Re: current state of sid (unstable)
On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Michael Cree <mcree@orcon.net.nz> wrote:
>> Comments welcome. I've received one strong recommendation to give
>> Gentoo a try,
>
> Matt, no doubt :-/ He's a great evangelist for Gentoo.
Turn that :-/ upside.. well, not down. :-\ is pretty much the same.
(Yes, it was me)
>> presumably because the Alpha platform is still supported
>> by Gentoo.
>
> Well, to note, the Alpha platform is not completely unsupported by Debian.
> That Alpha is still in Debian Unstable attests to that fact.
>
> I tried installing Gentoo about a year ago on a PWS600au but had such a bad
> experience that I have never looked at Gentoo again. It took a whole
> weekend to just get the machine to boot to the point that I could actually
> log in to the shell on the console. There were quite a number of boots into
> a machine for which all of the keyboard, the serial port and networking
> didn't work so I couldn't get access, rebooting with the rescue disk and
> manually running every step of the boot process to get the gentoo system up
> to a useable state and then recompiling the kernel. Bah, humbug, I like to
> spend my weekends doing more useful things than that.
>
> Cheers
> Michael.
I don't want to make this a distro war, but your waste of time almost
definitely could have been avoided by asking a question or two of the
six or seven Gentoo/Alpha users on the #alpha IRC channel, to which
you're already connected.
I like Gentoo, I admit, but even if I weren't using Gentoo on my
non-Alpha systems, I'd recommend it to Alpha users. It's less about $x
feature than it is that Gentoo actively supports Alpha/Linux. We
actively find, report, and fix bugs in the Kernel, gcc, glibc, and
X.Org.
But the name of the distribution isn't important. That one has active
developers working on it while another does not, however, is
important.
I'd (We'd) love to consolidate Alpha/Linux users on one distribution.
It simply makes things better and easier for everyone.
I know that at this point I'm experienced with Gentoo installations,
but I can have a system up and running in a few hours most of the time
(and most of this time is compilation of software, which contrary to
popular opinion is not necessary to watch). The process isn't as
painful as many would have you believe.
Thanks for understanding,
Matt
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