[gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[davecode]

Hi,

We plan to eval Gentoo.  We await 2008 final.  The comment is, Gentoo
home page gives no clue about status.  Convincing people that Gentoo is
"alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
motion on the home page.  That's about all most people inspect.

So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
test.

Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new
reported, maybe??  At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected
final release date"?  Counting lines of code or something?

Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present
expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask.

Thanks.
-- 
  
  davecode@nospammail.net

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - Faster than the air-speed velocity of an
                          unladen european swallow

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[gentoo-user] Re: Home page slowness

[Francesco Talamona]

On Saturday 10 May 2008, davecode@nospammail.net wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We plan to eval Gentoo.  We await 2008 final.

Why? What features are you expecting?

> The comment is, Gentoo 
> home page gives no clue about status.  Convincing people that Gentoo
> is "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
> motion on the home page.  That's about all most people inspect.

You are right, many people take conclusions from superficial looks.

> So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
> test.

I don't think we should make Gentoo more appealing, you can attract 
people that later will dislike its lack of eye-candy, better be 
honest :-)

> Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new
> reported, maybe??  At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected
> final release date"?  Counting lines of code or something?
>
> Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present
> expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask.

Unlike other distros, Gentoo evolves linearly, not by leaps (releases). 
Indeed there's no strong distinction between updates and upgrades, if 
you keep it up-to-date, already have the latest "release".

Ciao
	Francesco

-- 
Linux Version 2.6.25-gentoo-r2, Compiled #1 PREEMPT Sun May 4 08:26:42 
CEST 2008
One 1GHz AMD Athlon 64 Processor, 2GB RAM, 2004.04 Bogomips Total
aemaeth
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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Justin]

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davecode@nospammail.net schrieb:
> Hi,
>
> We plan to eval Gentoo.  We await 2008 final.  The comment is, Gentoo
> home page gives no clue about status.  Convincing people that Gentoo is
> "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
> motion on the home page.  That's about all most people inspect.
>
> So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
> test.
>
> Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new
> reported, maybe??  At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected
> final release date"?  Counting lines of code or something?
>
> Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present
> expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask.
>
> Thanks.
>   
There is no need to wait for any release. You can use what ever 
environment you want e.g. any live distro, running linux,... to install 
gentoo. On gentoo there aren't release steps in the way other distros 
do. So go ahead, boot a livecd get the appropriate stage3 tarball and 
portage tarball and begin to love gentoo. If you are waiting for the new 
release of the installer, then I would recommend you to do it better the 
normal gentoo way as descripted in the handbook 
<http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml>.

cheers
justin


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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Alan McKinnon]

On Saturday 10 May 2008, davecode@nospammail.net wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We plan to eval Gentoo.  We await 2008 final.  The comment is, Gentoo
> home page gives no clue about status.  Convincing people that Gentoo
> is "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
> motion on the home page.  That's about all most people inspect.

I think you misunderstand how Gentoo works.

First of all, there's no such thing as "the latest Gentoo version". What 
you do have is the current state of the portage tree and that is 
constantly changing.

All that "2008" is, is a workable snapshot of a basic system that you 
use to install Gentoo. The next thing you do is update the tree to the 
latest state, and update the system by recompiling everything that has 
changed since your CD image was built.

There's only one reason to wait for the 2008 CD, and that is if you have 
hardware that cannot boot from existing installers due to driver 
issues. So this is a bootstrap problem, not a latest version problem. 
For example, this very notebook I'm using now is 7 months old, and I 
used a 2005 installer CD to install - it just happened to be the only 
one I conveniently had handy at the time.

Gentoo is not Ubuntu, don't try to think of it in Ubuntu terms. Don't 
claim that "this confuses new users", because those new users are 
mistaken. Shoehorning Gentoo into something where the latest installer 
is of vital importance is never going to work and all attempts to do so 
will fail, in much the same way that awaiting "linux kernel 2.6 SP9" is 
also never going to work out

> So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
> test.

That's a false assumption. You or your users are looking at a blue sky 
and asking why it isn't green with pink dots because those colours are 
nice.

Doesn't work that way.

> Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new
> reported, maybe??  At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected
> final release date"?  Counting lines of code or something?
>
> Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present
> expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask.

OK, so this is what you'd like. Unfortunately you can't get it. What 
could be done though is a nice big clear link to an article that 
explains how Gentoo works and why OS versioning is not relevant.

Perhaps a chart laying out the latest stale and unstable versions of 
major packages, categorized by arch would suit your needs. 
Distrowatch's list of packages provided would be a good place to start.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Justin]

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Alan McKinnon schrieb:
> On Saturday 10 May 2008, davecode@nospammail.net wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> We plan to eval Gentoo.  We await 2008 final.  The comment is, Gentoo
>> home page gives no clue about status.  Convincing people that Gentoo
>> is "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
>> motion on the home page.  That's about all most people inspect.
>>     
>
> I think you misunderstand how Gentoo works.
>
> First of all, there's no such thing as "the latest Gentoo version". What 
> you do have is the current state of the portage tree and that is 
> constantly changing.
>
> All that "2008" is, is a workable snapshot of a basic system that you 
> use to install Gentoo. The next thing you do is update the tree to the 
> latest state, and update the system by recompiling everything that has 
> changed since your CD image was built.
>
> There's only one reason to wait for the 2008 CD, and that is if you have 
> hardware that cannot boot from existing installers due to driver 
> issues. So this is a bootstrap problem, not a latest version problem. 
> For example, this very notebook I'm using now is 7 months old, and I 
> used a 2005 installer CD to install - it just happened to be the only 
> one I conveniently had handy at the time.
>
> Gentoo is not Ubuntu, don't try to think of it in Ubuntu terms. Don't 
> claim that "this confuses new users", because those new users are 
> mistaken. Shoehorning Gentoo into something where the latest installer 
> is of vital importance is never going to work and all attempts to do so 
> will fail, in much the same way that awaiting "linux kernel 2.6 SP9" is 
> also never going to work out
>
>   
>> So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
>> test.
>>     
>
> That's a false assumption. You or your users are looking at a blue sky 
> and asking why it isn't green with pink dots because those colours are 
> nice.
>
> Doesn't work that way.
>
>   
>> Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new
>> reported, maybe??  At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected
>> final release date"?  Counting lines of code or something?
>>
>> Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present
>> expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask.
>>     
>
> OK, so this is what you'd like. Unfortunately you can't get it. What 
> could be done though is a nice big clear link to an article that 
> explains how Gentoo works and why OS versioning is not relevant.
>
> Perhaps a chart laying out the latest stale and unstable versions of 
> major packages, categorized by arch would suit your needs. 
> Distrowatch's list of packages provided would be a good place to start.
>
>
>   
That was what I meant to say! Thanks for this more epic explanation!


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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Florian Philipp]

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On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 16:19 -0700, davecode@nospammail.net wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We plan to eval Gentoo.  We await 2008 final.  The comment is, Gentoo
> home page gives no clue about status.  Convincing people that Gentoo is
> "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
> motion on the home page.  That's about all most people inspect.
> 
> So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
> test.
> 
> Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new
> reported, maybe??  At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected
> final release date"?  Counting lines of code or something?
> 
> Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present
> expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask.
> 
> Thanks.
> -- 
>   
>   davecode@nospammail.net
> 
> -- 
> http://www.fastmail.fm - Faster than the air-speed velocity of an
>                           unladen european swallow
> 

You might want to take a look at Gentoo's Bugzilla charts and
statistics:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/report.cgi

For a start, have a look at "Old Charts" link and create statistics for
new, resolved and fixed bugs. These numbers show clearly that Gentoo is
very alive.

The statistics here: http://www.gentoo-portage.com/Statistics
also show that the number of packages doesn't stagnate as it would on a
dying distro.
 

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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Mick]

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On Saturday 10 May 2008, Florian Philipp wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 16:19 -0700, davecode@nospammail.net wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > We plan to eval Gentoo.  We await 2008 final.  The comment is, Gentoo
> > home page gives no clue about status.  Convincing people that Gentoo is
> > "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
> > motion on the home page.  That's about all most people inspect.
> >
> > So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
> > test.

> For a start, have a look at "Old Charts" link and create statistics for
> new, resolved and fixed bugs. These numbers show clearly that Gentoo is
> very alive.
>
> The statistics here: http://www.gentoo-portage.com/Statistics
> also show that the number of packages doesn't stagnate as it would on a
> dying distro.

The OP has inadvertently given us some valuable feedback, which stands on its 
own and is irrelevant with the fact that he (like many other non-gentoo 
users) had mistaken Gentoo for yet-another-binary-distro.  Having a user 
friendly website that also caters to the needs of newcomers to the Gentoo 
scene, requires that the key features and benefits of Gentoo are easily 
visible/accessible.  Not many people will navigate to hidden Statistics pages 
to draw their own conclusions.  These could be users that one day prove 
valuable contributors.  I suggest that we spring clean the website and 
consider our new visitors needs at the same time (plus things like the much 
asked for Documentation search field?).  ;-)

Just my 2c's.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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[gentoo-user] Re: Home page slowness

[James]

Mick <michaelkintzios <at> gmail.com> writes:


> The OP has inadvertently given us some valuable feedback, which stands on its 
> own and is irrelevant with the fact that he (like many other non-gentoo 
> users) had mistaken Gentoo for yet-another-binary-distro.  Having a user 
> friendly website that also caters to the needs of newcomers to the Gentoo 
> scene, requires that the key features and benefits of Gentoo are easily 
> visible/accessible.  Not many people will navigate to hidden Statistics pages 
> to draw their own conclusions.  These could be users that one day prove 
> valuable contributors.  I suggest that we spring clean the website and 
> consider our new visitors needs at the same time (plus things like the much 
> asked for Documentation search field?).  

Some months ago, when we all argued about the necessity of having a "polished"
installation CD, many of the more technical folks alluded to the fact that
it's really not necessary, as there are a myriad of ways to install Gentoo.
We, who use it regularly, know that at any given point you do not need an
official installation CD to install Gentoo. Very true.


However, as a major Linux distro, I used the analogy of "Green teeth" as
our first impression. This (potentially) new user, and the corporation
where he works, was about to base their entire opinion of Gentoo, based on the
status of the installation CD. For all of those that blasted me, with technical
truths, I have now *A BIG FAT GRIN*!

The question we should all ask is, how often does this happen, and
we never know about it? Like it or not, the installation CD(s) are like
a first kiss, from a woman. We should make a good impression, as that
may be the only chance we get, to grow our membership, into the best
(meta) distro on the planet.

Vindication is very sweet.


Seeya,
James




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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 11 May 2008, Florian Philipp wrote:
> On Sat, 10 May 2008 16:43:41 +0100
>
> Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The OP has inadvertently given us some valuable feedback, which
> > stands on its own and is irrelevant with the fact that he (like
> > many other non-gentoo users) had mistaken Gentoo for
> > yet-another-binary-distro.  Having a user friendly website that
> > also caters to the needs of newcomers to the Gentoo scene, requires
> > that the key features and benefits of Gentoo are easily
> > visible/accessible.  Not many people will navigate to hidden
> > Statistics pages to draw their own conclusions.  These could be
> > users that one day prove valuable contributors.  I suggest that we
> > spring clean the website and consider our new visitors needs at the
> > same time (plus things like the much asked for Documentation search
> > field?).  ;-)
> >
> > Just my 2c's.
>
> Yep, gentoo.org really seems to have been created from devs and users
> for devs and users. There is nothing like a "Features" page or "Why
> to choose Gentoo" for newcomers. Heck, you have to search hard to
> even learn whether it is suitable for desktops or servers! Just
> compare ubuntu.com with gentoo.org, for example. The difference is
> striking.

Ah, but www.gentoo.org/doc actually does contain decent INFORMATION in a 
manner that I can find.

All I ever seem to get out of ubuntu.com (after the cute front page) is 
the equivalent of Ubuntu For Dummies or endless chitter-chatter on web 
forums almost exclusively populated by 14 year olds. Or people mentally 
equivalent to 14 year olds.

gentoo is a lot like Ferraris, Buells and Crays - virtually nobody, but 
nobody, gets involved with them without being quite knowledgeable about 
the subject as a whole and having a very good idea of what they are all 
about.

Let's put it another way. Person X from company Y is evaluating distros 
and is put off by www.gentoo.org's front page. Right. Now, what kind of 
user is person X do you think? Someone who will be able to use Gentoo 
to it's full potential right away? No, I don't think so. If you need to 
read the front page to find out the basics of what it is, then you 
shouldn't be anywhere near Gentoo as a corporate. You'd be much better 
off looking into the well-known binary distros.

I'm not spouting steam out my nose here. My day job is looking after 20 
gentoo servers out in the wild at customer's premises. My personal 
machines have been exclusively gentoo for over 3 years now. I'm 
migrating the customer's machines over to Ubuntu server LTS one by one 
as the hardware gets upgraded. Why? Why does someone, who is well known 
in my city for being the biggest Gentoo fan around, do that?

Because I cannot deal with the learning curve of my juniors anymore. I 
don't want to have to still make every USE related decision on every 
machine even though a junior is sitting right there logged in. It makes 
complete sense for $ARB_UBUNTU_DEV to make those decisions instead.

So let's tidy up gentoo.org by all means and make it a bit more obvious 
how this awesome thing called portage works. But lets not be deceived 
into thinking the distro itself is a mass-market distro because it 
isn't. It's more like a magnificent hand-made piece of fine Italian 
machinery. And I like it that way.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Florian Philipp]

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On Sat, 10 May 2008 16:43:41 +0100
Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The OP has inadvertently given us some valuable feedback, which
> stands on its own and is irrelevant with the fact that he (like many
> other non-gentoo users) had mistaken Gentoo for
> yet-another-binary-distro.  Having a user friendly website that also
> caters to the needs of newcomers to the Gentoo scene, requires that
> the key features and benefits of Gentoo are easily
> visible/accessible.  Not many people will navigate to hidden
> Statistics pages to draw their own conclusions.  These could be users
> that one day prove valuable contributors.  I suggest that we spring
> clean the website and consider our new visitors needs at the same
> time (plus things like the much asked for Documentation search
> field?).  ;-)
> 
> Just my 2c's.

Yep, gentoo.org really seems to have been created from devs and users
for devs and users. There is nothing like a "Features" page or "Why to
choose Gentoo" for newcomers. Heck, you have to search hard to even
learn whether it is suitable for desktops or servers! Just compare
ubuntu.com with gentoo.org, for example. The difference is striking.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Mick]

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On Saturday 10 May 2008, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> Ah, but www.gentoo.org/doc actually does contain decent INFORMATION in a
> manner that I can find.

Right, but I can think of better ways to search through it by category, by 
keyword, by arch, by whatever, than just use Google.

> All I ever seem to get out of ubuntu.com (after the cute front page) is
> the equivalent of Ubuntu For Dummies or endless chitter-chatter on web
> forums almost exclusively populated by 14 year olds. Or people mentally
> equivalent to 14 year olds.

I haven't visited Ubuntu for more than a year and a half now and back then it 
seemed to me that it was comparatively easier to find what I was after.

> gentoo is a lot like Ferraris, Buells and Crays - virtually nobody, but
> nobody, gets involved with them without being quite knowledgeable about
> the subject as a whole and having a very good idea of what they are all
> about.

Sure, but there will be the few select who will decide to cut their teeth into 
Linux with Gentoo.  I will always warn them and then welcome them.

> Let's put it another way. Person X from company Y is evaluating distros
> and is put off by www.gentoo.org's front page. Right. Now, what kind of
> user is person X do you think? Someone who will be able to use Gentoo
> to it's full potential right away? No, I don't think so. If you need to
> read the front page to find out the basics of what it is, then you
> shouldn't be anywhere near Gentoo as a corporate. You'd be much better
> off looking into the well-known binary distros.

I can't but agree.  Gentoo is a labour of love, not a 15 minute install script 
for a busy sysadmin who's used to binary distros.

> I'm not spouting steam out my nose here. My day job is looking after 20
> gentoo servers out in the wild at customer's premises. My personal
> machines have been exclusively gentoo for over 3 years now. I'm
> migrating the customer's machines over to Ubuntu server LTS one by one
> as the hardware gets upgraded. Why? Why does someone, who is well known
> in my city for being the biggest Gentoo fan around, do that?
>
> Because I cannot deal with the learning curve of my juniors anymore. I
> don't want to have to still make every USE related decision on every
> machine even though a junior is sitting right there logged in. It makes
> complete sense for $ARB_UBUNTU_DEV to make those decisions instead.

The last server I installed for a customer was an OpenSuse . . . I haven't had 
a single call in the last 8 months (other than to thank me for a nice 
server!)

> So let's tidy up gentoo.org by all means and make it a bit more obvious
> how this awesome thing called portage works. But lets not be deceived
> into thinking the distro itself is a mass-market distro because it
> isn't. It's more like a magnificent hand-made piece of fine Italian
> machinery. And I like it that way.

Absolutely, so do I.  On the other hand, I am inclined to give every help and 
opportunity to a willing Gentoo starter.  I am not for a minute suggesting 
that Gentoo is a broad appeal Linux system.  All I am saying is let's make a 
small effort to present it in a more user friendly way - we're not gaining 
anything by unnecessarily alienating potential Gentoo advocates.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Albert Hopkins]

On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 00:00 +0200, Florian Philipp wrote:
> Yep, gentoo.org really seems to have been created from devs and users
> for devs and users. There is nothing like a "Features" page or "Why to
> choose Gentoo" for newcomers. Heck, you have to search hard to even
> learn whether it is suitable for desktops or servers! Just compare
> ubuntu.com with gentoo.org, for example. The difference is striking.

I think you hit the nail with that one.  The difference between
ubuntu.*com* and gentoo.*org* is just that.  Whereas Ubuntu, or rather
Canonical, is a for-profit company that actually has a commercial
objective, a big budget, full-time paid developers, professional support
services, many times more resources and staff who actually have degrees
in marketing it should come as no surprise that ubuntu.com looks the way
it does.  As much as Canonical wants you to believe that Ubuntu is a
community, Ubuntu is in fact a brand and they work very hard and no
doubt spend a lot of money promoting that brand.

OTOH, Gentoo is a group of volunteers.  Is it even a non-profit
organization anymore?  No, or hardly no, budget.  No market research,
access to professional art or artists, public relations staff, etc. etc.

A more fair comparison, would be that of Debian.  Now if you compare the
front page of gentoo.org with debian.org they are not that dissimilar.
Similarly Debian is regularly being criticized for late release and,
just as Gentoo, every once in a while someone will post a blog or start
a thread about how Debian is "dead" or "dying".

Big deal.  Let's face it: the all (mostly) volunteer-based distros are
never going to have the flash or press coverage as your Ubuntu or your
Fedoras. And it can be argued that they're not going to be as popular.
But I would hope that their main goals is not to win popularity
contests.  I would agree that concerning Gentoo's home page are may be
areas of improvement, but to compare it to Ubuntu.com is not exactly
balanced.

-a

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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Crayon Shin Chan]

On Sunday 11 May 2008, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> It's more like a magnificent hand-made piece of fine Italian
> machinery. 

All Italian machinery I've had the misfortune to be acquainted with (from 
cars to washing machines) have turned out to be rust buckets (literally). 
Italians should stick to making spaghetti :)

-- 
Crayon
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Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 11 May 2008, Crayon Shin Chan wrote:
> On Sunday 11 May 2008, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > It's more like a magnificent hand-made piece of fine Italian
> > machinery.
>
> All Italian machinery I've had the misfortune to be acquainted with
> (from cars to washing machines) have turned out to be rust buckets
> (literally). Italians should stick to making spaghetti :)

Then Ducati would have to go away. That would be a bad bad bad thing :-)

The only reason I don;t ride a Ducati is because I ride something else 
than needs even more pampering.

And I use Gentoo for the same reason!



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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