Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Decision to remove stage1/2 from installation documentation

[Abhay Kedia <abhay.ilugd@gmail.com>]

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On Tuesday 22 Nov 2005 10:09 pm, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> *sigh*
>
> Another "Gentoo is about choice" argument.  Can I ask you something?
> Where does it say that Gentoo is about choice?  I see lots of places
> that say that Gentoo allows you to customize, but nowhere do I see
> anything that says that we are about choice.

I am a really novice desktop end-user and am following gentoo-dev just for 
learning what all goes through the minds of the uber gentoo developers. I 
have no say in this discussion as it doesn't effect me and am certainly not 
qualified to get into an argument with someone like you but I have read your 
posts mentioning this "Where does it say that Gentoo is about choice?" 
argument lots of time.

Till now I also had a picture in my mind that Gentoo was actually about 
"choice" and when I saw that picture getting shattered by a Lead Developer, I 
went to look for the places that made me think about Gentoo in that way i.e. 
"Gentoo is about choice". These are the few things I could find.

1) On the about page with picture of "Larry The Cow": 
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml
"He discovered lots of up-to-date packages that could be auto-built
using the optimizations settings and build-time functionality that
he wanted, rather than what some distro creator thought would be
best for him. All of the sudden, Larry the Cow was in control. And
he liked it."
---rather than what some distro creator thought would be
best for him.
^ that statement makes you think it is about choice.

2) The Philosophy: http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml
"If the tool forces the user to do things a particular way, then the tool is 
working against, rather than for, the user."

3) Gentoo Social Contract: http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/contract.xml
"A Gentoo operating system should satisfy the self-hosting requirement. In 
other words, the operating system should be able to build itself from scratch 
using the aforementioned tools and metadata. If a product associated with an 
official Gentoo project does not satisfy these requirements, the product does 
not qualify as a Gentoo operating system."

All these things "imply" that there should be a choice for a user to do what 
ever way he/she wants while building his/her system i.e. even from scratch.

Since these documents just implied the "Choice" nature of Gentoo, I went ahead 
and did some googling to actually get the direct connection. Searching for 
"gentoo about choice" leads 653,000 results and just the first two results 
are enough to get the point across for a user.

1) From 1st Link:
Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: March 28th, 2005
http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20050328-newsletter.xml
Developer of the week talks
"Gentoo represents choice and freedom for every user to build their computing 
environment to their individual needs, by giving them the tools to do it." -- 
Marcus D. Hanwell (cryos)

2) From 2nd Link:
Trusted Gentoo : by Daniel Black
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20050202-trustedgentoo.xml
"Gentoo is about choice"

The last link should settle it for you?
Can we now comfortably say that "Gentoo is about choice"? The other 652,998 
links might reveal a few more places where we can get the choice idea from 
but I hope that all these links should be sufficient to give anyone this 
idea.

Regards,
Abhay

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