Is The Art Of Listening Dead?
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 8:45 AM, Wed 20 Sep 06
Filed under: The Ouija Board Of Gentoo
5 Comments
A couple of folk have asked me where I get my ideas from. Well, there’s this mail order company … 
Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t be giving up the day job for a spot down the local Glee Club. But, seriously, if anyone’s short of inspiration, all you need to do is find a bunch of folk who aren’t part of the Gentoo dev community, and listen to their experiences with Gentoo. And listen to their experiences of having to deal with the bunch of us. We’re all too close to Gentoo to be able to see everything clearly, and as a group we’re really bad at looking inwards far too much.
Take this chap as an example, and see what your next idea to improve Gentoo might be. Whilst you’re doing so, take a good look in the mirror at your own reaction to his comments. You’ll see many of the core problems of Gentoo right there and then.
5 Comments
September 20th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Hi,
how about this one:
http://distrocenter.linux.com/distrocenter/06/09/12/213246.shtml?tid=108
Regards,
September 20th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Hi!
The / . guy sums it up pretty well…
Some weeks ago some changes in PHP or Squirrelmail or Courier screwed up my home emails system.
And today, while working on that issue (trying to move to dovecot instead of courier) I also upgraded OpenSSH, and viola, I can’t connect from work to my homeserver anymore…
Wouldn’t be that bad, if my server at home wasn’t a headless server… I have to get a ladder (no joke!), shutdown the server which resides in 3m height above a door, get the 20 kg box down ;-), attach a keyboard and a monitor, and find out what is goind on…
Shouldn’t happen, but has happened more than once the last six months…
Greets,
Arndt
September 20th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
This guy reflects well what I am thinking: Gentoo works fine your your non-essential home desktop, but becomes a lot of work when trying to use it on several boxes.
Using his “I liked Gentoo when it was less hectic” statement, it argues for the kind of “sarge-stableness”, that one expects from a server. I won’t argue that old versions are necessarily better/more secure. But once a server runs you want to only change as little as possible to make life easier when maintaining multiple installs
September 20th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
I share some of this guy’s experience. I have had 5 gentoo boxes at one point, including my machine at work. I now have 4, only because I consolidated 2 of them into one box. Here’s what I have now:
1. Home Desktop w/ Athlon 2500XP
2. Old Thinkpad (500MHz)
3. MythTV box + music storage + backup storage for 1.
4. Work machine with 2 x 3.4GHz Intel dual core
Maintaining them is a chore. The only thing that makes it a bit easier is that I have been using gentoo for about 4 years now so I know all the tricks. Although every once in a while something throws me for a loop and I have to figure out what’s wrong.
Gentoo more than anything has made me a better Linux user, I am more careful before I do upgrades of any software now. If it is something critical (like courier-imap, postfix, or any of the other stuff I used while running my IMAP server) I check the upstream changelogs and sometimes mask it for a while and let other people be the guinea pigs for a while. I also stay away from ~x86 if I really care about stability. I blame myself first, when anything goes wrong, and the gentoo devs second. Sure Gentoo has it’s problems, the devs aren’t perfect, but usually more often than not it’s me that is less than perfect. Gentoo does demand a bit “perfection” from its users than other distros.
I still wouldn’t go back to a different distribution though. All things considered equal (package versions, hardware, etc..) problems will occur in Gentoo as well as other distros. I find that problems are actually easier to fix in Gentoo than any other distro and the user community, docs, and tools are still the best. Making packages is also easy as hell. I could go on and on.
September 21st, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Many thanks to all of you for your feedback. I can’t guarantee anything will change as a result, but honest feedback _is_ appreciated
Best regards,
Stu
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