Sebastian Pipping posted on Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:00:03 +0200 as excerpted: > Duncan wrote: >> [L]et's get some context here. layman's no difficulty at all, really, >> when compared to the ordinary stuff we expect Gentoo users to do all >> the time. > > I think you forget about the learning curve: Gentoo users are not born > as Gentoo users. They are coming from other distros (say Debian or > Ubuntu).
Not forgetting that, but perhaps forgetting how "unordinary" my own experience was. I came from Mandrake, but researched Gentoo well enough that I was already explaining portage basics based on the material in the Handbook, etc, on the user list (and reading the dev list), before I even had Gentoo installed. I like to think that if I can do it, everybody can, but regardless of whether they /can/ or not, it's a fact that not everybody /does/, as demonstrated by the fact that people were asking the questions I was answering. I /do/ sometimes forget /that/ end of it, that for whatever reason, not everybody chooses to read the handbook, etc, even if it's ultimately only making the job of sysadmining their own Gentoo boxen an order of magnitude harder than it should be. > For me it was unmasking that confused me a lot in the beginning. There > is three different kinds, one is not in "the books" afaik and it's no > fun to me to do. I guess without autounmask by now I would be so > frustrated to not use Gentoo anymore. You have me wondering now what's "not in the books." I'd guess the three types of masking must be (entirely) unkeyworded, ~arch keyworded, and hard-masked (package.mask-ed), but again, unless that material has actually been /removed/ from the handbook since 2004, I was actually explaining all that to others even from my still Mandrake system, so it's /certainly/ in the books! And I don't need for autounmask, tho I do run ~arch. But the thing is, if people are running enough individual ~arch packages so handling it manually is difficult enough they need a tool for it, from my viewpoint, they should seriously consider running ~arch anyway, since stable is tested, and ~arch is somewhat tested, but nobody much tests a half-and- half system nor could it be practically so in any case since there's just too many millions of variants there to test, so trying to run such a half- and-half system is really asking for more trouble than trying to run a full ~arch system. But with a few small refinements over the years as Gentoo and its FLOSS environment have changed, again, that's very close to the same position and explanation I took from the very beginning, while I was still working on my first install. > Seriously, stuff like the layman setup mess is another tiny reason > keeping our user base smaller than needed, keeping our recruiting rates > down. I guess I just don't see it. There's a reason the packages on the overlays aren't yet part of the tree, because in general, either the ebuilds (if not the upstream packages) aren't yet mature enough to be in- tree (at least unmasked, in-tree), or they're community ebuilds, not Gentoo-dev vetted ones. Keeping that distinction, for the protection of both Gentoo and its users, is a deliberate policy. Those who are mature enough to handle the risks of overlays can get them with little problem, while those newbies who self-evidently are NOT mature enough in their Gentoo usage to properly handle the risk (or it'd not be a problem for them in the first place since they'd be comfortable with the tools and how to use them), are by deliberate policy, kept away from the additional risk and danger. Other than minor refinements here or there, I just don't see how that can or should be changed, unless we're simply deciding that policy is wrong- headed, so damn the torpedoes headed for our users, full steam ahead, let them at them! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
