Michael Orlitzky wrote: > I just get annoyed with the "don't use Gentoo unless you like your > stuff broken" attitude.
Don't confuse stuff changing with stuff breaking - they are very different things. In Gentoo stuff changes every single day. I heard that gentoo-x86 gets some number of commits per hour, or was it per minute.. Stuff generally doesn't change for changes sake, but because the change is an overall improvement to Gentoo. Gentoo being source based is also a big part of why there are so many and frequent changes. This means that anyone who wants to use Gentoo and have a system which reliably does what they want it to do *need to pay attention*. They need to pay attention to what happens upstream, and they need to pay attention to what happens in Gentoo. Not by monitoring every mailing list, but by monitoring what portage will do when they use it, and by being sure that this is what they desire. USE flags are a huge part of this. Guessing at what any USE flag means is no good, so yes, sometimes it is needed to actually look at the ebuild to learn what will happen. Personally I find ebuilds to be amazing as documentation, because they are also the actual code. I've built some Gentoo systems tailored to specific needs which work great but which are not getting updated, because the sysadmins who take care of those systems since they were deployed aren't comfortable and efficient with Gentoo. That's fine - Gentoo is clearly not a system for everyone. But it *is* a fantastic system for those who are aware that a finely tuned machine requires good care, and who are able and willing to take such care, by being active in creation of their systems. It is fantastic because it is so easy for Gentoo to change for the better, which happens constantly. I think USE=-server is a great way to change the ebuild for the better. I don't care at all about a news item. They are generally only annoying me. :) //Peter
