[gentoo-user] For those who complain

2012-01-20 Thread Albert W. Hopkins
For those who complain about default portage behavior:
It changes constantly. If you can't accept the bleeding edge behavior,
you're probably using the wrong distro.  There are always going to be
changes.  Some you don't like, some you say oh gosh, finally!.  For
the latter, I cheer, for former, I work around.  EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS is
your friend.

For those who complain about not knowing something was
added/removed/changed.  Most packages do a decent job of providing good
ChangeLogs, either from Gentoo or upstream.  It's not Gentoo's
responsibility to make you read them.  It's like reading the fine print.
Yet you can't complain that it's not there if it's in the fine print.
Some say there should be more announcements for changes, yet others
say there are too many announcements and important stuff gets lost.  One
man's trash is another man's treasure.  There just doesn't exist a sweet
spot that will satisfy everyone.

For those who complain about man pages being too cryptic/incomplete/etc.
Man pages have pretty much always been designed to be reference manuals.
The key word is reference.  They are not guides, they are not
tutorials.  They are more suited for I know this library provides a
function to do *this* but I don't know the function's signature.  They
are less suited for I don't know how to do *this*.  There are other
resources for the latter.  And if there are not, that's not the fault of
the man page.  But in my experience, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this,
most people who complain about man pages are those who don't bother, or
at least put *very* little effort, to *read* the man pages.

For those who complain Why do I have to compile all this stuff to get
X?: Why are you using Gentoo?

For those who complain about bugs/regressions: Why do you use software?

For those who complain about software/features needed/unwanted/changed
in a way you disagree with: Where is your patch?

For those who have genuine technical questions; for those who can
provide answers to those questions w/o being overly critical; for those
who give back by submitting bug reports, patches, ideas, praise: Thank
you.

Gentoo is a rainbow with no end and no pot of gold.

-a





Re: [gentoo-user] For those who complain

2012-01-20 Thread Dale
Albert W. Hopkins wrote:
 For those who complain about default portage behavior:
 It changes constantly. If you can't accept the bleeding edge behavior,
 you're probably using the wrong distro.  There are always going to be
 changes.  Some you don't like, some you say oh gosh, finally!.  For
 the latter, I cheer, for former, I work around.  EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS is
 your friend.
 
 For those who complain about not knowing something was
 added/removed/changed.  Most packages do a decent job of providing good
 ChangeLogs, either from Gentoo or upstream.  It's not Gentoo's
 responsibility to make you read them.  It's like reading the fine print.
 Yet you can't complain that it's not there if it's in the fine print.
 Some say there should be more announcements for changes, yet others
 say there are too many announcements and important stuff gets lost.  One
 man's trash is another man's treasure.  There just doesn't exist a sweet
 spot that will satisfy everyone.
 
 For those who complain about man pages being too cryptic/incomplete/etc.
 Man pages have pretty much always been designed to be reference manuals.
 The key word is reference.  They are not guides, they are not
 tutorials.  They are more suited for I know this library provides a
 function to do *this* but I don't know the function's signature.  They
 are less suited for I don't know how to do *this*.  There are other
 resources for the latter.  And if there are not, that's not the fault of
 the man page.  But in my experience, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this,
 most people who complain about man pages are those who don't bother, or
 at least put *very* little effort, to *read* the man pages.
 
 For those who complain Why do I have to compile all this stuff to get
 X?: Why are you using Gentoo?
 
 For those who complain about bugs/regressions: Why do you use software?
 
 For those who complain about software/features needed/unwanted/changed
 in a way you disagree with: Where is your patch?
 
 For those who have genuine technical questions; for those who can
 provide answers to those questions w/o being overly critical; for those
 who give back by submitting bug reports, patches, ideas, praise: Thank
 you.
 
 Gentoo is a rainbow with no end and no pot of gold.
 
 -a
 


And sometimes those people are finding problems.  This is from -dev:

On 01/20/2012 10:28 AM, Hilco Wijbenga wrote:
 I'd like to chime in here. I started a thread on gentoo-user (Portage
 option --changed-use not working?) pretty much about this.

 I use --changed-use instead of --newuse to get the advantages of a
 fully up-to-date system without the unnecessary churn. From the man
 page I understand that (part of) the idea behind --changed-use is to
 *not* rebuild packages where an unused/disabled USE flag is dropped.
 Which ought to apply to kdeenablefinal, right?

 It seems my understanding is incorrect because I see --new-use +
 --exclude is being recommended, not --changed-use. Would somebody
 please set me straight?
You've found a bug. It's fixed in git now:

http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=a77292d37e3c2604479514abed2dda64dabace25

As a workaround, you can add --binpkg-respect-use=n to your options.
-- Thanks, Zac

So, it was a bug and Zac is fixing it.  Sometimes when people complain,
it is because something is not working as it should.

Also, complaining is sometimes beneficial.  It's how things get improved.

Dale

:-)  :-)

-- 
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or
how you interpreted my words!

Miss the compile output?  Hint:
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n