Gentoo Announces 'Seeds'

rvale writes "Gentoo has announced a new project called Seeds. Aiming to provide out of the box images for various common tasks, it could be the answer to the common complaint that installing and customizing Gentoo takes too long. However, with other developers and Council members complaining that the project was improperly set up and those backing the project refusing to back off, lending weight to recent claims that Gentoo is suffering from management problems, will what could be a massive step forward degenerate into a repeat of the Sunrise disaster?"

Sunrise disaster

[urbanradar]

For those who have no idea what exactly the "sunrise disaster" in the summary is supposed to mean, like I did, here's the link: Project sunrise [gentoo-sunrise.org].

Re:Ill informed post

[ArcherB]

Whether or not making gentoo installable without spending endless painful hours of your time on it is a good thing?

That's already been done. It's called STAGE3

There are alternatives to Gentoo

[SaidinUnleashed]

I'll take the opportunity to pimp Source Mage Linux (http://www.sourcemage.org). SMGL is far simpler, easier, and faster to set up than Gentoo. The system management scripts are fast, and work astoundingly well, and the devs are always in irc and love to help. Just an all-around nicer bunch of guys and a better distro than Gentoo's seen in a few years.

Re:Ill informed post

[Enderandrew]

And Sayonora and Kororaa and Emission, etc.

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[wolf31o2]

Well, I'm not going to post anonymously. In fact, you're more than welcome to see exactly what I think. I know for a fact that this is going to make me a few enemies and probably piss off quite a few developers. Quite frankly, I agree with the poster here on many things, but definitely not on all of them. Gentoo really needs a few things to remain a top distribution. For one, we absolutely must stop doing this experimental crap and start focusing on improving and fixing what we already have in the tree. We need to focus on improving the quality of the distribution more than adding new "features" that do nothing more than make things easier on the lazy and the incompetent. There are simply too many Gentoo developers moving in too many directions. We have no focus. We have no direction. Worse yet, if we had one, we have no way of enforcing that we actually move towards it. Gentoo needs a good house-cleaning to remove some of the "problem children" and get us back to, oh, I don't know, maintaining packages and fixing bugs. Sure, that's not very glamorous, but we *are* a community-based Linux distribution. Perhaps we should get back to actually working on that, instead of trying to come up with new projects which sap resources from other places.

It is my personal opinion that the Gentoo developer community is too large and too diverse to properly work towards any real common goals. We have also diverged too far into essentially two camps, those that want the new whiz-bang features and want them now, and those that want a good, stable, reliable, and flexible system that is capable of meeting the demands put upon it. I definitely fall into the second category. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for experimental things, but they should be done outside of the scope of the main project and brought into the project once they've been proven.

I tend to believe that Gentoo needs more internal structure and needs more *well-designed* process to get things done. I don't think that red tape is the answer, but there has to be something done to solve this current anarchy. General development in the business world follows many stages, from initial design, through development, testing, QA, then deployment. In too many places, Gentoo developers are completely skipping the design and jumping straight into development. What this gives the world is a poorly designed product that is extremely hard to maintain and keep the quality up on over time. Beyond that, general testing an QA is being skipped in far too many places, or being done "after the fact" once something is in the wild.

I hope that the election of a new Gentoo council will bring about change to make Gentoo for the better, but truly fear that unless we start taking a hardline position on many of these new projects that we will fade into oblivion under the weight of our own garbage.

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[wolf31o2]

Except that as another user noted above, there's a problem with the base install where PAM and shadow libraries conflict with each other (obviously there are packates from the stage tarball that depend on each?) and it was a problem in the 2006.0 release. Something like that should have been fixed for the 2006.1 release. I had a lot of "fun" getting around that problem (and a lot of wasted time!).

Umm... that's called a blocker and it is done intentionally to keep you from screwing up your own system. Perhaps you should read section 2 of the Handbook, that clearly explains how portage works, what a blocker is, and what you should do when you get one. No offense, but we can't fix stupid.

I mean basically "out of the box", you've just finished the install and you reboot into your new gentoo system only to find a PITA of a problem the minute you go to install a package or set of packages that depends on Pam or shadow. I still have the 2005.whatever release still running on my main linux box because of this (I was smart and tried 2006.x on a different system first.)

The state of the tree is consistent with itself. It had nothing to do with packages depending on PAM or shadow. The entire situation was that at one time, the "login" program was split out into a separate package when you merged "shadow" with USE="pam" and with newer versions of shadow, it was re-integrated. Because of this, one needed to first unmerge pam-login, which is why a blocker was added. This is normal and expected behavior on a Gentoo system. Now, the whole 2005.whatever comment just shows that you really don't know what you're talking about, since the release information is only important when you're booting from the CD and unpacking the tarball. Everything after that point would be "Gentoo Linux as of my last emerge --sync" not "Gentoo Linux 2005.whatever" as Gentoo is in constant motion. But you knew that, didn't you?

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[agaffney]

I only have one thing to say to this....damn straight!

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[agaffney]

Do you realize that you're telling the Gentoo x86 Release Coordinator that he's wrong about what constitutes a release in Gentoo? The "releases" in Gentoo are really nothing more than media refreshes. The new profiles may give you a slightly different set of default USE flags, but in most cases, you will get the exact same versions (the latest) when you 'emerge -uDN world'.

Re:No, bad

[ChaosDiscord]

Frankly, this is why OSS sucks.

You want stability? If Gentoo is as problematic as you claim, maybe you should move to a more mainstream, boring distribution. Debian's stable release isn't very exciting, but it has a good reputation for stability. Same goes for the various Red Hat repackages like CentOS. If you don't like the free support, check out what other distros offer; I hear good stuff about Ubuntu's community. If you want more certain support, go pay for a distribution like Red Hat and cough up for the support contract.

This is not an problem with Open Source, this is a problem with Gentoo. The other option is going to demand that you pay them, why not pay for support for OSS?

In the non-free world you don't see Microsoft telling it's customers "You don't like explorer? Fix it yourself!"

Indeed. Microsoft's answer is "You don't like explorer? Sucks to be you!"

Re:... and what is an "overlay"?

[Kaseijin]

I feel like a complete noob for asking this, but ... what's an "overlay", in the context that the Gentoo people are using it?

Portage stores package information in a directory tree updated via rsync, which overwrites local modifications. An overlay is a separate directory maintained by the administrator. This capability has been used to kludge a third-party repository system, since Portage lacks direct support.