Maciel: Because your distro should be cool [LWN.net]

Og Maciel writes about why he likes Foresight Linux. "Reason 2 - Roll backs: Because the entire system is kept under a complete version control down to the file level, It is possible to perform something that other distributions can only dream of: system roll backs! Don't like the application you've just installed? Remove it and it will be as if your system never had it installed! Want to go back to the update you ran 3 weeks or even months ago? Not a problem! Your system is like a giant Git/Mercurial repository and you control what to clone and what branch to checkout."

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Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 24, 2011 20:49 UTC (Mon) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] (1 responses)

I can supply the marketing slogan: Foresight Linux... for when you step on your foreskin!

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 5:49 UTC (Tue) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]

Don't give up your day job...

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 24, 2011 23:35 UTC (Mon) by sturmflut (guest, #38256) [Link] (9 responses)

The news should mention that Og Maciel is the Community Manager of Foresight Linux, so he is praising his own product.

No stable release since 2009, the promised XFCE and KDE versions are still beta, Maciels predictions didn't become true ("I predict that the Foresight community will rally together in 2010 to get back to being the most GNOMEic and bleeding edge distribution out there!") and about 50% of the messages on the mailing list are by himself. I would not entrust this distribution with any of my data. Trying to be the "most bleeding edge distribution" killed Gentoo, and bleeding edge software without proper support is just plain dangerous.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 2:56 UTC (Tue) by am (subscriber, #69042) [Link] (8 responses)

> Trying to be the "most bleeding edge distribution" killed Gentoo

Gentoo is dead? I'd like to know what your definition of "dead" is.

Gentoo still lives

Posted Jan 25, 2011 8:26 UTC (Tue) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

Indeed, I've been happily running Gentoo for years and I haven't noticed it stop being updated.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 10:56 UTC (Tue) by sturmflut (guest, #38256) [Link] (6 responses)

They tried to be bleeding edge and could not keep up, up to a point where they did not even ship current packages in the stable tree (e.g. when all others shipped mySQL 5.0, and Gentoo didn't even have a mySQL 5.0 ebuild in the tree). Later on they focused on having a bleeding-edge stable tree, but that also didn't work - Ubuntu and Fedora do a better job.

Not only is Ubuntu Testing more bleeding-edge than Gentoo ever was, it also ships a much larger number of packages which are actually built for every supported platform. The Portage tree contains many broken and outdated ebuilds, and most of them are not marked for architectures other than x86 and amd64.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 11:43 UTC (Tue) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link] (1 responses)

> They tried to be bleeding edge and could not keep up

I do not think Gentoo's main call to fame ever was to be bleeding edge. That's certainly not the reason I keep coming back to Gentoo. The "current-ness" of packages is actually not very uniform across package types, but it's usually quite good.

Where Gentoo package choice is way ahead of other distros though, is in how easy it is to cherry-pick some package version from ~arch, masked packages, external repositories, or your own private repository. Without making a mess. To me, that more than offsets the fact that some packages may be missing or not bleeding-edge enough in the main stable repository.

Gentoo's flexibility

Posted Jan 31, 2011 13:04 UTC (Mon) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

"Where Gentoo package choice is way ahead of other distros though, is in how easy it is to cherry-pick"

Indeed this is the main reason I use it at home. As a developer it's very easy to import a random package which does the normal configure/make/make install cycle. It's also generally easy to version bump stuff up in your own overlay if the main portage tree hasn't caught up. The flexibility of Gentoo is it's main selling point.

Arguments about repository size are irrelevant next to the flexibility that provides. In fact number of installable packages is probably a poor metric for any distribution - a lot of distros carry some very esoteric packages that are useful to a handful of people but certainly not used by the majority of the distros users.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 17:40 UTC (Tue) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link] (3 responses)

Gentoo's approach of "don't even mark your ebuild ~arch unless you've tried it on a Gentoo system of that architecture" makes that last problem very likely. Debian and derivatives take the opposite approach: try to build it for everything unless somebody says otherwise.

Some software is non-portable, sure, and yes you do run across the odd thing that fails at runtime on certain architectures, but it's not quite as bad as all that. I'm much happier to defend Debian's choice of sides in this tradeoff than I would be to defend Gentoo's, which seems to involve an awful lot of manual wheel-spinning.

(Of course, maybe I'm wrong about how much is manual. My only substantive experience of Gentoo development is getting a libpipeline ebuild into the portage tree - four weeks later nobody's turned it on for anything other than ~x86 and ~amd64. Maybe I should be doing something but it's not clear what's best ...)

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 18:48 UTC (Tue) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link] (2 responses)

You can't really compare Debian and Gentoo that way: if an ebuild is committed without being tested, it may not even build. Debian packages on the other hand won't make it into the repository if they fail to build.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 20:18 UTC (Tue) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm well aware of that - but Gentoo does seem to err too far on the side of not trying a lot of the time.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 22:12 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I agree with this. I'm not using gentoo at the moment, but when I was using it I dan into more than one case where a perl program was only marked for x86, not for amd64 and when I pushed about it I was told that it wasn't enabled because it hadn't had anyone test it there and report that it worked. I reported that it did work, but months later it still hadn't gotten blessed for amd64 (let alone for other architectures)

yes you do have apps that have problems with different word sized and byte orders, but even then, one you know that it works on 32 bit little endian systems, you should be able to have a pretty good confidence that it will work on _all_ 32 bit little endian system (as long as the compile step doesn't barf)

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 0:24 UTC (Tue) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link]

Giveaways you are reading a sales pitch:

1. They say they are not going to do something and then proceed to do just the opposite.

2. Excessive use of "!!!!"

3. Has the quote "No siree Bob!"

I do like the idea of rollbacks, but something tells me you are going to need rollbacks due to, "Most of the time new applications are available within days of being launched as it passes through some spot checking and QA."

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 16:24 UTC (Tue) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link]

Did anyone actually try the distribution? Everybody seems to have an opinion on the review itself, but nobody seems to be able to tell us anything about the distro itself...

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 25, 2011 19:22 UTC (Tue) by mricon (subscriber, #59252) [Link]

Rollbacks are fun, but also an excellent way to shoot yourself in both feet. The usual example is:

1. I upgrade from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1
2. A few weeks later I decide to downgrade back to 5.0, because 5.1 is giving me whatever problems
3. Unfortunately, 5.1 database layout is not backward-compatible, so if I roll back to 5.0, I effectively hose my database.
4. I could roll back my database files as well, but that means I lose a few weeks worth of data.

Rollbacks work great between minor version revisions, but not for anything where data migration is involved.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 26, 2011 5:26 UTC (Wed) by nevyn (guest, #33129) [Link]

> Want to go back to the update you ran 3 weeks or even months ago? Not a problem!

-100 points do not pass go, go immediately to a.s.r.

Now, sure, yum allows you to easily "yum history undo" and it will work just as well moving back 3 months of package updates instead of just the last one or two transactions ... but that doesn't mean it's a good idea, even if the technology is perfect all the time.
Anyone advocating that people should regularly do that kind of thing needs to take some little green pills, IMNSHO.

There's also this wonderful gem (in the comments):

> [it's slow] This is because your entire system (yes, every single file) is analysed and tracked
> in order to maintain everything in tight formation and versioned. [...]
> True, for other distros where youre installing pre-built binaries you will experience faster
> response, but youre giving up on the stability that conary gives you

As I'm sure the "author" doesn't know, rpm also tracks "every single file" (and dpkg could kind of do it, last I looked). As for "the stability" of using a distro. with few users, one of which is very loud and mis-informed, that and a dollar will buy me a donut.

And, yeh, I've used an rPath based distro. (a few years ago) ... and it was interesting at the time, but time moves on and I know rpm/yum has mostly caught up, in the areas it was behind.

Maciel: Because your distro should be cool

Posted Jan 27, 2011 9:24 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Great - except any filesystem with snapshots can do the same. What's the point of creating a whole new distro just for this?