Thoughts on Gentoo

[Kurt Granroth]

On Friday 08 September 2006 14:36, Alexander Henry wrote:
> Kurt Granroth wrote:
> > Why?  HORRIBLE quality assurance on the packages.  We grew to dread every
> > update because we knew that something else was going to completely
> > break... since *something* always did.
>
> Did you do an etc-update after every update world?  Did you re-link gcc
> if a new version compiled itself?

Yes, and I'm not just talking about updating world.  We ran into problems on a 
regular basis doing selective updates and installs as well.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about an office full of Linux newbies.  At 
least three of us have a combined total of nearly 30 years of Linux 
experience, which includes building our own Linux distributions from scratch 
back when we were younger and had more free time.  That is to say that we're 
not going to get hung up on the little things.

> I completely disagree with the "never upgrade your system" camp which
> you declared.  I've never had that kind of trouble with Gentoo, I've
> found it equals apt-get for keeping your system up to date in speed and
> convenience.

I think it has a lot to do with how "stock" you keep your system.  If you have 
any modifications, that's when things start falling apart.

Here's an example of part of one developer's "last straw" with Gentoo.  Mind 
you, this is only part of it and it was the final bit of a series of 
problems.

1. Updated system and saw that dhcpd was blocking updating baselayout.  That 
would typically happen with the executable was moved into a new package.  
Weird that it would be into baselayout, but not unprecedented with the new 
haphazard Gentoo packaging.  So he removes dhcpd and re-emerges baselayout.  
Finds out only after shutting down the laptop and going home that there is no 
dhcpd anymore and lots of network fiddling needs to be done to get things in 
a working state again.

2. Oh, and the networking config is totally changed from before.  There's no 
warning, as usual. We had fairly extensive modifications to the networking 
config scripts so nothing works anymore without a few hours of work.

3. Lots of network work made harder because of other unannounced changes.  
Like, what is the new /sbin/runscript?  It's a binary exe but no man page nor 
help info.  Okay, maybe there is online but remember, the networking is now 
all broken.  Anyway, there are a lot of steps that I'm skipping but 
networking is finally fixed.

4. 'emerge system' finally works but gives lots of errors about some missing 
dependencies around dev-manager.  Tries an 'emerge world' and it fails with 
lots of complaints surrounding udev being masked.

This continues for quite some time... and is totally typical of any kind of 
update that we did.  He finally gets everything working again, but enough is 
enough and he vows to switch to Ubuntu.

Now I'll say that a lot of this is because we customized a LOT of packages and 
procedures.  That's where my comment about running a standard LAMP system 
comes in.  If you're sticking with the normal "stable" Gentoo with *no* 
unmasked unstable packages, then you might be fine.  But let's face it.. one 
of the appeals of Gentoo is how much you can customize it to your own needs.  
So if doing so totally breaks everything else, then what good is it?

> I always recommend Gentoo over Debian and Slackware as a person's first
> "advanced" operating system, as the documentation in Gentoo is the most
> gentle one out there, and after learning it, I'm comfortable with rpm,
> rpm-source, or raw ./configure && make && make install with custom
> configure flags in many other distros, and I would know how to approach
> rolling my own distro if given the time and need.

Yep, I agree.  It's great for learning Linux for newbies wanting to take the 
next step in their Linux evolution.

> DO NOT put ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" in your make.conf.  It's not the
> equivalent of Debian's unstable, it's far worse. Put it in
> packages.keywords WITH the specific version number of a package only if
> you really really really need the unstable version.  Gentoo doesn't
> operate like Debian, stable Gentoo is far more hip than Debian's stable,
> and when Gentoo masks packages as unstable, it's really really unstable.

I also agree here.  Unfortunately, a lot of the packages you'd need on a non 
LAMP (or other server) system (like a development machine) will be masked.  
Unmasking them causes no end of problems since, as you say, unstable Gentoo 
packages can be really really unstable.