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Growing with Gentoo (O'ReillyNet)
This O'ReillyNet article covers
a talk by Daniel Robbins, Gentoo's chief architect. "Robbins
acknowledged twice in his talk that Gentoo users have a reputation for
pestering upstream open source developers with bug reports. Some have been
legitimate -- the idiosyncratic configurations permitted by Gentoo often
shook out obscure problems in the most stable packages. There's a general
feeling among some developers that Gentoo users are identifying problems
caused not by upstream bugs, but by aggressive optimization or other poor
configuration choices that the users themselves have made."
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Growing with Gentoo (O'ReillyNet) Posted Mar 16, 2004 22:53 UTC (Tue) by stonedown (guest, #2987) [Link] Robbins guesstimates that over 50,000 people have a Gentoo installation. ("We have no figures. It's over a thousand, I know that.")LOL! I think it's closer to 50,000 than to one thousand.
Aggressive optimization? Posted Mar 16, 2004 23:45 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] The delopers at gentoo should expect that they'll have lots of people who are trying to build with aggressive optimizations; that's the main "selling point" that's being pushed by their literature.That's what people expect to get in exchange for building everything from sources. That they often exceed their own expertise by trying to eke small gains through these "aggressive optimization" options is hardly surprising. The thing that I would most love to see in gentoo is the option of building "embeddable targets" from the sources using emerge scripts and some sort of custom install filters that strip away all of the docs and cruft as the files are pushed into the target; and the ability to have the *target* dependencies checked (and in many cases over-ridden, as with busybox replacements to many coreutils --- when the bb version is sufficient to the given case). Ideally distros like the LNX-BBC and it's many derivatives, and many of the mini and full-sized "Live CD" distros could then be built from such scripts and patchsets.
Aggressive optimization? Posted Mar 17, 2004 0:47 UTC (Wed) by nikarul (subscriber, #4462) [Link] I think they mean the developers of the individual packages feel that bugs reported from users of Gentoo are due to agressive optimizations, not the Gentoo distribution developers.
Growing with Gentoo (O'ReillyNet) Posted Mar 17, 2004 5:50 UTC (Wed) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] Speaking as an upstream developer, the problem isn't entirely with aggressive optimizations (although I've had a lot of bug reports related to that, too). It's also with USE flags.The project I run requires SDL, with Ogg Vorbis sound effect support. Normally we check this via version, since Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora, Debian, Slackware, etc, all enable this by default. However, a lot of times a Gentoo user will come in and report a "bug" (without checking the FAQ, which mentions the issue...) because their SDL_mixer can't play Ogg sounds. Since the dependency chain for SDL_mixer is pretty big, and I'm not familiar with Gentoo, I have absolutely no idea which particular dependency they might have forgotten, or where in the chain it goes. The problem is heterogeneous systems. Aggressive optimizations are one cause of this, but it's important to realize that USE flags are, too. Most people running any distribution have no idea how to configure it properly (I doubt any single person could construct a good, complete distribution at this point, given the interactions between packages). In Debian, the Vorbis guys make sure the Vorbis development packages work, the SDL guys can just use those, the Pygame guys can just use the SDL guys' work, and I can just use Pygame, knowing that I'm guaranteed a specific set of features. Gentoo is not really "a" distribution, or even "a" base system to build distributions off of (like UL). Every system is (often nontrivially) different; every user creates (usually unknowingly) their own "Gentoo variant". And most of them have no idea how to do that reliably.
Growing with Gentoo (O'ReillyNet) Posted Mar 17, 2004 16:53 UTC (Wed) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link] >every user creates (usually unknowingly) their own "Gentoo variant".And the very crazy thing is that in most cases it works. One more impossible, impractical, unworkable thing that this community has done. Sometimes I think we're all lunatics. 5 to 10 years from now there will be interviews with developers, when asked how they started with Linux, will say Gentoo. Derek
Growing with Gentoo (O'ReillyNet) Posted Mar 17, 2004 22:06 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] Speaking as a Gentoo user who is also a longtime Linux user, I don't think it's quite as bad as that. USE flags basically represent optional capabilities, not actual dependencies; if someone wants their SDL_mixer to play Ogg sounds, what they should do is make sure that USE="ogg" is in there somewhere before they emerge the SDL_mixer package. Getting a list of the flags available for a package is a simple command line option, so really, there isn't much excuse for a Gentoo user saying "My SDL_mixer won't play Oggs!" or somesuch, if they haven't made sure to compile it with Ogg support.If they did, mind you, then they have a right to complain. :-)
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