Re: [gentoo-user] Things that can be improved

["Daniel da Veiga" <danieldaveiga@gmail.com>]

On 7/7/06, Rafael Fernández López <info@maestroprogramador.com> wrote:
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> Hi,
>
>         This is not flame war. I love Gentoo, and it is the distribution that
> fits me perfectly, but I've been wondering this last year what things
> can be improved in this wonderful distro.
>
>         The first thing that I'd change is "etc-update" or "dispatch-conf". I'd
> suggest to create some kind of tool like "dpkg-reconfigure" in Debian.
> More intuitive than reading /etc files and writing them by hand that is
> more probably to be mistaken when writing.

This has been already discussed in the list, and a good discussion
too. There are tools that do the job better/faster for someone's
opinnion (not mine, I still like etc-update). You can choose that
tools, I don't know Debian, but I doubt a combination of all tools
mentioned at that thread would not come close to what you want.

>
>         Second thing that I'd improve is a security one. I know that "emerge"
> is a very cared package, but it is a script. Suppose that someone
> commits portage with a emerge failure in its code (he forgot a comma
> !!)... if someone updates portage won't be able to update it again
> because it will fail ever and ever again... So I suggest to have a
> backuped emerge script that we are sure that worked (like the last
> emerge tool that was used), and if the new emerge tool is mistaken (so
> that user doesn't need to know python) only has to run "regenemerge" for
> example, and will have the latest emerge working tool.
>

There are SO MANY ways to recover portage. A snapshot, a binary
package. If you run stable, its almost impossible, to say the least,
that you're gonna get a trivial error in emerge that prevents it from
running, if you run testing, still, gentoo devs are responsable people
and would not do something like that. If we count with that kind of
error, your "regenemerge" command would have to redownload and compile
python, portagem, pycrypt, gcc, glibc and a lot of other packages that
emerge depends on. You can always "quickpkg portage" once in a while,
but any portage snapshot untared at / would recover most of portage
for you.

No flames intended, I just say there are ways to do all this
already... But you still can post a feature request anytime.

-- 
Daniel da Veiga
Computer Operator - RS - Brazil
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