang indicator on your desk, indicating whether your system is up to date, and a classification of the available updates into security, bug fixes and enhancements. I don't ever remember how long Red Hat has had that, and I know Debian and the other apt-based package managers have something similar, even if it's just a command-line level. On Gentoo, even with the latest Portage, I do emerge --sync; emerge -puvDN world and just get a list. There's no way to tell which of those are must-haves for security without reading changelogs. 2. Just last year, the organization that is developing the LSB (Linux Standard Base) standards got around to forming a working group on package management. Bluntly put, everybody's package management sucks in some way or another, and there are three major Linux package management systems (RPM, apt and Portage) in addition to Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP and R all having their own package management systems. But ... the Red Hat/RPM/yum folks were there ... the Debian/Ubuntu/apt folks were there ... and I think the Perl and Python people were there ... Gentoo wasn't! There doesn't seem to be any Gentoo representation on the Linux Standards Base at all! So a standard Linux will end up being some usable compromise between Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, Novell/SuSE, Perl/CPAN, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Python and PHP. * Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code than a mere package manager. The tree, like an ordinary tree, is a complex adaptive system, including code, developers and users. I obviously don't have the same insight as a developer, but I think it's in pretty good shape. As near as I can tell, it's second only to Debian in terms of its size. There may be more RPMs world-wide than there are .debs or ebuilds, but they *aren't* all together in one place. * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. You may not know what the user base is, but you can probably get a pretty good idea of how *large* it is relative to Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and openSuSE by doing some simple web page hit statistics research using publicly-available tools and data. And I think you'll be amazed at how small that base is. Distrowatch was right about that part -- Gentoo share of mind is dropping and dropping rapidly, although I don't think it's because of misbehavior in the community. I think it's because:
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:31:57 -0700 M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1. As far as I'm concerned, the one thing that absolutely positively should have happened now but hasn't is some scheme where you have something like Red Hat/Fedora's green checkmark/red bang indicator on your desk, indicating whether your system is up to date, and a classification of the available updates into security, bug fixes and enhancements. I don't ever remember how long Red Hat has had that, and I know Debian and the other apt-based package managers have something similar, even if it's just a command-line level. On Gentoo, even with the latest Portage, I do emerge --sync; emerge -puvDN world and just get a list. There's no way to tell which of those are must-haves for security without reading changelogs. paludis has a --report that wouldn't be to hard to copy or adapt for a graphical environment. The tree doesn't carry information about whether an upgrade is important or not, however (security aside), so one of the following would have to happen for non-security critical updates: * Affected versions would have to be package.masked * A GLEP 42 news item would have to be released * GLSAs would have to be extended to do non-security things. Personally I'd find the second option most useful, and it wouldn't be hard to deliver... 2. Just last year, the organization that is developing the LSB (Linux Standard Base) standards got around to forming a working group on package management. Bluntly put, everybody's package management sucks in some way or another, and there are three major Linux package management systems (RPM, apt and Portage) in addition to Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP and R all having their own package management systems. But ... the Red Hat/RPM/yum folks were there ... the Debian/Ubuntu/apt folks were there ... and I think the Perl and Python people were there ... Gentoo wasn't! The LSB sucks even more than not having a standard at all. This one's been discussed at length previously. * Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code than a mere package manager. The tree, like an ordinary tree, is a complex adaptive system, including code, developers and users. I obviously don't have the same insight as a developer, but I think it's in pretty good shape. As near as I can tell, it's second only to Debian in terms of its size. There may be more RPMs world-wide than there are .debs or ebuilds, but they *aren't* all together in one place. The tree is in better shape than Portage, yes. If you think it's ideal, you're probably not asking yourself the right questions... * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. You may not know what the user base is, but you can probably get a pretty good idea of how *large* it is relative to Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and openSuSE by doing some simple web page hit statistics research using publicly-available tools and data. And I think you'll be amazed at how small that base is. Distrowatch was right about that part -- Gentoo share of mind is dropping and dropping rapidly, although I don't think it's because of misbehavior in the community. I think it's because: a. Daniel Robbins left and went to Microsoft, leaving no Mr. Gentoo, and Eh, that's not really relevant. You're assuming that Daniel was hugely influential right up until he left. That isn't the case. b. No effort to seek corporate support, at least none that I'm aware of. Gentoo can't deliver anything amazingly useful to corporations with Portage the way it is. If Gentoo had a package manager that could handle managing large numbers of non-identical systems with ease it would have a major selling point. Gentoo doesn't have lots of users because it has nothing to offer most people over the competition. What was unique five years ago is now largely irrlevant due to improvements in the competition. By not keeping up, Gentoo is getting Red Queened. -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
[Oh no! How did I let myself get sucked into a gentoo-dev thread? ;-)] On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 13:31 -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: [...] I'll just throw out a couple of my own comments: [ I'm skipping the first one because it doesn't interest me] [Comment about Gentoo's non-participation in LSB] While I somewhat agree, I think Gentoo's main selling point (at least for me) is that is the way it stands out from your typical Linux distro. It's source-based package system was once what distinguished it from the rest. In summary, I don't think Gentoo should totally adapt to what the rest are going any more than I think Slackware or GoboLinux should. What I do see is that perhaps there are ideas that Gentoo has that maybe other distros could benefit from, and vice versa. But sometimes we have to agree to disagree with mainstream. As for enterprise... that's fine. Gentoo has traditionally been the kind of distro that throws you just enough rope to hang oneself, so I never really considered it an enterprise Linux, but if that is the direction that it wants to head in then it benefit it to make it more known to the general public. [Stuff about distrowatch, other distros and market share...] Gentoo share of mind is dropping and dropping rapidly, although I don't think it's because of misbehavior in the community. I think it's because: a. Daniel Robbins left and went to Microsoft, leaving no Mr. Gentoo, and I would generalize this more. I would say that Mr. Gentoo isn't/wasn't Daniel Robbins but Larry, and in recent times Larry has not enlightened us with his vision of Gentoo and where it's going. We have http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml but where do we go from there? Maybe we need to have a sit down with Larry so we can know what Gentoo really is. b. No effort to seek corporate support, at least none that I'm aware of. I would also like to generalize this more. Instead of corporate support I would say funding, whether it's corporate or what. I think it's important to convince people that they should give us money, and we should have the wisdom and capability of receiving said money and doing something productive with it. In short, I'm not sure there is any future for *any* pure community distro. Somehow Gentoo needs to at least find a marketable defendable niche and some kind of corporate sponsorship. Maybe embedded will turn out to be that niche -- I'd love to have even 1/4 of Portage on something like a Zaurus or iPhone. It's NFP, but even NFP has to have some sort of structure and unified vision. Even my neighborhood coop has decent solidarity and a marketing strategy. -- Albert W. Hopkins -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: * Portage. Gentoo hasn't delivered anything useful or cool for two years or so. Things like layman are merely workarounds for severe Portage limitations (not a criticism of layman). Delivery to end users is based around what's possible with Portage, not what people want or need. In the mean time, managing a Gentoo system has become much more complicated due to the increased number of packages on a typical system and the increased requirements for the average user. Combined with serious improvements in the competition, Gentoo's benefits are rapidly diminishing. Until there's a general admission that Portage is severely holding Gentoo back, anything delivered by Gentoo will be far below what could really be done. Portage is being incrementally improved. I'm not trying to rag on the former or the current portage crew; certainly it moves slowly. Much of it needs rewriting; my preference is to have more tests so that when stuff gets rewritten people aren't completly ruining the existing system, so my focus has been on tests and docs. Occasionally I work on features (glep 42 was one of those). People are free to submit patches and I think the portage team^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Zac does a decent job of integrating them. The only recent one that didn't get applied was the parallelization one; and I think zmedico has some plans for how he wants to accomplish that. It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a big deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is indicative of how low people's expectations really are. The portage team has always been hesitant to break backwards compatibility; the advantage of competing programs such as your own (paludis) and pkgcore is that you don't have the whole of Gentoo's user-base and you can remain much more agile in that type of space. I also think either you are ignoring the changes or you are just unaware of things that the portage team (aka Zac for the most part ;)) has been working on. Many of these things are internal behind the scenes changes and they don't require any user-level modification. * Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code than a mere package manager. I agree with that statement. * Low QA expectations. Gentoo's QA isn't any worse than it was two years ago. However, expectations are much higher due to improvements in other distributions, and the increase in tree complexity makes mistakes much more severe. Mistakes can be classified as those that can be detected automatically (things are improving in this area -- for one example, adjutrix is being used to detect forced downgrades), and those that can't. Reducing the latter involves education and ensuring that developers are aware of expectations -- developers shouldn't be relying upon the QA team to do QA. Unfortunately, some developers simply won't fix QA mistakes. When something like this happens: 11:16:24 @genstef hansmi: bah fix your qa stuff yourself if you think I am wrong. I wont do something I dont agree with something has to be done to prevent the developer in question from continuing to hurt the users. I can agree with parts of your statement. Particularly the expectations are not set out anywhere (not even by the QA team). There are no metrics, no data; it does not surprise me when QA is lax. There is QA policy of course (devmanual and devrel docs) but most of that relies on common sense (when is breaking the rules ok, when is it not, etc...) I said the same thing when Halcy0n led QA; if all the devs can't agree on the expectations of Quality Assurance within Gentoo there is no point in enforcing much of anything (aside from what I would term; black/white QA violations; ie no one in their right mind would think it wasn't a violation). However many violations are in a gray area in between and thus enforcement as well is...gray and not well executed. I would like to also point out that your quoted irc snippet is very weak as there is no explanation to what the issue is nor why genstef is being bothered about it. I realize you most likely meant it as an example of something that often happens (ie dev A does something, dev B calls him on it, dev A and dev B disagree on what proper course of action is; one dev must then have the bigger balls to either revert/fix or back down), however it may be good to use a made up instance in the future; lest your statement be misconstrued. * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
quoth the Albert Hopkins: [Comment about Gentoo's non-participation in LSB] While I somewhat agree, I think Gentoo's main selling point (at least for me) is that is the way it stands out from your typical Linux distro. It's source-based package system was once what distinguished it from the rest. In summary, I don't think Gentoo should totally adapt to what the rest are going any more than I think Slackware or GoboLinux should. What I do see is that perhaps there are ideas that Gentoo has that maybe other distros could benefit from, and vice versa. But sometimes we have to agree to disagree with mainstream. Albert W. Hopkins Exactly. LSBs insistence on using RPM as the One True Package Manager seems incredibly daft to me. It was RPM-hell that steered me towards Gentoo all those years ago in the first place. I cannot put into words how much I loathe RPM. Seems to me if Gentoo wholesale adopted the LSB then it would be little more than another Redhat/SuSe clone no? And nobody here wants that, do they? Portage (or the tree as Ciaran puts it) is _still_ the chief reason I use Gentoo, and I rather think it will always be... just another Gentoo luser, -d -- darren kirby :: Part of the problem since 1976 :: http://badcomputer.org ...the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected... - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, June 1972 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems (was: Introducing the Proctors - Draft Code of Conduct for Gentoo)
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: I cannot agree on the Genstef-thingy, nor can I proof you wrong, but I'd be please if in general such things could be done anonymous as it is in some way FUD and might fuel flames...userrel and userreps are there to be talked to about such things. * The wrong idea of what the user base is That this can be fixed in a relatively short time of concentrated working by a single person has been proofed yet. (It has not been me.) Why not just do it? -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Hello Alec On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 02:41:10PM -0700, Alec Warner wrote: 11:16:24 @genstef hansmi: bah fix your qa stuff yourself if you think I am wrong. I wont do something I dont agree with I would like to also point out that your quoted irc snippet is very weak as there is no explanation to what the issue is nor why genstef is being bothered about it. For the sake of completeness, here's the full context: (2006-01-06, 12:08 CET, 11:08 UTC) [12:08:32] hansmi genstef: ping, please fix net-www/gnash-0.7.2_p2009. It must not use KEYWORDS=-* according to http://devmanual.gentoo.org/keywording/ [12:09:50] masterdriverz hansmi: i thought the discussion was still ongoing as to whether that could still be valid [12:11:44] hansmi masterdriverz: as far as I know, the devmanual is normative [12:13:49] masterdriverz hansmi: well imho having -* in live and testing ebuild is a good thing [12:14:06] masterdriverz but i know a lot of other people disagree with that viewpoint [12:15:32] * marienz kicks masterdriverz [12:15:35] hansmi masterdriverz: No. [12:15:41] marienz *incremental* [12:15:44] masterdriverz :( [12:15:48] hansmi masterdriverz: In that case, you set , not -*. [12:16:20] armin76 lol [12:16:24] genstef hansmi: bah fix your qa stuff yourself if you think I am wrong. I wont do something I dont agree with [12:16:27] marienz it sort of works atm, but I hope that's only because not all ebuilds have been fixed yet [12:16:56] hansmi marienz: Paludis doesn't accept it anymore [12:17:20] marienz pkgcore only accepts it some of the time (it breaks rather regularly) [12:18:09] masterdriverz hansmi: i guess if that worked it would be fine... [12:18:57] hansmi masterdriverz: There's still p.mask Greets, Michael -- Gentoo Linux developer, http://hansmi.ch/, http://forkbomb.ch/ pgpCtnOYWpCVb.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems (was: Introducing the Proctors - Draft Code of Conduct for Gentoo)
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:22:55 +0100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I cannot agree on the Genstef-thingy, nor can I proof you wrong, but I'd be please if in general such things could be done anonymous as it is in some way FUD and might fuel flames...userrel and userreps are there to be talked to about such things. Well that's my point. Userrel and userreps have nothing to do with such things. And although QA and devrel can, in theory, take action, it isn't happening. * The wrong idea of what the user base is That this can be fixed in a relatively short time of concentrated working by a single person has been proofed yet. (It has not been me.) Why not just do it? All that we'd find out is the kind of user that actively follows requests for information and responds to them. Gentoo currently doesn't have a way of interacting with all the other users out there... -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems (was: Introducing the Proctors - Draft Code of Conduct for Gentoo)
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: All that we'd find out is the kind of user that actively follows requests for information and responds to them. Gentoo currently doesn't have a way of interacting with all the other users out there... Of course you would only find out about the user that responds to the request. I do still claim that the input could well be worthwhile and I feel proofed by how many tried to achive this in the past, yet sadly failed - which I dont see as a problem, since at least not all tries failed because of technical issues. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:41:10 -0700 Alec Warner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Portage is being incrementally improved. I'm not trying to rag on the former or the current portage crew; certainly it moves slowly. Much of it needs rewriting; my preference is to have more tests so that when stuff gets rewritten people aren't completly ruining the existing system, so my focus has been on tests and docs. Occasionally I work on features (glep 42 was one of those). People are free to submit patches and I think the portage team^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Zac does a decent job of integrating them. The only recent one that didn't get applied was the parallelization one; and I think zmedico has some plans for how he wants to accomplish that. You're avoiding my point. The improvements that are being made are, by and large, insignificant. Portage doesn't need a few little tweaks now and again. It has to start delivering a whole load of major new features (there's no one killer feature), and quickly. GLEP 42 shouldn't be a major undertaking. It should be a day's work. That it isn't is a sign of how seriously screwed up things are. As for submitting patches to Portage... Heh, you know as well as I do that that's a lost cause. If people who've been working on the code for years can't deliver, what hope does anyone else have? It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a big deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is indicative of how low people's expectations really are. The portage team has always been hesitant to break backwards compatibility; the advantage of competing programs such as your own (paludis) and pkgcore is that you don't have the whole of Gentoo's user-base and you can remain much more agile in that type of space. Largely irrelevant. What you mean there is, there's no way of changing Portage in such a way that we can be sure it won't explode horribly, because we have no static checking, no design consistency and far too few test cases. I also think either you are ignoring the changes or you are just unaware of things that the portage team (aka Zac for the most part ;)) has been working on. Many of these things are internal behind the scenes changes and they don't require any user-level modification. That's just it. Portage needs to deliver major visible improvements at the user level for Gentoo to get anywhere. Managing a Gentoo system is much harder now than it was a few years ago, but the tools are largely the same. * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. I was certain that Gentoo's direction was influenced by the people working on Gentoo; not ricers. Do you have any examples of when the ricers changed the direction of things in Gentoo. Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:22:55 +0100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I cannot agree on the Genstef-thingy, nor can I proof you wrong, but I'd be please if in general such things could be done anonymous as it is in some way FUD and might fuel flames...userrel and userreps are there to be talked to about such things. Well that's my point. Userrel and userreps have nothing to do with such things. And although QA and devrel can, in theory, take action, it isn't happening. saw in the full context looks a bit different than what I was expecting, a 2byte change that is more or less a syntax nuance could be as quickly addressed by the reporter than the developer. lu - that now knows that -* has been deprecated in favour of or p.mask. (could the repoman be updated to point to a bit of documentation about it?) -- Luca Barbato Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:20:37 +0100 Luca Barbato [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:22:55 +0100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I cannot agree on the Genstef-thingy, nor can I proof you wrong, but I'd be please if in general such things could be done anonymous as it is in some way FUD and might fuel flames...userrel and userreps are there to be talked to about such things. Well that's my point. Userrel and userreps have nothing to do with such things. And although QA and devrel can, in theory, take action, it isn't happening. saw in the full context looks a bit different than what I was expecting, a 2byte change that is more or less a syntax nuance could be as quickly addressed by the reporter than the developer. QA is supposed to avoid fixing other people's code where things are actively maintained. -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: That's just it. Portage needs to deliver major visible improvements at the user level for Gentoo to get anywhere. Managing a Gentoo system is much harder now than it was a few years ago, but the tools are largely the same. What on earth is going to be a major visible improvement to a command line based package manager that any average Gentoo user is going to realise? The average user probably only uses a few commands: emerge -u/p/a/v/--sync/package/world/system and then use package.keywords/mask/unmask so there are really no fundamental differences that the average user will notice And that really means that portage is no easier/harder than it was 3 years ago when USE=~x86 emerge foo was consigned to the dustbin * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. I was certain that Gentoo's direction was influenced by the people working on Gentoo; not ricers. Do you have any examples of when the ricers changed the direction of things in Gentoo. Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... It seems to most that the forums is the only part of Gentoo that is - and always has been - running smoothly -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
What on earth is going to be a major visible improvement to a command line based package manager that any average Gentoo user is going to realise? The average user probably only uses a few commands: emerge -u/p/a/v/--sync/package/world/system and then use package.keywords/mask/unmask so there are really no fundamental differences that the average user will notice How about the speed of search's? the speed of resolving dependancy's? how about the speed that it takes to calculate a dependancy listing after you've already done it once? portage is SLOW. how about getting it to the point where it could be made to incorporate a graphical frontend if wanted. how about providing me a list of packages that are masked instead of making me read and unmask them one at a time.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:19:52 + George Prowse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What on earth is going to be a major visible improvement to a command line based package manager that any average Gentoo user is going to realise? The average user probably only uses a few commands: emerge -u/p/a/v/--sync/package/world/system and then use package.keywords/mask/unmask so there are really no fundamental differences that the average user will notice If you think that that's all a package manager should do, you have a serious lack of imagination. Most users need or would heavily benefit from far more. See http://ciaranm.org/show_post/95 for some modest ideas that have turned out to be useful. And that really means that portage is no easier/harder than it was 3 years ago when USE=~x86 emerge foo was consigned to the dustbin Except that now users have to deal with more like a thousand installed packages, and have no sane way of doing simple things like: * Unmasking everything needed to get a particular KDE release in one go * Uninstalling a package along with its now-unused dependencies * Uninstalling a package along with everything depending upon it Why should these things be difficult? Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be representative of Gentoo's user base)... It seems to most that the forums is the only part of Gentoo that is - and always has been - running smoothly Smoothly is not productively or effectively. -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: QA is supposed to avoid fixing other people's code where things are actively maintained. I usually ask before messing with other's stuff but if I find something wrong I rather fix it myself while I'm at it (and I'm quite happy if people does the same for my stuff). in the genstef vs hansmi example if hansmi just asked genstef if he mind if he just change the masking to the proper one and just commit the local fix he had in place to make paludis happy probably won't be much to argue. lu -- Luca Barbato Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 03:45:01 +0100 Luca Barbato [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ciaran McCreesh wrote: QA is supposed to avoid fixing other people's code where things are actively maintained. I usually ask before messing with other's stuff but if I find something wrong I rather fix it myself while I'm at it (and I'm quite happy if people does the same for my stuff). in the genstef vs hansmi example if hansmi just asked genstef if he mind if he just change the masking to the proper one and just commit the local fix he had in place to make paludis happy probably won't be much to argue. Paludis had nothing to do with that. It was a Portage change that required the update. -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems
On 3/14/07, Ciaran McCreesh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 03:45:01 +0100 Luca Barbato [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ciaran McCreesh wrote: QA is supposed to avoid fixing other people's code where things are actively maintained. I usually ask before messing with other's stuff but if I find something wrong I rather fix it myself while I'm at it (and I'm quite happy if people does the same for my stuff). in the genstef vs hansmi example if hansmi just asked genstef if he mind if he just change the masking to the proper one and just commit the local fix he had in place to make paludis happy probably won't be much to argue. Paludis had nothing to do with that. It was a Portage change that required the update. hansmi's log was from 1-06-2007. The change in portage was added 1-23-07. This was before the discussion and portage fix, when the reason was pure paludis. (http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/portage?rev=5760view=rev) -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/ -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
