How big stable is Gentoo community 985

On Sun, 23 Apr 2006 16:16:18 -0400, Christopher Browne staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Sounds close for a stage 3 install on a fast machine with a reasonably high-speed CD-RW. Use the fancy ncurses-based installer, answer all its questions, wait for it to extract a whole bunch of tarballs, install the bootloader, do the sync and update later.

Stage 3 installs come in a variety of flavors. i686, athlonxp, pentiumm, etcetera, so you pick the one that's compiled for your CPU type and you get many of the benefits of compiling.

The big reason for doing a stage 3 install is speed. You get a usable system with the applications you want in ~ 1 hour. Then you can *use* the machine while you do "emerge sync && emerge world" in the background. After that's done, you get a machine that's up-to-date and compiled with all the options you want.

FWIW, when I did this "stage 3 followed by sync+world" thing on a T42p (2.0 GHz, 512M), it took about 24 hours. This was with heavyweight packages like monolithic Xorg, KDE, mplayer, xine, and xmame selected. And for about 23 hours of those 24, I was doing stuff other than attending to the machine. Getting the ACPI scripts working properly required more effort and keyboard time than installing all the software I normally use.

Easy package management? They've sort of fixed the worst problems with RPM Dependency Hell, but several years back, the automatic dependency tracking of Gentoo was a big factor in my choice of Gentoo. And it's still less of a pain to install a number of non-Free things on Gentoo than it is on Debian.

I'm not so sure that approach would scale well to the larger size and increased feature set of the Linux "base system". It'd also slow development down.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL