Agree with you, but... (there's always a but :o) )
First of all, maybe I should mind my own business instead of talking about how things could be better or putting pressure on some developers that do things for free, so please take this as just an oppinion and kind chatting, as I don't intend at all to criticize your work (what the [EMAIL PROTECTED], I think you are doing a great work)
So back to the point, I think all of this you have talked about could be solved in the following way:
* About the optimization flags, don't give the "idiot" users the
chance to change sensitive compile flags. Maybe they could only
change the processor they are compiling for with --march-XXXX and
nothing else, I don't know. Or even detect the processor (I think
this can be done easily) and automatically compile for it without
any further optimization. Ok, they won't have a fully optimized
system, but at least they will have a system optimized for their
processors, and this is more than they will ever have with another
distros. This way the number of bugs caused by agressive
optimization flags could be drastically reduced for "idiot" users.
* About the bug reporting, maybe it could be created some automated
reporting tool. Gnome has one, I don't know if works well, but
it's an idea.By the way, I have curiosity about this... do you all the developers work for free in Gentoo?. Again, I should mind my own business, but I think you have a great product here, and you could start promoting it and selling it to companies, basing the marketing in the improved performance obtained in Gentoo. Gentoo still could be free, but you could make some good money for selling services associated with Gentoo. Have you ever thought about that?
Regards Jose
Spider wrote:
begin quote On Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:17:36 +0200 Jose Gonzalez Gomez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Okay, I'll take the bait... here
Several people in this thread seem to associate graphical
installers with precompiled packages, why?
<<<SNIP>>>
And don't forget that I love Gentoo the way it is right now, just
I think that a graphical installer would be a great thing for Gentoo to gain mass adoption, that's all.
Regards
Jose
Okay, I might keep a fairly low profile theese days, several reasons,
most private, but I have to come in with a point here.
please, dont take this as an official "Gentoo" opinion, its not
discussed in the devteam, its not politically correct and its
inflammatory and prejudiced and put some good people in a fairly bad
light.
One thing that scares me with the ease-of-install and simplicity, the lowering of the threshold for users to install Gentoo, is this.
Bugs.
Most of you folks are horrid at bugreporting. "this doesnt work here" is very common, the disrespectance between "Gentoo" bug and "User" bug is very much odd. People go ages and call a problem "obvious" without
filing a bug. people who claim their bugs are blocking the distribution
completely.
People file bugs without rebuilding with lower optimizations, common
issue, still is : Oh YES! Gentoo, I can use CFLAGS="-ffast-math
-force-dropping-coredumps -O99-march=athlon-xp -msse2 -mmmx -m3dnow
-megafast -DBREAKTHINGS" so of course its your problem that you haven't
documented that -megafast would break!
Yes, all this could be fixed by hiring folks or getting more users... Or perhaps writing off all such bugs as WONTFIX: USERERROR, but it isn't nice, polite or pleasant thing to do. We try not to, as most of us (if not everyone) want to keep a friendly attitude.
Even worse, people who dont file bugs and then claim "its broken" . Yeyy, how are we to know? No, I dont use all the same packages in the
same ways as the users do. Sorry, no can do.
Of course, we could get more devs to fix "stupid user bugs" but that doesn't feel like the right way. unfortunately :/
Another problem with lowering the bar, is that the current installation indoctrinates people on "Read the wellwritten manual carefully before you continue" .. Graphical /userfriendly installers dont give the same breaktrhough.. Thats why they exists, so users dont have to read manuals. (Joel on Software had this down good, "users dont read manuals. In fact, assume users can't read." )
Making the bugreporting harder to get to is another solution. Yey, make it even more difficult to file a bugreport? unfortunately that is rather unpleasant thing to do when you want to file bugs. :-/
How do other distributions come through with this? Debian devs are for
all that I've noticed distanced and hard to reach with support and bugs,
and a lot of them have the reputation of being flamemongers that do
nothing but bicker. *cough*
Slackware, I'm not sure, I haven't tried to get support there so I dont know. Somone involved might be able to help there?
BSD: see Slackware.
Mandrake + Redhat + SuSE .. : Sell the support. Hire folks. all very viable when you have an IPO and sell a product. Not that good for a "true" opensource project with only community support.
Well, Thats my inflamatory rant on the subject of why I fear a userfriendly installer that helps the less advanced users on their path into the project.
//Spider
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