Wiktor Wandachowicz wrote:
Simon Stelling wrote:
Edgar Hucek wrote:
I know my tools but not necessarly the normal user who wanna use gentoo
and is ending frustrated.
If the users are too lazy to read the documentation, why should we care
about them?
Because we risk that Gentoo may receive the "user-UN-friendly" label and
become irrelevant in the long run? I know it ain't gonna happen, but still.
Both Edgar and you have some valid points. He refers mostly to the out-of-box
experience, which includes compiling GNOME and its dependencies at the install
time. With USE="accessibility" enabled, which makes perfect sense for people
with disabilities. And then the first-ever Gentoo installation breaks on the
speech-tools and festival.
How would *you* feel in such case?
You OTOH bring to the table a fact that developers shouldn't be that much
concerned with the stabilization/testing of packages before new release of
installation media. But new releases *ARE* targeted specifically at new users
and it's them who suffer the most. Next to it is the reputation of Gentoo and
its developers. Edgar's call was targeted mostly at releng and QA teams, who
should poke developers to decrease number of similar problems.
I maintain a bunch of Debian/sparc, Debian/i386, Gentoo/amd64, Gentoo/x86,
Solaris/sparc, Ubuntu/i686 boxes and mind you, out-of-box experience at
install time means A LOT.
More respect to the users => more respect to Gentoo.
Let's see...
Several points (misunderstandings) need to be clarified.
1) Gentoo is not intended to be an out-of-the-box distro, but instead, a
customizable distro. Can see the difference?.. There are many, one of
them is that users should 'make' the process of using Gentoo _friendly_
partially by themselves through reading documentation and tutorial when
needed (and sometimes going through a list of bugs to know what it is
going on).
2) Gentoo releases are "very".touppercase different to most of the other
distros. Gentoo releases are mainly intended to be used as a tool to get
you started building your _own_ system in an automatic way through
scripts/metadata, this being very different to other distros, where they
simply force you to use version 6.6.6 as a bunch of dead packages that
won't likely suffer any major changes within the next 6 months until
upgrading (which can be a very painful process) to the next 6.6.7 release.
This is precisely why i say Gentoo is an incremental meta-distro.
3) Considering the two points above, i therefore think , there is no
point (and actually makes no sense) to bitch at our releng team (which
did a great job) because two packages don't currently compile.
4) Gentoo is more a community than anything else. So we indeed all
deserve respect. Some developers put into this project (the releng team
being one of them) a lot of effort, so making comments like this thread
might be very insulting for many people; apart of making false claims
that could lead to a bunch of misconceptions. Now who is being
disrespectful?
If neither of those points are convincing enough, then remember free
software comes with *NO-WARRANTY*
Thanks,
My 0.2bs
--
Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
