Re: [gentoo-dev] GLI Officially Deprecated

[AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk>]

Philip Webb wrote:
> 090114 Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> On 15:23 Wed 14 Jan 2009, Ben de Groot wrote:
>>> Also, will we have an announcement on the www.gentoo.org frontpage?
>>> This seems to me an important enough issue to inform our users about.
>> Yeah, I'll get something up. I've got a few pending now.
> 
> I've been using Gentoo since 2003 & have installed it in  2  machines.
> I've also felt it necessary more than once to comment in LWN
> in response to scare stories then circulating about "the death of Gentoo"
> & how it was no longer putting out new versions reliably or on time.
> The fact that 'version' doesn't mean the same for Gentoo as other distros
> is not clear to the many people who haven't used Gentoo.
> 
> I just had a look at the Gentoo home page,
> as if I were a newcomer wanting to find out how to get started.
> The 'about' page says nothing about the basic installation process,
> so I went to 'installation docs', where the 1st 'installation resource'
> is the 'Gentoo Handbook', which led me to get 'Gentoo AMD64 Handbook',
> then 'about the Gentoo Linux installation'.
> This emphasises that I can install Gentoo in many ways,
> the 1st of which listed is 'from one of our installation CDs'.
> 
> May I suggest that the 'about' page needs an additional 3rd section
> entitled 'How do I go about installing Gentoo ?'.
> I'm sure DB is capable of writing whatever is needed,
> but it could be something like the following:
> 
>   Unlike most distributions, which rely on binary packages
>   and create a new version of the whole system at regular intervals,
>   Gentoo is installed once and thereafter kept upto-date by the user
>   by means of Portage (as above).  Installing Gentoo is not difficult,
>   but it does require a bit more time & attention from the user,
>   which we at Gentoo consider to be a useful exercise for her or him
>   to get to know better how a Linux system really works under the hood.
>   All you typically need is a live CD and a copy of the Gentoo Handbook,
>   which you can find by following the link to 'installation docs' above.
> 
> It might be an idea also to amend the line in the Handbook above,
> so that 'one of our installation CDs' is not quite so prominent.
> 
> HTH
> 

The ability of new users to find their way around the site was something 
I tried to fix with a new sidebar menu[0], which has currently been 
implemented in http://gentoo.org/index2.xml - Unfortunately this is 
currently being held up by something to do with the GLSA's that's been 
hanging around incomplete for the past 6 months now (see the deps of bug 
#252157).

I've tried posting on the relevant bugs to find out exactly what needs 
to be done, but no one seems to care, which is a real shame as the new 
index would be a vast improvement in my opinion.

[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/252157

AllenJB