Now look what I’ve done
Posted by Ciaran McCreesh on August 20, 2008
For those of you wondering what this is all about…
< ciaranm> dev-zero, dav_it: name the three most important improvements gentoo has delivered to users in the past year < dev-zero> ciaranm: in the past year: talking in "features" of the distro itself you might add irix-support, freebsd-support or the like
Now, I’m not saying those aren’t interesting to some people, but to users in general? The best that anyone’s managed is something that’s used by maybe one user in a thousand? Even I find that rather hard to believe… Surely someone can come up with a better answer than that…
D.J. Capelis said
Also maybe only used by a small minority of users, but these are the new features that have been exciting for me.:
1) EAPI work and PMS to allow multiple package managers to work on the distribution
2) kdebuild-1 and other EAPIs which provide good -scm capabilities for packages.
3) The increasing ability to use overlays when the tree itself lags embarrassingly behind. People are not treating ~ARCH as a place where breakage is acceptable. ARCH is turning back into useless again because things never get pushed there as it’s enough trouble to put things in ~ARCH. The overlays have done wonders to at least make ~ARCH a place where new packages go. While overlays aren’t new, some initiatives over the last year have provided very good ground for new overlays and new places for overlays to spawn.
Maybe the third one is more a survival technique than a feature. :-\
iaindb said
What about baselayout 2 and openrc? A worthwhile improvement, surely.
Ciaran McCreesh said
Sure, if you don’t want to have bash on your system. Which you have to have for ebuilds anyway…
yoshi314 said
maybe some portage changes might be important to some users, as it’s still a majority’s choice for software management in gentoo.
klon said
Ciaran: what does bash have in common with baselayout+openrc2? Correct me, if I’m wrong, but it has nothing in common. I personally experienced a BIG speed-up after upgrading to the new system. So, at least IMHO, openrc IS a good new feature.
And yes, I do agree, that making ebuild specifically bash scripts, and not just /bin/sh scripts deacreases the portability, but still – is this one additional dependency such a burden?
Ciaran McCreesh said
A large part of why openrc exists is that certain people don’t want to have bash on their systems. These people are, of course, ignoring that ebuilds are bash, and that by forcing POSIX sh on people they’re making configuration files considerably nastier to work with.