Gentoo (was: ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora)

[Ben Scott]

On 2/26/07, Dan Miller <rambi.dev at gmail.com> wrote:
> Whats scarier? vim /etc/config_file.config or kate
> /etc/config_file.config? Its not that scary, you don't need to edit many
> many config files.

  "Scary" from the point of view of P17T [1].

1. PDOTLREBTWWLLAPACTT [2]
2. People doing ordinary tasks, like reading email, browsing the web,
writing letters, looking at pictures, and calculating their taxes.

> Its not that scary. I've automated most commands I do.  I have a nightly
> cron that syncs the portage, then runs emerge -upD world (check
> everything in my world file and its dependicies to see if there are any
> updates). The output of this and glsa-check -tv all (check to see if any
> install packages have security issues). The output of these are then
> emailed to me every morning. I also have a logwatch report that comes to me.

  ...

  Thanks for making my point for me.  ;-)

  I have no idea what most of that means, and *I'm* a certified geek.
Now, I'm sure I could figure it out, given time and manuals and
Google.  But I do this kind of crap for a living.  P17T would be
terrified by the above.  :)

> I open up the CLI to run emerge, ssh, and various other commands. The
> CLI is faster in some ways than any gui.

  I agree.  I'm a command-line junkie.  But P17T insist on using GUIs.
 Partly because it's what they're used to.  Partly because they do
enable easy exploration of the unknown.

> Emerging OpenOffice took me about 3 hours, thats on a dual-core dual
> proc Opteron 2800SE with 4 gigs of ram.

  Yikes.  I tremble to think of how long it would take on the 1200
MHz, 256 MB box I was running at home eight months ago.  Still, that's
useful as hard data; thanks for offering it.  :)

>>  ... say I mail the package maintainer ... and he says, "Huh.  Not sure
>> what your problem is, but your system is completely different from
>> my system."
>
> Thats the maintainers problem, not yours. He should change ...

  I have a couple problems with that.  One is that I firmly believe
this whole user/programmer thing is a partnership, so I regard heavy
burdens on the programmer to be bad for me as a user.  The other
problem is that this is FOSS, so it's quite possible that the packager
could be me, and the user, someone else.  In short, if it sucks to be
a packager, the packages will suck.  :-)

> Wow, there is a lot in portage, and the emerge process has, about the
> only thing that can be done is a nice overview. With some of the
> benefits, and power a user has.

  That sounds like a *great* talk!  So, then, when can you present?  :-)

  I am serious about inviting presentations on this.  I'd love to
hear, first-hand, from a Gentoo fan, what's good about Gentoo.
"Presentation" can be any format you like -- slides and speech,
improvised Q&A, software demonstration, etc.  Just sit down with an
install CD if you like.  We can make a ground rule about "No distro
wars" to keep from getting side-tracked.

-- Ben