On Sunday 16 March 2008, Chuck Robey wrote: > It certainly does! AND I found that there IS one document that tells > you more than a fleeting hint about slots: the eix man page. Someone > else sort of snidely said "you should read the emerge man page" after > giving me (once again) description of slots without giving me any way > to USE them ... as if I hadn't read that emerge man page again and > again, and let me tell you, it gives nothing whatever on slots. > Well, now, after reading this, AND the eix man page, I think I will > know enough to begin to be dangerous :-)
I think it was me that gave you that snide comment <blush>. Oops... I had a little think about this and what I've concluded is that those of us using gentoo for months/years without a break confront these things little by little as they get introduced. One new change a week is something we can easily absorb without thinking twice and eventually we amass this HUGE collection of facts and we are comfortable with it. So far so good. Someone new to Gentoo comes along, or returns after a few years away. Lots has changed, and we all tell you to RTFM because the answer "is so bloody obvious ... sheesh, get a clue dude" or similar. What that reduces to though is that the oldies expect the newbies to absorb in a day what took the oldie a few months. Not only is it unfair, it's a totally unreasonable thing to expect. I shall make a mental note for myself for future use. Meanwhile, something good you could do meanwhile is go over to bugs.gentoo.org and submit a new bug under the "docs" section. Briefly summarize what docs you read and what lack of data you found on SLOTs and ask the documentation maintainers to expand the description of SLOTs. Give it from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't know portage well so they can see where you reasonably went looking and what you expected to find but that was missing -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
