[gentoo-dev] Re: 2004.2 Feature Requests

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

John Davis posted <1083296558.8842.127.camel@woot.uberdavis.com>,
excerpted below,  on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:42:38 -0400:

> To start preparing for 2004.2 in July, releng is opening up Feature
> Requests that the community would like to see included in 2004.2. The last
> day that we are accepting requests is Friday, May 7th at which point
> releng will hold a meeting and decide which requests are feasible for both
> the alloted time and workload. Thank you for your time and your requests.

Here's (what should be) a simple one.

Include a "man" binary in the stage-one tarballs.

I'm new to Gentoo, having started with 2004.0, but have yet to
successfully get a working system, (after having waited for .1 to come
out before trying again, after a first learning run). A lot of the reason
is the way I go about it, demanding (and eventually getting) a system
customized to my wishes from the get-go, learning huge gobs of stuff along
the way, that it'd otherwise take me quite awhile to learn, as I'd never
be confronted with issues forcing me to learn it in ordinary operations.
Computing is my hobby, not my profession, so I'm not on a deadline, and
I'm fine with all that.

One of the things I've done is analyze the bootstrap(-2.6).sh script and
do a single ebuild at a time (with proper bootstrap and build use flags
where appropriate) what those scripts do in one huge step.  In an earlier
run I got far enough into things to make use of the emerge and friends man
pages, which helped me understand quite a bit more of what was going on. 
Then I decided I wanted to start over, and did so, cleaning the partitions
and installing the new (now 2004.1) stage-one tarball, and going from
there.  However, I was having problems getting one (unstable) package to
properly emerge, and wanted to try the single-step-at-a-time ebuild
command instead.

Trouble was I couldn't remember the steps and man isn't yet installed at
that point in the process.

As it happens, I'm installing using a chroot from a running Mandrake
(AMD64) system, and I got around the problem by creating a script named
gman to be run from OUTSIDE the chroot, that would set $MANPATH to the
Gentoo mounted version (copied from the /etc/profile.env file and modified
to include the gentoo root mountpoint), before calling (the Mandrake) man.
Thus, I could "gman ebuild", "gman portage", etc.  A few commands used
in both distribs are slightly different between them, and with gman
setting the gentoo path exclusively, and my regular mandrake manpath
unmodified, I could call up the manpage for whichever version I wanted,
using either man or gman, from OUTSIDE the gentoo chroot.

I find it rather strange and frustrating that after updating my
chroot environment per the handbook instructions, I have a $MANPATH
variable setup perfectly correctly, within the chroot, but no "man" binary
to use it, until rather later in the bootstrap process.

Thus, my request is simply to provide a man binary in the stage-one, to be
overwritten later when it is compiled, just as with the other basic
binaries from coreutils.  This would be of /tremendous/ help to "stubborn
mules" such as myself <g>, that like to do things the HARD way, learning
as they go.  I definitely found it rather disconcerting to be without a
working man system, even while the documents and manpath itself were
setup.  It's kinda hard to learn as you go when you can't read what you
are supposed to be learning!  <g> 

OTOH, I DID learn how to setup $MANPATH manually to access "foreign"
manpages, something I would have missed if the stage-one HAD supplied a
binary man, and a good place to apply such "theoretical" knowledge, so it
wasn't without its benefits.  I wish I would have thought of it sooner,
however, as I sure wasted enough time trying (without success) to google
for the man pages I needed, first.

That of course is another suggestion:  There are a number of web sources
for various standard man pages.  Couldn't the Gentoo specific ones be
hosted somewhere and a link to them be placed in the handbook?  The
handbook does provide a good introduction to use flags and some of the
additional features of portage and etc, but fails to provide the
detailed info the manpages, particularly the ebuild (1 and 5) manpages,
provide.  Reading them was an invaluable help in parsing the ebuild
scripts so I could understand what was happening, and figure out where I
could customize and/or where an ebuild was failing that I HAD customized. 
I only wish I'd had that info ahead of time, when I'd read the handbook,
and the amd64.gentoo.org documentation, in doing my pre-install research.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



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