Is Gentoo in crisis? 199
TheCoop1984 writes "A recent article on distrowatch, and an extended thread on the gentoo forums, have pointed out that gentoo is not what it used to be. Daniel Robbins came back and went again after only a few days, developer turnover is as high as ever, personal attacks on the mailing lists are common, and people are generally not happy about the current state of affairs. Is gentoo rotting from the inside, and can anything be done about it?"
Teenagers (Score:2, Funny)
No (Score:2)
flameeyes / Diego (Score:3, Interesting)
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Considering both posts together I think this is sign of healthy community.
I personally would vote for the people who have remained with Gentoo: I believe that you can make something better only from inside. External critique is also very important - but it is rarely constructive. And to be really constructive you have to be in loop - you have to be part of it. (But of course that make sense if the loop isn't broken already.)
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No way! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope gentoo doesn't pass away as it's a clever idea and a good system but really who was it appealing to? Even as a geek is wasn't really interested in compiling my own packages because there is so little to be gained by it. Probably the best solution is to have a system where you can compile your own easily when you want to but generally take the precompiled offering - basically what Debian does. The performance that Gentoo claimed never really appeared AFAIK and I think that would be the only reason for the system.
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not that all the compiling and tweaking is necessarily a bad thing. Many people like to fiddle with computers in that was as a hobby. They don't see it as a distraction from more useful endeavors, rather, they see it as something interesting to do.
I actually see this more with Windows users than Linux users, though. Somehow some guys get interested in speeding up their computers or protecting it from slowdowns via thi
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Which inevitably leads to the method most Windows users resort to when their computer seems irrevocably mangled -- Format&Install.
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As for Linux, I used to tweak around quite a bit wi
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right, but Gentoo makes it easy. It has the best package management system ever done -even better than apt-get IMHO and surely at least on par with it.
Having the easiness of a great package manager with included ability to fine tune your packages is the strength of Gentoo.
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Interesting)
I second that. Very easy. I was never able to master the art of creating
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Although I understand what you are thinking here, a lot of the time it's not practical... Mostly because of the way that the package manager handles dependencies. For example, do not install X.org from your repository. Install it from source, then try to install a program [say, via RPM]
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The program will hiccup and complain that X is not installed
This is not because of how the package manager handles dependencies, but because you don't know how to correctly install from source on a system with a package manager. Of course you have to tell the package manager in so
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When I could:
Or even:
The point I am trying to make is that you shouldn't have to bend over for a half-baked package management system. Sure, I know sometimes it's handy, which is why I used SuSE for over 3 years. But I just got tired of having to build my own packages, then install them over the old RPMs... It's a pain in the ass, I'd rather just install i
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Oh ok then, That's something different
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Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Insightful)
Back to the appeal question, our lab will soon be deploying Gentoo on a PXE booted HPC cluster with over 256 cores, and this is on the low end of the scale where Gentoo clusters come in (I know of people responsible for its deployment on 512+ node, 2K-core clusters). I won't even begin to list other places where Gentoo comes in as a first choice because of its flexibility.
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--S (running 800+ gentoo hosts in production
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http://horizon.ath.cx/gentoo/ [horizon.ath.cx]
Text search for "Micro-howto: Creating master and slave nodes for clustering". Everything up to the double newline is relevant.
Any particular problem you've run into?
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I always looked at most compiling (save the Kernel and maybe the base of X) as an irritation--the cost of using the distro. Even with the compile time, it was STILL worth it.
It would seem that I got in just at the beginning of Gentoo's "golden age", and left just before it ended. I switched to Ubuntu, which is lean and well-designed while having EXACTLY the bells and whistles that I want (if
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i686 would be nice. Compare it to i386 though, which strangely enough is what most x86 distro's are still compiled for these days. Does anyone still have a working 386?
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Re: Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:2)
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Other people have already pointed most of that out, but the whole point of gentoo/portage is the USE variables, that let you quickly select what your system is going to be built for.
Want it as a multimedia box? easy, just add all the multimedia-relevant use flags into your make.conf, then start emerge mplayer or
Linux distro I learned on (Score:2)
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And I too really liked the old educational experience.. I learned *A LOT* and am much more efficient at problem solving my system because of
Nope, debian ain't the answer (Score:2)
The simplest difference between gentoo and binary distros is NOT that you compile your own. That is just a side effect. What is far more important is that you have the CODE, or rather more importantly, the HEADERS!
If you EVER tried to compile a package yourselve on a binary distro you will have found that you first have to download a ton of headers, wich are often out of date, or you are using some weird binary.
Simply put, if I want to compile a package on gentoo on my own I can do so by JUST compiling th
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My God I hate doing etc-updates. That's still my only major complaint with Gentoo.
Gentoo is dying (Score:2)
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DEsktop Linux has grown up. (Score:2)
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But if you happen to pick some junk PC/Sparc/Apple and would want to put it to better use, you soon would find that only flexibility of Gentoo allows you to make something real out of the junk. Or if you are developer you get instantly all the environment for you ready: with capability to automatically test little but disruptive changes on wide range of applications. It is irreplaceable.
Of course, for end user on new powerful computer it
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I bailed on Gentoo years ago due to problems with the distribution. Examples: Bind 9 was masked in portage for a year and a half after it's release due to a conflict with another package...which was trivially fixable, but no one would accept the patch; bugs in the builds for my arch were ignored since it was a
"near perfect" documentation? (Score:2)
I can't find it now, and I suspect the bug report is gone.
Basically, their installation instructions -- or some similar documentation -- mentioned Reiser4 and warned that it was unstable, beta stuff, or something like that. I pointed out that it may be unstable (and they could say that), but it was obviously, factually wrong to claim it was beta, as the code has b
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I have to agree. I sometimes refurbish older computers for children to use. I've found that Gentoo is about the only current operating system that works well. The oldest system I've used is a 233MHz PII with 32MB of ram. It made a nice game computer for a 3-year old. Gcompris, Childsplay, and Tuxpaint all run great
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No need: http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repository.php [sos-sts.com]
Only using it for three reasons: (Score:2)
Reason #2 is g-cpan, and things like it. Ubuntu has to manually go and re-package CPAN libs, Gentoo can automagically generate them for things which don't require special care. In general, Gentoo's philosophy of a package being an
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I second that.
I ran Gentoo for 3 years. Switched to Kubuntu last year and haven't looked back. I was just tired of it breaking all the time, simple as that.
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When Daniel was around, Gentoo also only had about 80 developers and less than 30,000 files in the tree. The package count was less than 1/4 what it is now. The bugs were still less than 25,000. There were horrible cliques within the distribution... tons of infighting. Daniel stopped doing Gentoo development long before he actually left the distribution. People seem to have this starry-eyed memory of when Daniel was around. Trust me, It wasn't a cake walk by any stretch
the last gentoo council meeting (Score:2)
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs
full log
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs
for me, gentoo is still more healthy than any other platform ever
What's the big idea? (Score:3, Interesting)
The big idea doesn't have to be a valid one -- although it helps. What it has to do is attract and retain contributors. It has to keep them working together despite their differences. Differences between people who are working toward the same goal can be a good thing, if their commitment is strong enough that they eventually try to to see the other side. If not, then they end up standing in the way of progress until they decide to leave.
Each successful distro has a big idea.
Fedora: bring the most up to date technology to Linux, both for users and others who want to make specialized distros.
Debian: create the freest possible operating system.
Ubuntu: promote a free operating system like Debian, but with more frequent releases so that users have the benefits of newer technology.
Slack: place the highest value on design simplicity; assume the user knows what he is doing and stay out of his way.
CENTOS: provide a completely free operating system that will also allow any user to run enterprise software (e.g. Oracle) without paying any unnecessary license fees.
Knoppix: make it possible for everybody to try a free operating system without the hassles or issues of a hard disk installation.
and so forth. Each of these ideas not only has merit, it has contributor appeal.
The big idea of Gentoo is to create a distribution in which components are distributed in source code form only, and compiled by the user. The idea has both its merits and problems. But the real question is whether it has enough appeal to motivate people to overcome their normal differences. Time will tell, but I have my doubts.
For one thing, the Gentoo goal is achievable and has been achieved. In many other distros, the big idea is like the horizon; it keeps receding as you move towards it.
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I've been a Gentoo user for about 4 years and that's never been the goal, that's the means through which it achieves its goal.
Gentoo is a system designed to allow a user to easily put together their own personalised system aimed at doing whatever they like on whatever they like (hence the big pile of supported architectures). It's about providing as much choice as possibl
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able to compile all your packages from source and combine your system however you
want and do it all from source really shines.
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Gentoo supports binary packages in Portage. The core purpose of Gentoo was to allow a user a means to have exactly the system they want. The most important and powerful facet of Gentoo are USE tags.
No other distro provides the level of customization that Gentoo does.
Honestly, in a perfect world, I'd like to see every major distro tie into Portage, which is the best repository system out there. Most distros look down their nose at Gentoo for being silly, unprofessional, and a "ricer" distr
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The system is not restricted to source-only distribution. There are binaries in the tree, and many more would be welcome, but the demand for binaries just isn't all that grea
Gentoo definitely is in crisis. (Score:5, Interesting)
Gentoo was and somewhat is great, but there hardly is a world update anymore, which goes smoothly. Sometimes things even break silently, so you cannot even be sure when something broke. Constantly the need to learn new configuration syntaxes because the old configuration stops working after an update is very tiring. Uprade/downgrade ping-pong also stops being funny quickly. I could complain because of seemingly egomaniacal decisions of the maintainers to remove widely used packages like xmms, but this would not be fair. If they have not enough manpower to maintain those packages, better remove them, but it still stings to be forced to search for alternatives.
I would not say there is no quality control in the Gentoo development, if I find 10 bugs, there might have been 100 others, which had been caught before release, but it simply isn't enough. I think it is fair to say that the Gentoo project has outgrown the current staff. They simply cannot handle it adequately anymore.
If anyone from the Gentoo staff should read this lines: It really isn't meant as an insult. You did great, but reached a point where your current methods are not sufficient anymore.
Re:Gentoo definitely is in crisis. (Score:5, Interesting)
The first thing to do is to stop emerging world. Emerge things when you know you want them, otherwise just run glsa-check (really "glsa-check|grep '\[N\]'") to scan for vulnerabilities. And if you do upgrade a big package, run revdep-rebuild.
Gentoo is not well-suited for the beginner desktop user or beginner corporate sysadmin. Its features do impart the drawbacks you describe: the config syntax changes would only be encountered by someone upgrading to the next release of a traditonal distro, where they are expected. In general, traditional distros don't have to deal with nearly the same amount of QA testing that Gentoo does. So really, regular desktop users are better off with ubuntu and friends, junior sysadmins are better off with RHEL and friends. It's when you need the flexibility Gentoo can provide that you want to use it.
I don't personally care for the XMMS issue, but since XMMS needed GTK1 and had vulnerabilities that needed fixing because its upstream dev team disbanded, it's really predicated on those two issues (you do realize that it's irresponsible for a dev to keep a package with known vulnerabilities in the tree, right?). You can still install it from an overlay, you can install a modern XMMS clone, and as far as I'm concerned, any package that doesn't support utf8 should get off the face of the earth ASAP.
Gentoo does need new QA tools to deal with the combinatorial explosion of package versioning and configuration possibilities. That, and a bit more immunity to drama on part of the devs (e.g. the ability to tell ciaranm to fuck off), is necessary for Gentoo not to stagnate.
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I would give exactly the opposite advice (Do as many small world updates as possible instead of waiting until updating something you want turns into a whole-ball-of-wax nightmare!) but either way, there's something obviously wrong when the package manager needs to be
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I really don't think this is a good advice. Superficially it sounds good, but Gentoo isn't stable enough for such a procedure. As I said, I once installed Gentoo for friends. Unfortunately one of my friends lives quite a distance from me and I have no remote access.
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Please read my statement carefully. I wrote: seemingly egomaniacal decisions. Yes, I know that this decision caused some bad blood in the Gentoo forum. And I do think complaining about this is unfair. However, even if I do understand, I don't have to like it. It just forces me to invest time in problems, which I already solved and have no interest in anymore. Sometimes again and again.
Running Gentoo since 2002... (Score:5, Insightful)
I admit that I'd stick with Gentoo even if, from my perspective as a user, it was going through a hard time, but on my (KDE desktop) system, which is the main system I use for just about everything, if I didn't read these articles, I would have no idea that anything was going wrong.
I have spent less time maintaining, fixing, or otherwise bringing my system up to date in the last few months than I have in years.
As for interpersonal politics, lack of diplomacy, and immoderate language, I don't think that's anything unique to Gentoo. It may well be that there are some cultural issues which need addressing - not for me to say - and perhaps the departure of key developers may, in the future, affect the user's experience, but for me, this has not yet been the case.
I like Gentoo a lot - in fact, I wound up running it sort of by mistake. As a newcomer to Linux, I'd read (in late 2001) that the Gentoo install was some kind of baptism of fire. I had problems understanding some of the fundamentals of how Linux systems are set up and at the time my Mandrake install was not helping me learn. I installed Gentoo as a lark, with the idea that I might learn some things about Linux that I could apply to Mandrake (which I was running because everyone said, at the time, that it was a great distribution for beginners).
Having gotten it installed on the first try, without any problems whatsoever, I ran it for a little while. Then I fell in love with portage which was - at the time - more reliable than Mandrake's package manager. After a few weeks, I couldn't find a reason to go back to Mandrake. This was just a few months in, after years of being a Windows user (which is why I also take issue with the popular assertion that Gentoo isn't for beginners, because it was ideal for me).
In the time since, I've tried several distributions and use Debian on my router and my file server, because they're old, crotchety machines that I was too lazy to install Gentoo on. But I've yet to find anything which so closely matches my expectation of how my system should work, than Gentoo. Which is why I'd stick with it (that and 5 years of momentum, of course).
For me, Gentoo is about ease of use, and specifically *not* having to spend a lot of time keeping my system up to date. In no way am I suggesting that the assertions of others that "Gentoo is too much work" are invalid, but they certainly have nothing to do with my experience, or that of many other Gentoo users. As for compiling software (for instance), this is a process I run, background, and forget about. Every few months, something a little more involved might require an hour or so of my attention (a major GCC upgrade, for instance) but overall, maintaining my system is simply not a time sink, at all.
And no, I'm not a developer. A computer hobbyist and fan of computers, but hardly some kind of guru. There may be good reasons not to use Gentoo, but I'd hate for anyone to think that these political spats somehow define the distribution or have much to do with the user's experience.
At least, it doesn't, so far, have anything to do with *me*. I still recommend Gentoo wholeheartedly. I have a lot of affection for it. I can and have used other distributions and I could learn to live with just about any distribution if I had to, but I doubt it would be the complete pleasure that Gentoo has been. I don't have hatred for any of the distributions I've tried out (Debian, OpenSuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, Kubuntu, and FreeBSD as well), bu
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My impression is that the people who are running 'emerge -uD world' every week are doing just fine and don't understand what all the fuss is about. It's those of us who update infrequently (I have dial-up at home, and anyway don't usua
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Beyond which, better to fix an issue or two here and there than face down 7 or 8 at once, which is more likely if you don't update often.
It's all about the packages... (Score:4, Insightful)
I originally switched to Gentoo because I had given up on using Slackware's package system and was keeping a large library of software current by hand.... Gentoo scratched my itch perfectly.
I really do hope it doesn't die from the inside. There are still a lot of people doing a lot of good work... and a _lot_ of people still benefiting from it. The way I see it, these type of squabbles are just a by product of becoming popular. As your dev team grows you're inevitably going to have personality conflicts... you just hope that over time you find a way to work them out and it doesn't bring the project down in the mean time.
Friedmud
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For me, as a Baptist, it's not. Just as long as we're tossing out unrelated qualifiers.
Interestingly, I feel the exact same way about Debian, and that's what kept putting me off of Gentoo - the packages I wanted just weren't there.
I like Gentoo and still use it on some very old hardware where the extra 5% performance from "-fomit-instructions" actually make
it isnt going anywhere (Score:2)
Gentoo never was "what it used to be" (Score:2)
Main problem is portage (Score:4, Informative)
A good solution would be to put portage into a
This is the kind of real, fundamental problem that gentoo should be solving. Gentoo should be the lightest distro, not a huge sprawling mess.
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Also, since you'd be using Gentoo, you might as well apply the reiser4 patches (or is there an ebuild for that? probably) and use that instead.
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I tried using reiser4 as my main fs and would get 10+ second freezes. Maybe it's good for only doing portage, but I wouldn't know. No thanks.
From a basic knowledge of python it looks like it should be pretty easy to intercept the standard open, read, write, close calls to f
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I've been off of Gentoo for almost two years now, but I'd taken to keeping the Portage tree on one machine and nfs-mounting it when I wanted to update my other two (laptop and main desktop).
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If you wanted to, you could put your portage tree in a compressed file system (mounted over loop-back) and, presumably, get most of the benefits you've described without making any changes to the way portage works.
Give it a shot. Let us know how it works.
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I have one machine generating a squashfs file from the latest release and a ramdrive which holds the changes. It works really well and keeps the portage database to ~40MB instead of 600. Then I just wget that file onto my other machines.
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As for some space savings, we're switching to Manifest2, which removes *all* of
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Hoping it Sticks Around (Score:3, Interesting)
I've still got that little laptop, and periodically boot her up to do an "emerge --sync; emerge -u world", maybe compile a new kernel. I don't use it as a daily laptop any more since I bought a Mac last year... but it's still a rock solid little machine that I might take with me this year when I repeat my trip in October.
But old hardware isn't just what Gentoo is good at. I use it frequently; in virtual environments. The host... well that can be Windows, Linux... or ESX... take your pick. However, when I need a slick, fast booting and "built to order" Linux box as a guest then there's nothing better than a Gentoo installation that boots the kernel, the VMWare Tools and then the application the guest is hosting! Fast boot, application isolation and simple package management (I usually set up a centralized Portage tree on the host machine). Believe me, the ability to reboot your web server in less than 10 seconds makes management sit up and take notice, especially when the other groups are using IIS boxes that take five minutes to come back from a hard failure.
But Gentoo isn't for everyone, and isn't for every implementation. I wouldn't call it "granny-friendly", and I would only use in a production environment where isolation is possible and rollback is simple (like in my aforementioned virtual environment... snapshots are a thing of beauty). Having said that, I recently built out a new home server and it got Gentoo almost by default. I thought about Fedora... but the flexibility of Gentoo really got to the geek in me
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Gentoo = Debian (Score:2)
Post vs Comments (Score:3, Insightful)
The article is about internal problems, and not about how one's computer runs absolutely flawlessly, or not.
We'll know within 5 days (Score:2)
Good & bad (Score:3, Insightful)
What got better:
- modular X
- good integration of gentoo kernel and driver packages
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- cleaned up USE flags
What got worse:
- dropping of packages for just political reasons e.g. xmms and the lie that's technical
- complexity
- useless dependencies (like not being able to install postfix and ssmtp at the same time)
Can be fixed - no panik.
Gentoo's value (Score:3, Interesting)
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apt-get autoremove
RPM sucks, but as a portage fan, you'll probably be pretty happy with apt. The pinning, building, and cleaning stuff is conceptually very similar to what portage provides, except that apt does it in a more polished, fully implemented way.
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Debian (and perhaps Ubuntu) does.
When you install packages with the "aptitude" tool, it will remember which pac
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On Debian and its derivatives, that's a feature of the recommended "aptitude" package manager. I can't believe that the major RPM-based distros don't have that functionality in their package managers, too (and no, the "rpm" command doesn't count here).
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The package metadata makes it easy to determine when a package was installed to satisfy a dependency. There are also trivial tools for identifying orphans.
There's an extensive discussion here [debian-adm...ration.org].
Methods for keeping your system clean vary, in a way dating those who use them. Some people use the old way:
apt-get remove `deborphan`
Although many modern package management UIs (aptitude is one I'm certain of) will offer to cull your orphaned packages aut
Gee, how long did it take us to get revdep-rebuild (Score:2)
USE flags? Well, it doesn't matter so much -- disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, so it takes far less time to download and install the extra libs than it does to compile the app without those libs.
But even i
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You can remove the application itself, but what about all those libxxxxx.rpm packages which it depended on. I can remove them if I can remember which ones they were, but otherwise they just hang around getting in the way. "Disks are cheap you Bozo!" Yes, I know, but I keep my systems up to date and unwanted libraries mean unwanted security updates. With Gentoo, this problem is entirely solved with the 'emerge --depclean' command.
Well, as has been pointed out, Debian and its derivitives such as Ubuntu can also do this, as well as *BSD. As far as disk space goes, a ports system uses a *ton* of disk space, much more than the amount saved by an occasional pruning of libraries. I recognize the utility of ports systems (Though I like the original *BSD system better for its higher speed, relaibility, and lesser degree of baroqueness) for keeping software up to date, but being space efficient they aren't, nor are they the only system that
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It appears to me that the Gentoo community is larger and healthier now than ever before, but the composition of community members has changed. Most noticeably, we lost most of the users who have to be using whatever the most hyped distro is (these are the people who were constantly singing the praises of Gent
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Where are you seeing this happen now? Forums? IRC? Bugzilla? All of the above?
I get whatever support I need through the Forums and on Bugzilla. Bugzilla can be hit-or-miss, but I've always found the forums to be consistently helpful and non-abusive (granted, I don't think I'v