[gentoo-dev] Gentoo observations

[mrfab@arn.net]

Ok, I've been using gentoo for a few weeks now and
am for the most part blown away.  I had given up
on ever finding a distro that I felt would give me
the control and flexiblity I wanted (been using
lfs for about two years) but finally found what I
was looking for.  That said, there are a couple of
instances in which the current release falls a
little short.  These aren't flames or complaints,
just observations that are VERY much my personal
opinion--I just thought I'd point these things out
to anyone that was interested.

First, where the hell is vi?  It is missing from
both the boot image and the base install.  I
realize that I can emerge it, but having to use
an editor as horrible as nano, even just for the
initial config, was a bit obnoxious.

Something else I noticed that the initial install
is lacking is some sort of firewall script.  It
would seem to me that even something as simple as
the examples used in the drobbin's stateful
firewall design article would be better than
nothing.

I may be just missing something, but it seemed odd
to me that there wasn't someplace I could look to
get a full index of ebuilds and descriptions. As a
quick hack I used the command below--but it
certainly isn't very elegant at all.

for x in `find /usr/portage/ -name '*.ebuild'` ; do ; echo `basename $x .ebuild` `grep DESCRIPTION $x` ; done > packages

For the most part the file system layout of the
installed packages is very well done, but a couple
of things didn't seem to fit right to me.  First,
I understand the reasoning for having both gnome
and kde in /usr...but it would be nice if
it happend in a consistant manner so that gnome
lived in /usr/gnome just as kde lives in
/usr/kde.  Another file system decision that seems
off to me is the choice of /uar/local/httpd for the
default documentroot instead of /var/www or
something like /home/http.

Speaking of apache, it would be better to use
something other than nobody:nobody by default.  My
suggestion would be web:web and then having the
default htdocs living in /home/web.  You get *so*
much more flexibilty over the execution of apache
that way--for example, users with public html
directories (as in server/~username) simply have to
be added to the web group and chown the files
in that directory to user:web instead of having to
them be world readable.  You also have the ability
to enable write access in certain directories for
that user/group if dynamic scripts require you to
do so.

I've noticed that a few distros (Redhat in
particlular comes to mind) have modified useradd
to create a personal group for a given user.  At
first glance it may seem odd, but if you give it
some thought there really are some instances where
it could be a good idea.  For one thing, it would
allow you to use a umask with +a for groups and
then just chown to allow another group to read them
instead of having to chown and chmod.

That's about it--just a few notes I've made during
usage.  However, in comparison to all of the
things that gentoo does right they are pretty
insignificant.  Just food for thougt.

As a final note, the person that takes the time to
create zsh completion scripts for the varioius 
gentoo scripts (from emerge to rc-update) deserves
a special place in heaven.


-- 
-                 Scott J Garner                 -
-                Austin, TX - USA                -  
-          ICQ: 17348307 AIM: Jungalero          -
-                   OPN: MrFab                   -