On 12/17/12 08:10, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > On 12/16/12 14:04, Markos Chandras wrote: >> On 16 December 2012 16:57, Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> wrote: >>> Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use >>> some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation >> >> Recruitment documentatiob? What does that mean? >> >>> People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all >>> the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable. >> >> Well that's not entirely true but that's a different issue >> > > The first part is definitely true. The stable part is also true in my > experience, all things considered. For an example, take the last "what's > your favorite distro" post on Reddit (not exactly a representative > sample, I know): > > http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/14tpnt/of_all_the_distros_youve_ever_used_what_do_you/ > > Top rated comment: > > "Tie between Arch and Gentoo. These are my "messing around" distros. > Fun to install and tweak on older machines, but I don't know enough > about them to use them full time. Plus, Gentoo breaks. A lot. Arch > breaks much more often than Debian for me but much less than Gentoo." > > Further down: > > "Gentoo is not stable. Stop saying that." > > My experience mirrors Michael Mol's. Perception is bad. Reality not so much.
And then you look what people do to get to that conclusion ... "I unmasked gcc-4.8, migrated back to glibc-2.5 so I could build binaries for CentOS 5, and started from a sabayon install because it's easier. My CFLAGS include make-faster things like -ffast-math and -O8" Plus people don't look at warnings unless they are interactive prompts that ask them so answer a question about the warning. So yeah, if you hit things with a hammer they break. And we make it easy for people to do that :) On the other hand I could tell you about "Enterprise Distros" that patch their gcc so badly that it is confused about its version, and many other funny things. Everything breaks at some point, I started using Gentoo because I was able to fix that breakage, thus enabling me to use my computer instead of just ranting about it. Internally, I think, we're doing ok, now we just need to make our PR effective again (which has been an ongoing project for half a decade ...)
