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

["Richard Fish" <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

On 7/7/06, Rafael Fernández López <info@maestroprogramador.com> wrote:
>         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.

I don't know anything about dpkg-reconfigure, so I can't really comment on this.

But one thing I really do like about gentoo is that I *can* go modify
configuration files directly, without worrying about some distribution
tool clobbering my changes, or choking on something it wasn't setup to
deal with.  This is one of the things that drove me from SuSE.  I
would really object to some kind of "configuration file configurator"
app.

>         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

I think this is a non-issue.  Something like this would be found
incredibly quickly by the portage devs working in their overlay, and
they would know how to fix it.  In the worst of all possible cases, it
might theoretically make it to the ~arch users, who again, presumably
have enough experience to know how to resurrect their systems without
resorting to a live CD and re-install.

It is far more likely that you could break python (and thus portage)
from a mishandled gcc or glibc update.  But there is already a
recovery option available in this case; if you have buildpkg in your
FEATURES, you will already have a backup copy of
portage/python/gcc/glibc/everything else in $PKGDIR.  Even if portage
is broken, you can extract those tarballs to get back to a working
configuration.  Of course, this assumes that tar and bzip2
work...otherwise you are down to booting from a live CD.


One area I do think could be improved is in the update process.
Currently we have etc-update, revdep-rebuild, fix_libtool_files.sh,
eselect {opengl,gcc,binutils}, python-updater, perl-cleaner, and so
on.  Each update requires running one or more of these.  But which
ones, when, why, and in what order?  I *think* _I_ know the answers to
those questions, but I would bet most users do not.  So I think a
little more automation (or at least hand-holding) in portage to deal
with the above would be very useful.  Something like:

emerge -DNuv world
<several hours later>
Updates done.

Hmm, looks like a new version of python was installed.  You should run
python-updater to make sure all python modules are rebuilt.  Do you
want to do that now?

-Richard

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