Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

The Success of Gentoo

Posted Nov 20, 2003 5:46 UTC (Thu) by dkite (guest, #4577)
Parent article: The Success of Gentoo

One refreshing characteristic of the Gentoo community is the lack of
feelings of entitlement. Most everyone just digs in, and figures it out.
Or waits patiently. Or tries to fix the problem for others. Did I mention
how refreshing it is?

Another odd, counterintuitive result is the relative stability of the
distribution. Even for those using the unstable ebuilds. The community
provides an almost instant feedback to developers, resulting in better
code.

And who can not feel good surrounded by like-minded wierdos?

Derek

(Log in to post comments)

Unbreakable (almost)

Posted Nov 20, 2003 19:15 UTC (Thu) by etwilson (guest, #8459) [Link]

The amazing thing to me is how hard it seems to be to get either portage or the system in general into a broken or wierd state. I've got a seriously bad habit of reconfiguring my home computer constantly; I'm always installing or uninstalling things and I've never managed to break portage and only once managed to (semi-) break the whole system. In contrast, it seems like normal use is enough to corrupt the RPM database on Redhat 9 (the system I have at work).
The one weak link in portage that I see is the problem with updating configuration files, mostly in /etc, after running an update. The utility etc-update" mostly does the right thing but: a. you have to remember to run it; b. its manual editing feature is pretty hard to use. Mis-using etc-update is how I managed to break the system that one time, it was a simple thing to fix but it took me a day to figure it out.

Unbreakable (almost)

Posted Feb 20, 2004 14:33 UTC (Fri) by xentric (guest, #19628) [Link]

Mistakes with etc-update are a very common problem for people new to Gentoo. I have written a script (with ebuild) that makes updating a little less dangerous and a lot easier. The script is called cfg-update. See: GUI alternative for etc-update -> cfg-update It determines if configuration files have been modified after being installed by portage and presents both the original and update in a graphical diff/merge tool of your choice (default is xxdiff). Unmodified files can be updated automatically and you can easily restore the backups if you encounter any problems.

The Success of Gentoo

Posted Nov 22, 2003 7:16 UTC (Sat) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

I forgot to mention the main reason I use Gentoo. It allows you to easily
have two or more versions of KDE available. I run the cvs version, with
all it's quirks, but the rest of the family can run a stable version.

All automatic. Just select from kdm.

I don't know any other distro that allows this without some fussing.

Derek

The Success of Gentoo

Posted Nov 28, 2003 9:13 UTC (Fri) by mdm42 (guest, #10466) [Link]

Yes, portage! Yes, knowing exactly what's going-on on your machine! Yes, the logical configuration of environment variables, rc scripts, etc.! Yes to all those techie things!

But most of all I found a helpful developer community refreshingly free of the egoism and arrogance so frequently visible in other OSS projects.