[gentoo-dev] Sorry, I Quit

[gentoo-dev] Sorry, I Quit

[Gary Whysong]

I've been a Linux user since 1994 and looked forward to trying Gentoo 
Linux 1.2 on my IBM laptop.  I cut my teeth on Slackware (kernel 0.94) 
and certainly have compiled my share of apps. from scratch. However, I 
doubt anyone is a complete master of all aspects of Linux.  I certainly 
don't pretend to be.

Initially, I had minor problems getting a basic Gentoo system up. 
 Networking gave me a little trouble due to hardware problems, but those 
were resolved fairly quickly.

My problem is with your portage system.  Basically, almost 40% of the 
software I've tried to install doesn't.  Some of it dies with no error 
messages, other's with the inability to simply create directories.  Open 
Office wouldn't compile because your glibc's are too old and I couldn't 
find any newer one's on your site. Permission errors abound which is 
rather interesting when one is running as root.

You're web site maintains that your portage system is better (in 
design?) than Debian's apt-get and BSD's ports systems.  Unfortunately, 
you have yet to prove it to me.  I've never tried Debian and won't, 
since I don't care for the "Debian attitude".  I have used Free BSD's 
ports system and have yet to see it fail.  Unfortunately, I can 
personally attest to the fact that portage does fail, and often.

With that said, I would like to compliment you on a great concept for a 
Linux distribution.  I strongly believe you are on the right track. 
 Unfortunately, your package system needs significant improvement.  I 
wish you the best of luck and may try your distribution again sometime 
in the future.  However, at the present, I need a Linux system with 
working applications more quickly than the week of spare time I've 
already taken trying to build one with Gentoo.  Thus, I have little 
alternative but to give up on Gentoo and install Mandrake or SuSE.

I wish you the best of luck in improving your Linux distribution and 
look forwared to trying it again in the future.

Sincerely,

    Gary Whysong
    Assoc. Professor
    Environmental Resources
    Arizona State Univ. East.  (Gary.Whysong@asu.edu)

Re: [gentoo-dev] Sorry, I Quit

[Brandon Low]

I would be very interested in more detailed descriptions of the problems 
that you encountered, I personally have my gentoo system installed with 
over 750 packages (and I know others with over 800) and the only package 
that I wish to use but which fails to merge correctly is openoffice (which 
fails due to gcc issues not glibc issues, and is totally beyond our 
control at the moment), it is important to note that we also have an 
openoffice-bin package which installs from a binary package and therefore 
should merge with no problems on most any gentoo linux system.  

While you were having these problems, did you submit bugs to our bugzilla?  
If the problems you were experienceing were truly errors in our system, 
you would find that they generally get fixed within a day or two, if not 
within a few hours (depends on the nature and complexity of the bug), did 
you attempt to contact us during your problems?  Many of the developers of 
Gentoo are readily available on irc.openprojects.net #gentoo (along with 
hundreds of users willing to help with problems, some will help with a 
problem for hours until it is solved, as they did for me when I first 
installed Gentoo months ago).  

Again, I would be very interested in a complete listing of the packages 
you experienced failures with, and if possible any logs of said failures, 
as that would be truly helpful in improving gentoo for everyone.  However 
an e-mail of this sort is completely unhelpful and rather offensive.

Sincerely,

Brandon Low
Gentoo Developer

On Thu, 07/25/02 at 21:08:53 -0700, Gary Whysong wrote:
> I've been a Linux user since 1994 and looked forward to trying Gentoo 
> Linux 1.2 on my IBM laptop.  I cut my teeth on Slackware (kernel 0.94) 
> and certainly have compiled my share of apps. from scratch. However, I 
> doubt anyone is a complete master of all aspects of Linux.  I certainly 
> don't pretend to be.
> 
> Initially, I had minor problems getting a basic Gentoo system up. 
>  Networking gave me a little trouble due to hardware problems, but those 
> were resolved fairly quickly.
> 
> My problem is with your portage system.  Basically, almost 40% of the 
> software I've tried to install doesn't.  Some of it dies with no error 
> messages, other's with the inability to simply create directories.  Open 
> Office wouldn't compile because your glibc's are too old and I couldn't 
> find any newer one's on your site. Permission errors abound which is 
> rather interesting when one is running as root.
> 
> You're web site maintains that your portage system is better (in 
> design?) than Debian's apt-get and BSD's ports systems.  Unfortunately, 
> you have yet to prove it to me.  I've never tried Debian and won't, 
> since I don't care for the "Debian attitude".  I have used Free BSD's 
> ports system and have yet to see it fail.  Unfortunately, I can 
> personally attest to the fact that portage does fail, and often.
> 
> With that said, I would like to compliment you on a great concept for a 
> Linux distribution.  I strongly believe you are on the right track. 
>  Unfortunately, your package system needs significant improvement.  I 
> wish you the best of luck and may try your distribution again sometime 
> in the future.  However, at the present, I need a Linux system with 
> working applications more quickly than the week of spare time I've 
> already taken trying to build one with Gentoo.  Thus, I have little 
> alternative but to give up on Gentoo and install Mandrake or SuSE.
> 
> I wish you the best of luck in improving your Linux distribution and 
> look forwared to trying it again in the future.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
>     Gary Whysong
>     Assoc. Professor
>     Environmental Resources
>     Arizona State Univ. East.  (Gary.Whysong@asu.edu)
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gentoo-dev mailing list
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
> http://lists.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev

Re: [gentoo-dev] Sorry, I Quit

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Gary Whysong wrote:

> My problem is with your portage system.  Basically, almost 40% of the 
> software I've tried to install doesn't.  Some of it dies with no error 
> messages, other's with the inability to simply create directories. 

Despite what the 1.2 label on our ISO may make you think, Gentoo Linux is,
and will be for the near future a "bleeding-edge" distribution. That means
you should not consider it for day-to-day use unless you're willing to
help improving the distribution by submitting bugreports on a semi-daily
basis as you encounter problems. 

If you want something that "just works", I recommend you use one of the
more established distributions.


That being said, we _ARE_ working on improving the stability and
ruggedness of the distribution as hard as we can, but this is a very
time-consuming process.


As Brandon mentioned in his post, we'd be _very_ interested in hearing
a detailed account of your gripes. 


Good luck with your further journey in the Linux Land of the Free ;)


Kind regards,

Karl T