Some rough edges [LWN.net]

Some rough edges

Posted Jul 1, 2005 14:17 UTC (Fri) by shane (subscriber, #3335)
In reply to: Some rough edges by felixfix
Parent article: An overview over the Gentoo community

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).

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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.