On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 7:39 AM, Fabian Groffen <grob...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 24-07-2012 07:20:31 -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: >> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Fabian Groffen <grob...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> > I don't know about general consensus. In my opinion, it's plain spam to >> > existing users. (And that would IMO be the xth news item in a row to be >> > spam.) >> >> Can't say I agree here. Some news items have been more useful than >> others, but I doubt the typical Gentoo user (who does not subscribe to >> -dev) would think that many of the past messages have been spam. > > Ok. This is subjective. > >> Long-time Gentoo users aren't going to notice in the handbook that the >> location of /etc/make.conf has moved - I know that if I'm doing an >> install I tend to use the handbook as a checklist but I skim through >> it so fast that I doubt I'd notice a big change. They're going to >> appreciate a heads-up. The only people who wouldn't consider it news >> are those following this list, and judging by the state of this thread >> you'll already have read 40 posts on the topic, so the 41st won't be >> that big of a deal. > > Long-time Gentoo users either 1) don't reinstall systems that often (why > would they?), or 2) know that things every once in a while change. > > IMO, with 1) you'd expect that user to read the docs again when doing a > new install. With 2) they already figured out when they did a new > install that /etc/make.conf was not there, however putting something in > a file out there did work as expected as well.
As a user who's done a lot of reinstalling this year, I can offer a couple observations: 1) The handbook contains a barebones make.conf, just as it comes with a number of other barebones configuration files. You probably don't need to supply a make.conf file, since the barebones version is only a few lines. 1a) I have to think that things like CHOST could be set somewhere higher up, and only overridden in make.conf. Similarly, if there's a round-robin DNS entry for GENTOO_MIRRORS, that could be defaulted, too. 2) Once I got to the point where I was frequently reinstalling, I started copying and tweaking make.conf files from working systems rather than doing a full rebuild. 3) That news item about udev-181 and a unified /usr is still greeting new users...and it's still claiming an unmask of 2012-03-19, which is three months ago. It's quite confusing in that it claims an event is going to occur, in the past, and it still hasn't occurred. > > From a different angle, perhaps stage3s shouldn't include a default > /etc/make.conf at all. Would solve this issue nicely, and doesn't > require a news item at all, IMO. >From the perspective of a user who often deals with the install process, and occasionally helps others with it, I think this is could be very good. -- :wq
