[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-core] This is just plain wrong.

[Brandon Low <lostlogic@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, 07/15/03 at 23:53:54 +0200, Lars Weiler wrote:
> The best thing to find out what users expect from Gentoo is
> having a lot of talks during four days on LinuxTag ;-)
> 
> You can read a summary of some talks in tantive's diary
> available at
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~tantive/lt/linuxtag_summary.txt
> 
> I realised that there are a lot of people using Gentoo on
> servers -- so it isn't still this hacker's distro as
> somebody wrote during this thread.

This is true, and something I considered bringing up at the time,
however even if we aren't a hacker's distro, we are a high performance
distro and those who run gentoo on server are experienced sysadmins.
and really, any experienced sysadmin should have no problem running
gentoo on a server (see someone's response to this post).  Furthermore,
we are actively (w/o any management changes) becoming much more server
friendly (see further information later)
> 
> One suggestion from several users was a kind of 'emerge
> security', meaning that only security-updates will be
> emerged.  Furthermore they want to install binary-packages,
> at least for the "big packages" (like KDE, mozilla etc.), so
> the GLRP should be realized as soon as possible (okay, it's
> on the way when I understand yesterday's mail properly).
> There are other things suggested as you can read in
> tantive's diary.  Maybe some of them can become a part of
> Gentoo?
> 
The feature in portage for this support is almost complete (as you
mentioned), and it will be a simple matter to keep a more up-to-date
GLRP for major packages.  With a seperate BINARY TREE which can be
synched against to provide the security only updates.  I also believe
from talking to carpaski today that the basic work to do
GLSA->PORTAGE->emerge -u security has already been started and really
just needs a new parent to finish it off.

> My view about Gentoo became really changed during those days
> on LinuxTag.  I realized that Gentoo is as famous as any
> other "big" Linux Distribution in Germany and that we have a
> lot of "usual" users, even administrators with huge server
> farms, and not only hackers or game junkies who want a fast
> desktop operating system.  We developers should be aware of
> this and concentrate our actions to become more comfortable
> to the user!

To stick to this thread's topic in my closing, I'd like to point out
that all of the things needed ot make Gentoo more user and server
friendly are already in progress without any further change to the
management structure.  I think that most of us devs have already felt
the overall better organization of release and other related processes
since the management overhaul, and we should (as someone else mentioned)
let the new structure take hold fully before we decide what all else may
need doing.  

So basically we're well on our way to having what we need, graphical
automated installer is in progress, we have a kernel autobuilder so that
users don't have to fear gentoo because they can't configure their own
linux kernel, and we will soon have a binary package
autodownload/install process which will destroy any automatic binary
upgrade system currently available that I am aware of.

--Brandon
> 
> Regards, Lars



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