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?"

No, bad

[tomstdenis]

NO MORE!

Spend more time on fucking Q & A. I'm tired of trying to talk people into Gentoo only to find out that the tree is half-fucked all the time [like packages marked stable requiring other libs NOT IN THE FUCKING TREE YET].

No more extras, fix the base!!!

This is the problem with OSS. Everyone wants to get famous for the next big breakthrough and nobody wants to maintain the shit.

Tom

Re:No, bad

[slapys]

"This is the problem with OSS. Everyone wants to get famous for the next big breakthrough and nobody wants to maintain the shit."

Seriously. I submitted several UI bugs to the Xfce bugzilla site recently and none of them were addressed. People want to develop fun new features, but unfortunately that's not all that software is.

Re:No, bad

[Rix]

Really, I find that most people would rather complain about what they don't like than actually do anything to help fix it.

Re:No, bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that most project owners would rather complain that other people don't fix things for them than actually do anything to maintain their own code.

Re:No, bad

[tomstdenis]

Um, that's such a inappropriately ignorant comment it's hard to really put this into context.

Let me see I can take a stab at it anyways...

My workstation is the product of about 800 Gentoo ports being installed. Roughly speaking probably around 200M lines of C, C++, Python and Perl source code. I don't have the time, nor the energy to go through all of them to fix them up because the developers are too lazy to maintain them. Frankly, this is why OSS sucks. In the non-free world you don't see Microsoft telling it's customers "You don't like explorer? Fix it yourself!"

I report bugs when I can but sometimes you don't know what to say. Like why did my UHCI controller stop working after I moved from 2.6.16 to 2.6.17? Fucked if I know. Why does my gige not work in 2.6.18 but it worked in 2.6.17? [actually this is a ICH8 fix I bet...]

Sure I could report it to the lkml, but chances are they'll need more than "Tyan 2882 and UHCI no work."

Tom

Hooray for zealots!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well gee, Tom, then maybe you should stop recommending a buggy piece of crap, you fucking useless waste of space. On second thought, don't. The more crappy opinions you spout, the faster other people will relise what a fucktard you truly are.

Love,
Mom.

Re:No, bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I wish like hell MS would give me the source and say that to me! As do a lot of others here I suspect.

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[Stalyn]

If you look closely, you'll see that Gentoo has not actually done anything for about two years now. Even an attempt to change the color of the website failed after over a year of work.

I have been using Gentoo for quite awhile and I don't have any gripes. Someone has to be doing something (maintaining packages) or I wouldn't have to emerge --sync and emerge -uD world every few days. But I guess if you consider changing the website color as doing something you could be right.

Re:What's the difference?

[ArcherB]

if you aren't going to compile from source to get that extra level of customizability, what's the difference between Gentoo and say, Debian testing/unstable?

apt-get is spelled different that emerge.

Seriously, apt-get replaced my kernel... probably because I told it to, but I was expecting at least to have the option to go back. I was hosed (before live CD's). Gentoo is a bit harder to replace the kernel, but you have the option of installing multiple kernels. I know I could have done it with Debian too, but I didn't think it was going to replace my only good kernel with a bad one. Also, I really prefer the Gentoo forums over any help I tried to receive with Debian.

Re:Ill informed post

[KhanReaper]

I hate to admit it, but I think that many people have misinterpreted what Gentoo really is and for whom it is geared. Let's be candid: it's really not about excessive CFLAGS.

Take a good read of this article [over-yonder.net]; it outlines some of the fundamental differences in philosophy between BSD and Linux. In some respects, Gentoo's portage system attempts to reconcile the differences between BSD's ports tree and the absence thereof in Linux as well as the concept of perpetual updates through make buildworld. (I know a guy who's maintained the same install of Gentoo on his laptop for over four years who has kept it up-to-date by using portage without a re-install. Talk about impressive for a Linux distribution.) Yes, it is true that Gentoo does not have a native pkg_add that FreeBSD does to install ports, but what Gentoo offers is as close to that as one can get in Linux; and it is one hell of an improvement on the base concept, might I say. In many respects, if you want to criticize Gentoo over having to compile things to keep it up-to-date, then BSD ought to be brought up for discussion.

Still, it is nice that Gentoo can be updated without having to perform a complete re-installation of the operating system. I hate to say it, but performing "s/old release/new release/g" on /etc/apt/sources.list, apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade is not always as clear as one might expect. When the average user who lacks strong familiarity with dpkg's options is in this situation, I have seen the results: They are very depressing. And while it is true that emerge updates can break, they will at least teach the user in time how to deal with them and learn quite a bit. The same can be said about other distributions, too, so the exclusivity of this issue to Gentoo is really a moot point.

.

What about customization? Sure, some BSD packages may have makefile-based booleans, but in no way are the centrally documented or are they centrally documented. FreeBSD KNOBS [freebsd.org] comes close, but it still is not exhaustive. There is no real comparison with USE flags. If BSD had it so well, I wonder why people are trying to port portage to BSD. (I love BSD, mind you, so I am not being unreasonably harsh on it.)

What about fundamental design? It is meant to be flexible and dynamic. Ever notice how many directories are suffixed with ".d" in /etc on Gentoo? A lot are. Yes, some other distributions do use the enumerated ".d" directory paradigm, but none seem to do it as much as Gentoo. Gentoo seems to use ".d" directories whenever it can. So if a new package wants to add something to the path, it merely adds another entry to /etc/env.d which specifies this path. I find this system so great, that I've re-implemented it in Debian/Ubuntu across 100+ computers at my work for the special in-house, non FHS-friendly applications. Talk about a compelling innovation.

And when it comes to configuration changes, Debian has debconf, which allows some packages to preserve changes across updates through configuration file regeneration. While this is nice for preseeding, this is not helpful when there are major updates or when you've made hand-made modifications. Yes, dpkg will bring about a diff of the two files, but does dpkg's integrated configuration diff mechanism really hold its own against Gentoo's dispatch-conf? If you've used dispatch-conf, the answer is no.

Yes, it is true that there are some quality assurance failings with packages in Portage, but let's put that aside for a moment. When it comes to making packages for Gentoo, it certainly beats making them for Debian. Yes, Debian has its nice policy manual, but it is not always up to date or the easiest thing to read. Gentoo's documentation let's a first-time package builder build a package in very little time; whereas Debian or Redhat's syste

This is how Free Software dies.

[RLiegh]

So, let's recap. Debian is having to pay developers in order to get a working distribution out of the door anywhere near on-schedule; NetBSD is embroiled in a scandal surrounding the undue influence of Wasabi on the core team -when it's not flayling wildly trying to cope with its' other management problems, and now it emerges that gentoo has been stuck in a political quagmire for years holding back even the most frivilous of changes (forget any major ones).

We've reached the point where all-volunteer, non-commercial unix-style Operating Systems are drowning in personality conflicts; and the only technical strides and achievements are coming largely from private companies (Sun, Redhat).

This quaint social experiment of altruistic development has shown two things: as much as you may dislike corporate culture, corporate structure and the incentive of a paycheck are what is needed to gain any sort of professional-quality software going out of the door on a regular basis.

Remove the structure, remove the incentive and before long you're left with nothing more than quibbling dorks and software packages like gentoo which half of the time are badly broken because no one can be bothered to work on them.

Re:No, bad

[naasking]

you don't see Microsoft telling it's customers "You don't like explorer? Fix it yourself!"

No, Microsoft says, "You don't like explorer? Tough shit!" On rare occasions it's "You don't like explorer? Well I'm afraid it's far too integrated into Windows your Honour."

Re:QA vs. Q&A

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Um.... OSS Sucks, and yet you still use it? Um.... Look. You're using the most user-unfriendly chunk of OSS there is. You're complaining it's user-unfriendly. I've installed both Ubuntu and the old Mandrake, I've done it for myself and non-techies, it was easy, I'm actually pretty happy overall. I'm not a demon-monster-coder. I can code enough to do it for a living.

Your continual 'OSS Sucks' comments are mildly offensive, seeing as you're judging an entire community based upon your experience with a small piece of it. They show you personally lack in certain areas of consideration.

OSS doesn't have any real problems, it's individuals within the system. The system / movement / whatever you want to call it itself mutates all the time. It's a software project that has lasted and lived in the same area for over ten or fifteen years, and managed to keep up with modern technology. There aren't a whole lot of codebases like that out there.

I'm sorry you think OSS sucks as a whole. But I don't agree and flaming the crap out of all the people that don't is just trolling.

Re:No, bad

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread explains why there will always be a place for proprietary software you must pay for. That's so someone can be paid to do uninteresting but necessary stuff.

Re:No, bad

[orasio]

I don't think that actually happens.
A project owner with an itch to scratch, will scratch it, they _do_ maintain their own code.
Maintaining their own code, but for other people, and for free, is something that they usually do, but some times they just don't want to. There is where you see some project owners complain, about users that want tailored free maintaining right now, without contributing.
There's no implied contract that says that the original coder will fix _your_ problems for free. That's one of the best things of the GPL, you have the power to make stuff happen yourself. Even if you don't know how to program, there are a lot of programmers that will do it for you, given the right compensation. That is the actual meaning of "free" as in "freedom", and not as in "beer".

Re:No, bad

[Dhalka226]

I mean how do you get the right to brag "Oh, I'm a Kernel developer, see my code-fu muscles" when you can't invest the money to actually develop seriously?

It's very easy: You look at the whole picture.

Your workstation is the result of 800 Gentoo ports being installed. 200M lines of source code. Your own words. Well. that sounds pretty fucking awesome to me. And you got all of that for free.

You're having a problem? Sorry. But even one problem, or five, or twenty--out of 800 installed packages--is still a damn good mark. And those developers you bitch and moan about being immature for not fixing your specific problem (without you even taking the time to report that problem) are clearly providing you a service that you like. If they weren't, the system wouldn't be acceptable for your use andyou would switch to something else.

Don't like the way that your problems aren't getting fixed in the OSS world? Well, you're free to go install Windows or OS X or some other, non-free-world operating system. There are NO problems with any of those OSs, I'm sure. And if there were, I'm sure Microsoft would be happy to release a patch just for you when you... well, don't report it. But I'm sure they'll get your report telepathically.

Seriously, you have one of the absolute worst attitudes I have ever seen. It's not just your posts here. I'm sad to say that I recognize your name because your attitude is constantly shitty. Maybe if you weren't such a high and mighty ass all the time, people would be more inclined to care what your problems are. Hell, if those "occasional" bug reports you file read anything like the drivel you spew here, no wonder your problems don't get fixed.

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[Otter]

This was covered on the mailing lists, GWN, and forums. Don't blame Gentoo because you can't use the tools or read.

That pretty much sums up the problem with Gentoo, nowadays -- searching the forums is now a routine tool for getting your updates to work. It used to be that Portage was the biggest advantage of Gentoo; now it's one headache after another.

And we're not talking about an xmms extension or Firefox theme here. We're talking about fundamental login and security functionality, and the "simple" solution is searching the forums for "emerge -B shadow && emerge -C pam-login && emerge -1k shadow"!

Re:This is how Free Software dies.

[drew]

this must be the perfect example of the old physics experiment rule:
"When you need to ensure a close fit to a line, make sure that you use only two data points."

OK, so you mentioned three open source projects that are having trouble right now, and two commercial companies that aren't.

What happens when you add Ubuntu, KDE, FreeBSD, or Firefox to your list. (OK, nix Firefox. Bad example).

Or for that matter, look how much corporate structure and financial incentive have helped Microsoft to get Vista, IE 7, and Office 12 out the door on time.

Any group can be run badly, and any group can be run well if there is enough interest and leadership. This incident reflects poorly on the leadership and members of the Gentoo project, nothing more and nothing less.

Re:This is how Free Software dies.

[Spit]

The large projects that succeed all have an arbitrator who has final call on any conflicts: Linux has Linux and OpenBSD has Theo. Sun and Redhat have executives. The decision maker is the final step required in a project to prevent ego-paralysis. It is telling that OpenBSD and Linux are two of the most innovative and complex projects around.

Note: Linux is a kernel.

Re:No, bad

[frogstar_robot]

And I wouldn't mind if you detailed the update process for Ubuntu... I've been spoiled by that "emerge -uDv world", I suppose ;o)

#apt-get update
#apt-get dist-upgrade

The first command updates the database of available packages and their versions. The second downloads and installs anything that is newer than what you already have.

If I want something a bit more bleeding edge than usual but don't want to risk a wholesale upgrade, I'll add "deb-src" lines from the development distro and "apt-get source packagename" then build the package from source against my otherwise default environment. If it's just a game or something trivial there really isn't much risk. Backporting something like glibc I just won't do. Anymore I just want to use the damn thing and I'm no longer willing to hose large tracts of my system to play a silly little game that just got released yesterday.

Re:Ill informed post

[DAharon]

I completely agree with you that people who are unfamiliar with Gentoo, are largely ignorant of what it's like to actually run a Gentoo system. CFLAGS? I don't really run any fancy CFLAGS. USE flags? If a program can benefit from a certain use flag, I add it. It's Portage and the Gentoo toolset that really makes Gentoo a joy to work with. I am always hearing people complain about how hard it is to install, and how it always breaks. I always ask myself, "What the hell are they doing"? I have been running the same Gentoo install for at least 3.5 years now on my desktop. I play games, surf the internet, write papers, download stuff on it. It also acts as my wireless router, MythTV machine, and file/ftp server. I emerge -uD world at least once a week and encountering a problem is a rarity. I just don't get it. How can everyone be having such a devil of a time maintaining just a basic Gentoo "surf the internet" computer, when I've had such an easy time for so long?

Re:QA vs. Q&A

[Anonymous Coward]

OSS is much like drivers on the road, most are shity but they work just enough not to get into crashes. And when the software is stable it's usually still a mess underneath anyways.

This is different from commercial software how exactly?

By the way, if you want the right to complain you pay for the privilege. These people are releasing their work free to the world, with no monetary compensation. Their technique may be bad but so what? If you want an assurance of quality, pay for it. OSX thrives on that market, and frankly you sound like you should be using it. Free means no guarantees, and some of us are willing to make that bargin. You obviously aren't, and shouldn't. I agree with you about the state of code out there, but since its free it doesn't bother me. If I want better code, I can either fix it up myself or pay someone to.

If your personal coding standards are high even for free code, I applaude you and wish more people were like you. HOWEVER, I know that I have no right to deride others when they do not code this way, because I have not paid them anything. I suggest your tone and attitude are not going to achieve even your own end, which I assume is to get people to write better code. Try instead suggestions, pointers to lessons on techniques, and polite discussion of the potential benefits. Attitude NEVER helps, and usually hurts.

Re:No, bad

[stuuf]

Why does it have to be proprietary for someone to get paid to develop it?

Re:Hooray for zealots!

[kelnos]

I feel pity for people like you. Who can't simply co-exist with others because you feel you have to mock and insult others.

Hello, kettle? Yes, this is pot. I'd just like to inform you: you're black.

Seriously, have you even read the other posts that you've written?

Re:Ill informed post

[Anonymous Coward]

If BSD had it so well, I wonder why people are trying to port portage to BSD. (I love BSD, mind you, so I am not being unreasonably harsh on it.)

To draw an analogy: if the Linux kernel was so well, why would Debian try to make Debian GNU/KNetBSD and Debian GNU/KFreeBSD (BSD kernel with Debian (APT, glibc, plus all normal other software)).

The answer to both questions is simple: because they can. I've not seen anyone in the *BSD community being particulary happy about Portage. Or adopting it. I've not seen Free|Open|Net|DragonflyBSD adopting it. They're happy with Pkgsrc mostly last time i checked. They're not against it either; why would they? What purpose does it serve? Its F/OSS after all.

The equiv to USE flags on my BSD systems is FLAVOR flag. It does more than enough for me on my BSD systems. If I don't like to compile I simply type pkg_add -r package_name and it just works by downloading that package from RELEASE. If I need a certain flavor, I add that. For example squid-2.5.STABLE12p1-transparent instead of squid-2.5.STABLE12p1. Ofcourse, that may have been updated in STABLE, and packages for non-x86 are not really updated, so then I need to a CVS update for my ports tree... and do it your way. I don't like to compile myself, would trust a MD5/SHA1/RMD160/GPGed repository more, but so be it. You guys automated that, made it a bit simpler, but if you know what you're doing such is not necessary. Problematic is it when you just took a lot of time to compile AND TEST your application, and it works (or doesn't). Who the hell would use Gentoo in a productive environment performing such tasks with dangerous USE flags?

Also, Gentoo is Linux, internally suffers from fragmentation, and its users frequently piss the hell out of F/OSS developers because of their clueless and bogus bug reports -- due to things such as USE flags. The only useful purpose I can think of is.. catching bugs in GCC ;) now I'm off eating rice crackers, laters...

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[petrus4]

Anyone trying to have technical discussion is called out and accused of flaming by the once great Seemant (who has not done any development himself for years) and his horde of fanboy minions (most noticably, Jakub)

This sounds to me like the same old story with regards to any form of participation in the terminal sociological disease we call "the Linux community" in general.

Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, and Bruce Perens are the broader community's resident egomaniacs. RMS in particular considers anyone who comes anywhere near Linux to automatically become his bitch by default. The other two aren't quite as bad, but they're not much better. From what I'm seeing here, it seems the seperate communities of some distros have the same type of "celebrity" problem...people whose output of actual work ceased years ago, but who insist on staying around and trying to demand that those who actually *are* working bow down and worship them on the basis of *past* accomplishments. Stallman is the single biggest example of what I mean, here...you need to go back *at least* 15 years to point to any of his programmatic contributions, and yet he still hangs around now, shooting his mouth off, demanding credit for things that don't belong to him, and causing nothing but problems generally.

I'm working on something almost entirely alone as a way of avoiding this type of garbage. If I need to deal with anyone, I talk to the people who are doing the various sub-projects' actual gruntwork, direct on Freenode...the proverbial people in the trenches. They're the ones who really build Linux, day in and day out, and they generally get zero credit for it. I remember what ESR once said about this, and I'm going to expand on it:- If you're not producing actual code, but are simply looking to build your own ego or a clique, then kindly sit down and shut the fuck up so that the rest of us who *are* doing something useful can concentrate.

The various social, psychiatric, and neurological disabilities of a number of people associated with Linux by themselves constitute the operating system's main problem...nothing else. Said people need to get over themselves, and above all, quite honestly disappear if they're not willing to do anything genuinely constructive.

That is who gets my own respect, though...people doing actual work. Linux's "celebrities" are formally invited to go and perform anatomically impossible acts with various sharp-edged gardening implements, as far as I'm concerned...and that goes triple for RMS.

Re:No, bad

[emilper]

why update for the sake of updates, especially if you run such a mission critical setup ? You don't have to rebuild kernels and reboot all the time. Real companies ... yes ... like those that don't test or don't care if they have relevant SATA drivers on their install disks ?

Re:This is how Free Software dies.

[quag7]

I'm not sure your post is fair. Despite the problems you list, free operating systems have come *this* far. There are quite a few very usable, (in fact, some quite polished) linux distributions which have been developed by volunteers.

Whatever Gentoo's organizational problems, no one should get the idea that the distro itself is falling apart. Frankly, if I didn't see stories like this, as a Gentoo user, I wouldn't know something was seriously wrong.

I assume you were using hyperbole when you said that Gentoo packages were broken "half of the time." Well, I just re-emerged world - that's every package on my system, because I'd updated to a new gcc version.

The results were 6 out of 743 packages didn't compile. When I tried to compile them again, 2 worked, leaving 4 out of 740 packages with problems - not exactly a disaster; that's just over half of a percent broken packages.

This was approximately the same as on my other Gentoo box which uses a different arch (the above is x86_64, this other one is x86).

This has been my experience consistently - would I like a 100% working stable branch? Yes. It's worth working toward. Is my system an unstable shambles? On average I reboot every 60 days or so when I upgrade my kernel. I wouldn't call that...rickety.

You call a decade and a half (speaking of Linux) of volunteer Linux development "This quaint social experiment of altruistic development"?

I'm sorry, but I have disagree - that is a seriously skewed perspective. If I read your post, I would conclude that Linux hadn't risen above, oh, MS-DOS in terms of usability and sophistication.

I've been using a Gentoo Linux desktop for 5 years and Debian production servers at work for three. I don't mean to suggest I'm an expert, but I do have a fair amount of experience with these "quaint social experiments," and it could be that you're just letting off some steam, but if not, I find it hard to agree with your assessment of the situation.

In my opinion the reality is that the volunteer development process is (and always has been) imperfect, and can probably be improved - in fact, this model has been around long enough that now is a good time for a re-assement of social dynamics of such a system.

Nor is it purely altruistic - developing software (I assume) gives a volunteer developer a sense of personal satisfaction, credibility, esteem from others, and even something to put on a resume. Users could stand to be a tad more courteous and grateful to developers, this much is true, and I don't want to speak for developers but I find it hard to believe they consider themselves religious clerics slavishly serving users out of some sense of self-sacrifice. I am personally deeply thankful for their efforts. Perhaps some developers could add to this discussion in terms of their motivations.

People have really been unfair to the GPL, volunteer developers, and so on - immoderate and sometimes mean-spirited in their criticism. Let's not forget what this "quaint social experiment" has in fact yielded. I know - I use products of that process every day.

I hope people smarter at social dynamics and project management than I am can improve the process, but, well, Gentoo and Debian work for me, professionally and as a hobbyist.

To suggest that this system is some kind of a lark or failure simply contradicts the basic reality of the situation. I'm surprised you feel as you do, as I assume by your post that you use or have used one or several free UNIX-like OSes. Your assessment of the situation could not be further from my own.

Lastly, and I'll be a bit of a broken record with this, Gentoo is not for everyone. It is not intended as a side-by-side replacement to something like SLED though with some work it can certainly work that way. Gentoo is for tinkerers, developers, and people who are interested in the OS itself, rather than simply what can be accomplished with the OS. It's definitely for me but I don't think less of anyone who couldn't be bothered with Gentoo.

If anything, I hope to see the problems addressed simply so life will be easier on developers, and encourage them to stick around (and new ones to contribute).