On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 16:59 -0500, Michael Crute wrote:
> I REALLY dislike the idea of eliminating stage1 tarballs. I am
> personally very picky about my system and what gets installed and from
> my point of view installing from a stage3 is as bad as installing
> Fedora. Plus it would be a real pain in the butt to have to go
> backwards, installing a bunch of stuff up front and then going back by
> hand and removing it. I do share Ed's sentiments about stage2 though,
> you could eliminate those as I don't see much point to them. You
> either want it all or you want the bare minimum, I want the bare
> minimum. 

Read my response to him to see why you're not saving yourself any time
or work.

> Another thought is release the tarballs but do not support anyone with
> problems doing a stage1 install. If you are brave enough to attempt
> it, you go it alone.

This was one of my original options, stated in my first email.  The only
issue with this is it still causes a great burden on the developers that
are responsible for release bugs.  We are severely overworked when
release time comes around, and having things such as a stage1 which
essentially allows a user to completely bypass all of our QA is a
logistical nightmare.

Choice be damned, if you can't ever get Gentoo on your system, who cares
if you got to make a few *choices* or not?

The removal of a stage1 tarball does not remove *any* choice from the
user doing the installation.  Anyone who tells you otherwise does not
know what they are talking about.

It *does* however guarantee that you have a minimal working system of
known quality with which to do your installation from, rather than a
completely hacked and limited functionality minimal environment designed
only to support the building of a minimal working system.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux