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An overview over the Gentoo community
Gentoo is one of the newer distributions, but has shown an amazing growth in
the last years. This growth has been partly because of the
behind-the-scenes magic of portage (the package manager) and the simple
yet effective configuration tools, but also because of the
thriving community and the up-to-date documentation that makes using
Gentoo very easy.
When I first installed Gentoo, the Installation Handbook was 9 pages of text that barely described how to get a base install working. If you tried to print the same document now, it'd be around 500 pages. Special chapters exist for different architectures ( x86, ppc, sparc, alpha, ...) Dedicated documents describe how to setup a hardened (secure) Gentoo system, alternative installation paths , but also different window managers like KDE or fluxbox. Since there are almost no special Gentoo tools, this documentation can even be applied to most other distributions without problems. And best of all, actively maintained translations for many languages exist! The Gentoo Documentation Project, lead by Sven Vermeulen and Xavier Neys at the moment, tries to keep everything up to date, and as far as I can tell, they're doing a great job. Every now and then some new HOWTOs and tutorials are contributed by users and developers - if you have a problem, it usually can be fixed with the documentation. Although not liked by all, the forums are a great resource for solving all kinds of problems. At the moment the Gentoo forums are the largest and most active phpBB installation we're aware of. Many HOWTOs are drafted, discussed and improved here, some common problems are explained, and "Off the Wall" is a place for all discussions that are not directly Gentoo-related. Very often the forums succeed in giving you answers where the official documentation fails. While usually people think about Bugzilla as a tool for bug fixing only, it is used as a coordination tool in Gentoo. Any bugs, new ideas or improvements are managed as their own bug. This gives many of the features of mailing lists without causing as much traffic for the individuals involved. Also all discussions and status changes are trackable as bug comments. Even meta-bugs that depend on other bugs are possible so that, for example, a meta-bug tracking all livecd-bugs can be created. This generic use has made our bugzilla installation very popular with about 96000 bugs total within a time frame of about 3 years. Every first Saturday of the month a "Bugday" is held where developers and users (at least those that find the time) try to fix as many open bugs as possible. This event has been a lot of fun for all involved and is coordinated in IRC on #gentoo-bugs. For all announcements, problems and discussions that don't fit in bugzilla or IRC the mailing lists are used. Some of them (like gentoo-user) are mostly used for user problems, some of them (like releng) are mostly for internal coordination. Much can be learned from them, and archives exist so that older discussions are not lost. IRC This is the heartbeat of Gentoo. Within the Freenode IRC Network much interaction happens for all things Gentoo. Some channels like #gentoo have an average of almost 1000 users at all times, others like #gentoo-bugs are not as popular, but have someone with specialized knowledge available around the clock. A lot of diagnosing, bug fixing and general chatter make the Gentoo IRC channels very interesting, but sometimes also frustrating since they can be overcrowded and at times even a bit hostile. Since even the Gentoo developers are spread all across the globe the IRC channels almost never sleep. For those that want to get updates on Gentoo development but don't want to be online everyday we publish a weekly Newsletter. Since we have a rather small staff of volunteers it doesn't always get published on time, but we try to do our best, and the feedback from the community is almost always positive. Sections like "developer of the week" show the people behind the names, "Future Zone" highlights projects in development. The GWN mailing list is by far the largest Gentoo mailing list, so we try to give our audience the best publication we can make. Conclusion The Gentoo community is quite large and vibrant. The communication happens through many different channels and is not always optimal, but if you need help or just want to chat with some random people, you'll find it. For newcomers it might be a bit difficult to find the right communication channel, but after some time you'll find your way around all things Gentoo, and if you're not careful, you might get addicted to it and spend much more time than you intended with this great distribution and the usually nice people that help making it. (Log in to post comments)
An overview over the Gentoo community Posted Jun 30, 2005 12:51 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] >makes using Gentoo very easy.Hmmm. Fun, interesting, educational, but not easy unless one is quite advanced. ;) Several excellent websites bear mention: http://www.gentoo-portage.com/ Is great for tracking and researching packages, http://www.breakmygentoo.net/ For the hardcore, but the one I enjoy the most is http://gentoo-wiki.com/ The Random Page feature, in particular, will delight those who think they've tried it all.
Gentoo oober yoober!
An overview over the Gentoo community Posted Jun 30, 2005 22:09 UTC (Thu) by plauer (guest, #30619) [Link] Those are good resources, but they are not official. breakmygentoo is a big no-no if you want any support from official Gentoo ressources since it can break your system in very subtle ways ...The wikis are nice, but the quality of the content varies a lot. The official Gentoo documentation has on average a higher quality, but the wikis are often up-to-date on "bleeding edge" problems. And for the easy part: I go crazy when one of those "easy-to-use" distros won't let me do things because the developers never thought of them :-) So from my point of view Gentoo is much easier since I have full control, but I agree that beginners will not see it like that.
Some rough edges Posted Jun 30, 2005 14:39 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] I have had two problems with Gentoo that make me shudder.
One, an update linked /bin/ls against a /usr/lib dynamic library. A real no-no. Boot partition commands should NEVER link outside the boot partition. This one caught me because I had added some debugging ls commands to a startup script.
The second problem was updating some library which removed the old version of the library (1.00) when installing the new 1.01 version. As a result, boot failed trying to mouont LVM volumes. I luckily was able to add a temporary symlink from the new lib to the old name, reboot, and update all commands which were still linked against the old version. I hate to think of the nightmare I would have had if the library change had introduced incompatible changes.
Both indicate, for want of a better word, amateurs in control. I switched to gentoo from slackware because I got a new Opteron system and wanted 64 bit Linux. I am going to try slamd64 one of these days; gentoo is nice in a lot of ways, but it has gotten to the point that I literally do not know if a reboot will succeed or I will have to break out the rescue disk again. That is a pretty sorry state of affairs.
Some rough edges Posted Jun 30, 2005 14:48 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] Glibc updates also make me shudder, but that has more to do with binary drivers. The KEYWORDS system stabilizes things, but the nature of portage is to sneak ever closer to the edge.Live on the cutting edge, bleed frequently.
Some rough edges Posted Jun 30, 2005 17:55 UTC (Thu) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link] > One, an update linked /bin/ls against a /usr/lib dynamic library. A real> no-no. Boot partition commands should NEVER link outside the boot > partition. This one caught me because I had added some debugging ls > commands to a startup script.
I suspect this was libgpm, which was only a problem if you built ncurses with gpm support. It was also fixed quite a while ago.
> The second problem was updating some library which removed the old version
This is what revdep-rebuild is for.
Some rough edges Posted Jun 30, 2005 18:39 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] Yes, I think it was gpm. I am glad it has been fixed, but it should never have happened in the first place. That was sloppy.
revdep-rebuild is well and good, but why delete an old library? That's one of the advantages to dynamic libraries. The LVM command should not link against an exact 1.00 version, it should link against 1. The old library should not be removed. That's why dynamic libs have all those extra symlink versions.
These two problems are indicative of a sloppiness that I do not want or expect in my system. How many other sloppy problems are out there?
Gentoo has some very nice features, but it also has this dangerous sloppiness that makes me skittish.
Some rough edges Posted Jun 30, 2005 21:13 UTC (Thu) by fjf33 (subscriber, #5768) [Link] Plus the documentation for LVM recomends that the static keyword be used so that in any catastrophic event this library dependencies are not a problem. Most of the critical components have the static option. Maybe they should default to static but somehow they don't. It is part of the learning that goes with all things Gentoo. :) I have a lot of fun with it and my emerges happen at night when I sleep. :P
Some rough edges Posted Jul 1, 2005 14:17 UTC (Fri) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link] Gentoo has some very nice features, but it also has this dangerous sloppiness that makes me skittish.I would say that Gentoo probably isn't for you then. I like Gentoo because it does give me total control over my system, yet does provide a certain level of help for me as administrator. But things do break, and have to be fixed. For my desktop or laptop, this is not a big deal - it's the price I pay for always having the very latest of everything, configured exactly like I want it to be. It is a pain in the ass occasionally, and I admit I don't like waiting for compiles (I am currently compiling KDE 3.4.1 and don't expect it to finish before I go home, for instance).
Breaking things is not acceptable Posted Jul 1, 2005 15:30 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] ...I would say that Gentoo probably isn't for you then...
You don't go far enough. Any system which breaks boot partition commands is not suitable, period. I love gentoo for compiling everything to my flags, for easy updates, for leaving UNIX mostly alone to be UNIX, not hiding all the configuration like RedHat and Mandrake. But breaking boot partition commands is a flat no-no. Requiring you to run revdep-rebuild manually is not good enough. Update simply must not break the boot process.
Some rough edges Posted Jul 5, 2005 22:04 UTC (Tue) by g2boojum (subscriber, #152) [Link] > Both indicate, for want of a better word, amateurs in control.
I'd just like to comment that this sentence is quite literally true. Gentoo is a community distribution, and very, very few developers are paid to work on any part of the distribution. That's not an excuse, just a statement of fact. When problems like this one occur, we encourage users to let us know at bugs@gentoo.org so that we can do our best to ensure that such problems do not occur again.
An overview over the Gentoo community Posted Jun 30, 2005 20:07 UTC (Thu) by thedude13 (guest, #29229) [Link] gentoo has been one of my favorite distros for awhile (that and debian, never been much of a fan of the commercial distros except rh 6.2, 7.3). the handbook has expanded so much and now they have the developer handbook that i would have loved to have a few years ago when i had more free time to even consider creating/maintaining packages
one of the few things that irks me are the qt/kdelibs recompiles that take hours and hours (this on a athlon 3200 + 1.5gb ram). most everything else that's not C++ compiles relatively quickly tho. i used their packages once upon a time on my laptop (2+ yrs ago) but they didn't stay up to date very well at the time
gentoo has made great strides in portage over the years and the forums have always been useful but their search function tends to be crap and returns tons of irrelevant results that have to be sifted through
An overview over the Gentoo community Posted Jun 30, 2005 22:14 UTC (Thu) by bchapman26 (guest, #4565) [Link] >one of the few things that irks me are the qt/kdelibs recompiles that>take hours and hours (this on a athlon 3200 + 1.5gb ram).
This has been resolved. Starting with KDE 3.4, the ebuilds have been broken up into many smaller ebuilds. This way you don't have to rebuild the whole kdelibs for a simple security fix.
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