Gentoo in Crisis, Robbins Offers Solution 259
mrbadbar writes "Gentoo Linux founder Daniel Robbins says Gentoo's leadership is in crisis. 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.' Robbins offers a solution: his return as President of the Gentoo Foundation. According to Robbins: 'If I return as President, I will preserve the not-for-profit aspect of Gentoo. Beyond this, you can expect everything to be very, very different than how things are today.'"
gentoo (Score:2, Informative)
Because this worked so well last time (Score:1, Informative)
So far it's looking good for him (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Trouble (Score:2, Informative)
6. You are forced to update VERY frequently. More than a month and you are CERTAIN to get issues while compiling.
7. Actually getting a usable desktop (with udev, automounting etc.) working is a hell of a lot of work
Re:What is the crisis? (Score:2, Informative)
The basic information is apparently on a mailing list, which I don't feel like reading.
Re:What is the crisis? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Trouble (Score:5, Informative)
Re:good! (Score:5, Informative)
The thing about gentoo is that it gives you super-fine grained control over your packages. You want ldap support? want to not support jpeg, but to support png? do you want the package installed, but omit all the X11 bullshit? Or how about keeping a specific version of a package from upgrading when you upgrade your system? That's the power of gentoo's package management system.
Gentoo also offers insight into the innerworkings of the linux OS. You get to build your own kernel and pick EXACTLY what gets installed.
Since Gentoo is frequently on the bleeding edge, it's great for testing out new versions of applications. One of the downsides of CentOS that I've encountered was the fact that subversion isn't quite up to date, and it took several months before vim7 was in the yum repository. Of course, you could add new repositories to yum, or download an RPM specificly of what you want, but that sometimes involves waiting for someone to make the RPM or finding the repository that has what you need.
Another downside of Gentoo, especially in a production environment, is that since it's bleeding edge, many things in the system are changing and usually with a frequency that defies belief. I've been running Gentoo on my own two personal servers (hosting my websites and mysql and DNS and stuff) for nearly 5 years. The sheer number of times that I've booted the machine after doing an 'emerge -u world' and gotten "this configuration file's syntax is depricated, please use this new syntax instead" messages has been infuriating. Routine upgrades aren't routine. You can spend hours picking through config files and manually inspecting the diffs between versions. You don't want Gentoo on your server unless you enjoy spending a day doing an upgrade.
Gentoo is ideal for embedded projects and systems that aren't going to change. The OS lends itself well to projects such as DVRs and controller OSs for robotics. It's small and runs on a lot of different hardwares.
I'm always amazed at how much hate people have for gentoo because you have to build it yourself, but you don't hear people getting mad about the
Gentoo is an exercise in academia. For a user new to Linux who wants to get a feel for the ins and outs and get used to the commandline really fast, gentoo is for them.
Re:What is the crisis? (Score:5, Informative)
The same blog can.
"I am still upset that the Foundation has not been run properly over the last three years, and that many trustees apparently decided to take extended vacations from the project shortly after becoming a trustee, leaving the work to be done by very few - and often a single individual, which defeats the whole purpose of having multiple trustees to do the work rather than a single leader. I am also, like many of you, not happy at all with the way Gentoo has been going from a development and community perspective."
You might also infer what was wrong by looking at what would be different.
CC.
Re:good! (Score:2, Informative)
The best thing is that it's right on your computer, just a couple of commands away:
Remember to modify the debian/DEBIAN/control file to look like it makes sense, pretty much like this
While it's not like downloading a
Oh and yes, you could just untar firefox in
Re:good! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry, but that is total crap. I have been using Gentoo on production servers which I *do* keep current using stable (not bleeding-edge) packages. This is a large shop with many servers. I have never looked back since switching to Gentoo. Everyone who moans about emerges failing and having to run revdep-rebuild often must be doing something wrong. I've had to run revdep-rebuild once when I upgraded libexpat. So what? It took like 2 minutes.
Don't make sweeping statements if you don't know what you are doing. I run Gentoo on my servers and I run Gentoo on my personal desktop and and laptop and have *NO* problems with it. The next time you feel like bashing it, try it first and this time RTFM. Sheesh....
Re:What is the crisis? (Score:5, Informative)
There's at least one response on Planet Gentoo [gentoo.org] so far. Maybe it [tsunam.org] will help.
Re:good! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Should we care? (Score:4, Informative)
Also, Gentoo is the best-documented distro out there with Gentoo HOWTOs often containing very useful information even for non-Gentoo users. It's pretty much irrelevant what you intend to do on your Linux box, a google for [subject matter] gentoo will usually give yu a detailed description of what you need to do.
Gentoo is much more than the ricer distro many people see in it.
Re:good! (Score:4, Informative)
Gentoo is great to experiment with, and provided you can keep the system bang up to date (and live with occasional breakage), fine. But many of us aren't prepared to make that sacrifice.
On the plus side, maybe as a result of this, it's produced a very helpful community. Much more so than many other distributions.
Re:good! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The state of Packagage Managers (Score:3, Informative)
Other posters have mentioned some possible ways of building from source. For me, at least if the source package is from Debian official, it's a matter of `apt-get source PACKAGE`, then `cd DIR; fakeroot debian/build binary`. If you have the prerequisite development packages install the package should build cleanly and you'll have the newly compiled binary packages ready for installation.
[By the way..... claiming that building debs from source is "harder" because you "don't know how to build Debs" is not terribly convincing...]
Re:The state of Packagage Managers (Score:2, Informative)
7.13 How do I install a source package?
Debian source packages can't actually be "installed", they are just unpacked in whatever directory you want to build the binary packages they produce.
Source packages are distributed on most of the same mirrors where you can obtain the binary packages. If you set up your APT's sources.list(5) to include the appropriate "deb-src" lines, you'll be able to easily download any source packages by running
apt-get source foo
To help you in actually building the source package, Debian source package provide the so-called build-dependencies mechanism. This means that the source package maintainer keeps a list of other packages that are required to build their package. To see how this is useful, run
apt-get build-dep foo
before building the source.
If you want just to compile the package, you may cd into foo-version directory and issue the command
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
to build the package (note that this also requires the fakeroot package), and then
dpkg -i
to install the newly-built package(s).
Re:good! (Score:3, Informative)
I've tried doing that in the past but have wound up with errors. I believe it's because my servers are both PPC and it seems that features appear and disappear and get renamed between versions, at least between gaps of 5+ versions. Going from 2.6.12 to the latest will not work at all. there are an enormous amount of new features that require enabling.
Re:Trouble (Score:3, Informative)
Of course not. That doesn't mean that anything you take our your a** is an issue.
"VNCServer doesn't depend on any font packages"
Of course not, since it doesn't really need any local font package installed. What else would you expect?
"despite not being able to start without them, with the official explanation being that the user could be running a font server somewhere in their network."
Isn't it a valid explanation? Wouldn't vncserver start using a network font server? And then, you see, both vncserver and vnc4server do *recomend* the installation of xfonts-base, just look at it.
Any modern OS is a complex thing and if you want to administer one of then, you'd better expend some time learning its ins and outs. That being said the "ins and outs" of Debian regarding systems administration are probably the very best out there.