Talk:Gentoo Linux/Archive 1

Stages in installation

I meant: the kernel compilation paragraph should come a few paragraphs earlier. --Sietse 09:53, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The Kerenel Compilation comes after the installation stages, and after the system is configured, so it is in the right place. See the Gentoo Install Guide

Gentoo Ricer Link

I have some objection to the Gentoo is Rice link, I dont like the site in general, the guy has taken some sample quotes from new or inexperienced users and presented them as representative of our community.

But this is not the basis for my objection, the site is "critical" of gentoo users, not the Gentoo Linux project or software, I dont think we should link to it from an article about gentoo software. I feel that linking to his site is an example of Guilt by Association, where he is attempting to discredit gentoo linux by presenting some quotes from gentoo users, "These people use gentoo, so imagine how poor gentoo must be". --taviso

I've added the "dubious" tag after the link, please remove it if the consensus is that the link is appropriate.

Check out the changes I made today - let me know if they make the link more appropriate. I was orginially thinking to remove it, but now that I've placed it in some context, perhaps it should remain for NPOV? --NightMonkey 22:16, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

OK, the article has been significantly changed to reduce POV (still working to make it better) - can we remove the "dubious" tag from the link, unless the author above has a continued request for removal? If there are no objections in the next day or so, I'm announcing my intention for removal of the tag. --NightMonkey 15:39, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)

I just removed it. If someone thinks it expresses valid, objective criticisms, then I invite them to add to the article, not just tag an external link. I may do it myself, just not right now. :p ¦ Reisio 09:36, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia often has "x in popular culture" headings or comments in various articles. This "ricer" site is known by all Gentoo users and many people who never use Gentoo...I think it's part of popular culture and should be included for this reason. After all, wikipedia has an article on goatse, so it should acknowledge this more legitimate and less controversial part of popular culture! BUT, all this said, I think that any link should acknowledge that this is not a legitimate review or criticism of gentoo, but rather, just a goofy parody that has become rather widely recognized. Cazort 01:37, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Controversy?

Full Disclosure: I'm a happy Gentoo user for over a year and a half, mild contributor to the forums and bugzilla, but in my work as a SysAdmin I am as platform agnostic (indeed, OS agnostic) as possible, though I advocate Open Source solutions where the solution meets or exceeds proprietary solutions on technical merits. I am also about to contribute ebuilds to Portage for some applications I've used in my work. Also, I'm relatively new at Wikipedia editing, so apologies if I'm stepping on toes.

I'm questioning the inclusion, and some of the content, of the Controversy section for a few reasons:

• Does any other Linux Distribution entry have a similar section? If not, are there no controversies or critics of other distributions?
• Many of the points listed in this section do not have referrant links to quotes from users or other studies. So, where did they come from?
• I'd wager that many Linux users don't know about Gentoo (being that many Linux users are Red Hat or SuSE users), or haven't tried it out, so how can "most Linux users either love or hate it?" I guess, from what the author has said, that the best that can be said is that "Many Debian GNU/Linux users are critical of Gentoo..." or something similar. Short of more formal polls of Linux users, that may be the best that can be said.

Look forward to your thoughts! --User:NightMonkey 09:28, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)

I think it's appropriate. What other distros are such a lightning rod for criticism, besides Lindows? I'm a Linux user since 2002 or 2003 (Don't remember) and certainly I remember Gentoo being one of the most praised and maligned distros out there. —Casey J. Morris 13:01, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

If you'll read further below, you'll note that this has been hashed out already - we re-wrote the section to make it more NPOV. I came to realize that, my own personal interestes aside, this deserves coverage. --NightMonkey 01:05, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Oops, sorry. —Casey J. Morris 06:35, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Controversy 2

To respond:

• I agree with some of the arguments against the "Gentoo is Rice" link; however, I fail to see the point of "it only attacks the user community, so it's irrelevant for this article" (in that case, the link to the user forums should have gone too). Second, I see no reason to believe the citations are taken from newcomers only; I see the same arguments ("Gentoo performs better", "binary packages are almost useless", etc.) being proposed by people having used Gentoo (and other Linux distributions) for several years.

Still, don't other distributions (and operating systems) also have "fans" whose positions would embarrass the user community as a whole, or the maintainers? The endless "<This OS> is great, <That OS> sucks" comes to mind. There are stupid people making stupid comments everywhere, on every subject - should they be chosen as "representative" of a user community? Perhaps only if they are also significant members of that community. For Debian, that might be someone like Bruce Perens. For Gentoo, that might be Daniel Robbins or other policy-makers. Why not choose the developers, or Gentoo Forum administrators instead of the most ignorant users? I agree that this inclusion unfairly creates Guilt by Association. --NightMonkey 00:08, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Mm, I agree -- you are free to remove it. --Sesse 13:19, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

No, I don't know of other distributions with "controversy" sections, but the most common distributions should definitely have such sections. (Update: Somebody added a really poor "controversy" section to the Debian page; people are working to improve it AFAICS, but it should really be done better if we agree to have such sections.) IMHO a Wikipedia article about a distribution should not just be "this is how you install the distro" page (like the Gentoo aticle very much is, IMHO). However, like I wrote in the article, Gentoo is really one of the most controversial distributions, so I took that one first.

Why should the common distributions have "Controversy" sections? Operating Systems like Solaris, Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux distributions like Slackware, and Linux_From_Scratch also do not have such sections. I don't see why all "common distributions should definitely have such sections." It makes a NPOV article into a POV article. It "labels" this distribution as a "controversial" one, while the others are, by inference, not. Perhaps the section should be retitled as "Criticisms". I believe that "Controversy" would be better applied to those articles that are truly such, such as abortion, Communism or Racial Profiling, yet do not contain such sections. I think a minority of users of both Debian, Gentoo and other distributions really care that much to consider "merit arguments" and other flame wars to be "controversial", or even useful.

Well, who cares about the name- "criticism" is probably a much better word. However, my point still stands- I think an article about a Linux distribution should cover more aspects than just "this distribution has feature X, which works great" (see the introduction claiming that Gentoo "achieves all this", for instance). --Sesse 13:19, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hmm... Well, I care. Word choice matters, especially in an encyclopedia. Some care should be taken to make sure Wikipedia articles are NPOV and refrain from personal opinion and unfair labeling. Also, I've never argued against your criticism of Wikipedia's Linux distribution articles. Keep on writing :) ! --NightMonkey 22:46, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Also, I think that it is debatable if Gentoo is the most "controversial" distribution, or just one of the most "discussed" distributions. It is certainly not controversial for the Gentoo user base. It is not an issue for SuSE users. Is it controversial for, say, the Windows user base? Or the Solaris? The Fedora? This opinion stated in this section, "While many Gentoo proponents usually hold the customizable optimization and USE flags (both of which essentially require building from source code, which takes time) as essential features, critics argue that the machine-specific optimization means little in real-world situations, and that USE flags are only marginally useful. (For instance, it is argued that while one may set a USE flag to build a program without support for X, all one gains is to reduce compile time slightly and keep a few megabytes of X client libraries off the system.)" is debatable as well. This is a Straw Man argument. I also question the use of Weasel Words in such phrases as "critics argue" (without references to arguments). In addition, is it unreasonable to suppose that this is actually what the user wants, and why they choose to make use of these features? Some users may actually need to "keep a few megabytes of X client libraries off the system" and "reduce compile time slightly". Why is that "controversial"? --NightMonkey 00:08, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

I disagree - you can avoid pulling in a massive dependancy like Qt, GTK, KDE or GNOME or X, even, by setting USE flags to "-kde -gnome -X" Thus, it's hardly just a few megabytes of X dependency.

Why would this be a straw man argument? The only specific tests I've seen (I could dig up the reference if you'd like, it was linked from Slashdot a while ago) shows that Gentoo is about in the middle of the pack with regard to performance (and I've seen other tests indicating a ten-fold slowdown with over-optimization (-O3) of libraries, although that's probably not as relevant). The point is, what people often claim about USE flags is that you need either USE flags or install all of GNOME on your system the day you install a package with GNOME support (and the same with X)- this is simply wrong, and I feel it's a common enough myth that it should be noted here. In short, almost all Gentoo proponents I've met claim that Gentoo is a lot faster and keeps a lot of junk off your system, which simply isn't true. And yes, Gentoo is indeed one of the more discussed distributions (I'm a bit unsure if we just disagree on what is involved in "controversy"), mostly because both the distribution and the community is so different from what most other distributions have. --Sesse 13:19, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I made significant changes to the article to reflect some of these points. I think that your point about the performance comparision misses the idea that Gentoo is a "meta-distribution". Its packaging system is only a recipe database for software compillation. If a user doesn't know gcc (or at least the meaning of it's options), and possibly follows gcc's development status, CFLAG changing beyond recommended defaults for a particular architecture and CPU will give diminishing (or negative) returns on time invested. I think your issues are with newbie Gentoo (or newbie Linux) users, and most are not arguments against the actual distribution. It's just a matter of education and experience, not fundamental flaws with Gentoo. Indeed, a newbie using Linux From Scratch would have many similar issues as new Gentoo users. --NightMonkey 22:46, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

I don't really see the need for concrete references; most of what is said there is a condensed ersions of the arguments I've seen in way too many flamewars. A Google search or the random distribution war of the day on Slashdot or IRC should bring up most of it.

So, these are *your* distillations of the discussions. They should probably be marked as such. --NightMonkey 00:08, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Of course they are my distillations, I wrote the article. Many Wikipedia articles are distillations of knowledge without specific reference; I don't really see what the problem in that is as long as it's kept NPOV. I did not write the section to induce a flamewar or to keep people off Gentoo Linux; I wrote it because there is indeed a lot of discussion about these topics and thus the article should mention them. --Sesse 13:19, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You are completely right about the "most users" part; most users are probably ignorant. However, those who care rarely seem to be neutral. The paragraph should probably be rewritten (do we have a "Linux distribution wars" node? :-) )

Hey, that's a great idea. Here you go: Linux Distribution Wars. Perhaps until that article is created, flame wars and their coverage should not be included in the Linux Distribution articles? --NightMonkey 00:08, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

I think it's quite a bit of distance from a flame war to sound criticisms of a distribution. We should all be able to be honest enough to keep the flamewars off Wikipedia- there are enough forums for it already, but all distributions do have their pros and cons apart from just a "religious" aspect, and I do not really think it should be impossible to cover that. (OBTW, just as we have that covered: I became a Debian developer a few months ago, after having used various Linux distributions since 1997.) --Sesse 13:19, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

BTW, whoever added the "Only Portage can have Freetype1 and Freetype2 installed at the same time,

Debian and FreeBSD can't do this" should definitely revert it; this is blatantly wrong. (Update: I took the liberty to revert the changes myself; anybody who doubts this is possible in e.g. Debian should try "apt-get install libttf2 libfreetype6" and see for themselves.) --Sesse 13:28, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I look forward to your comments and debate! Perhaps really all this article really needs is a rewrite to make it NPOV. As it stands, it doesn't meet the criteria. I am open to discussion. --NightMonkey 00:08, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Just did a rewrite. Look forward to the comments! --NightMonkey 22:46, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Looks a lot better (I've mostly skimmed it, though), although I still feel there's something missing on the very core of the usefulness of the CFLAGS and USE tweaking which I've seen many (included seasoned Gentoo users) hold as the very core of the "Gentoo spirit". (I am completely aware that "from source" is not really at the core of the Gentoo philosophy; however, for many it seems to be, and I think that should be addressed. Also, I think it's a bit hard to call Gentoo a "meta-distribution" as long as very few people use it that way in practice beyond simple USE tweaking to get rid of dependencies; it may very well be the intention, and I've heard the term being used before, but most people use Gentoo more or less as they would have used, say, FreeBSD.) Also, I feel the first paragraph of the "Criticism of Gentoo users" is somewhat long -- it sounds a bit like logorrhoea to me. --Sesse 00:48, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)

Removed "Criticism of Gentoo users". Sesse had it pegged. "Many of the critics"? Did you take a poll? The idea is not to jam a section in for every little person's gripe. There's no need to imagine what other people think - let them come and add to the article themselves. ¦ Reisio 09:46, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Controversy -> Criticism rewrite

I'm interested in hearing constructive comments on the rewriting process for the "Criticism" sections for NPOV and clarity. Just finished a rewrite today - let me know what you think. --NightMonkey 22:22, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

I added some things to it, including the infamous source vs. binary debate, trying to keep it as neutral as possible. Seems good for now. --KneeLess 05:55, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Gentoo Linux is one of the few entries in the Linux Distribution Category with a "Criticism" section, I browsed some of the entries for distributions that I recognised, such as Arch Linux, Lycoris, Linux From Scratch, Knoppix, Red Hat Linux, Fedora Core, Slackware, Ubuntu Linux, Xandros, etc. None of these have a Criticism section, in fact, the only entry I could find is for Debian, which is fairly laughable compared to ours. The last time I checked there are endless criticisms of debian, too political, hostile community, bureaucratic policies, bloated packages, unsustainable repository system, etc, etc.

Not even Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X has a criticism section, but hey, I can live with it.

What I am really opposed to is the "Criticism of Gentoo Users" section, I cannot imagine how any text is going to be anything more than a description of a Stereotype (and an unfair one, I might add), which has no place in an encyclopedia. It's going to be a Faulty generalization, and I would question whether the number of these "confused transitional users" are any higher for Gentoo than any other Linux distribution. I'll remove the "Criticism of Gentoo Users" section, feel free to revert if the consensus is that it should remain. --taviso 17:19, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Gentoo has plenty controversy and a 'stereotype', and we took the liberty to outline a bit of this. Debian has plenty of controversy, but so far, no one has really bothered to document it. Who cares. Our section was done pretty nicely (neutral tone, etc...) and it could be made better, of course, but punting it completely was wrong imho. I've taken the liberty of adding it back in. --vapier

I'm not disputing there's criticism of the project, I just don't see how describing someone's opinion of the stereotypical user is suitable material for an encyclopedia. How long do you think a description of the stereotypical American would last on the USA entry, or criticisms of Mac OS X users! My experience with the gentoo community is that the majority are intelligent and experienced.

Some of the text just doesnt make sense, "However, some of these users are also attracted to Gentoo because they've heard, rightly or wrongly, that Gentoo is the "best" or most "elite" distribution to use.". How is this critical, I'm sure 90% of the users for any operating system decided to try it because the sales assistant said it was "the best", friends reccomended it, or perhaps a reviewing journalist said so...is using reccomendadtions from trusted other people and trying to make an informed decision on which distribution to try a stupid noob mistake?. Most of the criticisms are true of any new users of any operating system, "Many of these users have difficulty understanding the jargon and reasoning for proper system provisioning, tuning and maintenance.", and "New users not taking care to read FAQ's, search the Gentoo forums, read the documentation, misusing terminology, etc...", for example. In fact, I think the whole section could be reduced to "New users make mistakes, some people think gentoo has a lot of them". --taviso 11:39, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Some of the stuff said in the criticisms section is mutually exclusive with the claims made in the article. For example, "Long initial installation" -- the article claims that there are Live CDs, so this doesn't make logical sense. Also for example, "[slow build time]" -- the main article claims binaries are now available.

Protection?

Why was this page protected by RickK? If those anons were causing a problem, block them, don't protect the article just for a couple of vandalism incidents. --Johnleemk | Talk 12:27, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

apt-get vs. RPM vs. Portage vs. ...

Gentoo's Portage system works similarly to Debian's APT.

OK. I've not used Debian very much, beyond some test installations. Is this true that Portage works similarly to Apt, but not similarly to, say, RPM? Is what this sentence trying to say something like this: "Gentoo's Portage is a package management system, similar in function to Debian's APT and Red Hat's RPM and (insert other package management system here)". Of course, worded like so, it now appears that this statement is not really true, as Portage has other functions more related to FreeBSD's Ports system, from what I've heard from FreeBSD users (and Gentoo's docs).

So, should this sentence be removed, reworded, or ? --NightMonkey 21:47, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

Well no, as I don't think it should, as it functions similarly to Debian's APT. With APT, you run 'apt-get <package>' to download, configure, and install a package (leaving out only compilation compared to 'emerge <package> as it is a binary distro) whereas 'rpm -i <filename>.rpm' requires you to already have the RPM downloaded, and have manually installed all of its dependencies. Therefore, portage/APT set themselves apart from RPM and other traditional package managers. --Brother Dysk 01:08, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

Huh. Well, the sentence leaves out a lot of important information, then. As it is, it implies that Portage is a workalike to APT. What about Red Hat's up2date? And, while I haven't used it in a while, I seem to remember that RPM can use a URI to locate RPM files (e.g. "RPM -Uvh http://freshrpms.net/somerpm-01.rpm"). All I'm saying is this seems too pat and narrow a statement. I seem to recall a program named "gnorpm" which would automate a lot of the dependency matching as well as download from repositories. And there's Ximian's Installer... So, can this still say that APT the only software which does download/dependency recurse/install? --NightMonkey 01:27, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)

First of all, I completely agree against the criticism section. If this is okay to put a criticism section on Windows and Mac; then I'll happy to write all my complaints about those idiots. (For Windows users, I can even write much more about those spamming, virus-addict .....bags)

Comparing apt-get & portage are quite different as well. The main difference between any "non source based" distro and a "source based" distro (Such as Gentoo, Linux From Scratch, Source Mage etc.); is the freaking "source". If you would like to compare Gentoo with any distro; then first think about Source Mage, LFS, Rock Linux etc. If you would like to compare specifically apt-get versus portage ; then they ressemble to each other but they are quite different. A Bugatti Veyron and a Saturn are both cars; but they are different. So while describing Bugatti Veyron, telling that "Bugatti is a car similar to Saturn" is an insult to Bugatti. I have prepared the article of Gentoo and Debian in Turkish here on Wikipedia; (Debian 1st hd, Gentoo 2nd HD) and to tell the truth I enjoy both. I think it isn't quite correct to compare portage with apt-get. There are huge differences on repesitories, insallation times, up-to-date programs, the capacity of controlling the installation etc. I believe it is quite sufficent to just say it's a package management system. --Nerval 19:19, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Informing users that Gentoo's Portage is similar to APT/RPM is blatantly wrong. It is completely different: internally (scripting versus compiled tool), feature-wise (optional dependencies, ...), functional (source-building vs prebuilt), etc. -- SwifT 14:41, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

External links

I think there are quite a few too many there!

I would suggest removing the following links:

• Gentoo torrents

torrents.gentoo.org has enough, and it's easily accessible from the index.

• Make.conf manpage

Hmm.

• Zynot Foundation - Fork of Gentoo Linux (declared dead by the founder).

It's dead ... some people like keeping the links though.

• Flameeyes Unofficial Ebuilds - Unofficial and amatorial ebuilds with focus on KDE applications and themes. It also contains fixes for current ebuilds which are known buggy.

Hm, one could replace this with a link to a helpful page on the Gentoo wiki with a list of links to portage overlays. Ah, here it is: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Overlays

Ah, BMG is included there too.

and moving the following links to their respective language wikipedias:

• GentooBR
• gentoo.pl
• gentoo.se
• gentoo.no
• gentoo.de
• gentoo.or.kr
• gentoo.or.id
• gentoo.org.tw
• gentoo.ro
• GentooJP
• Gentoo-ES
• Gentoofr.org
• gentoo-italia
• Gentoo Portugal

Dropping the subheaders would make sense too. How about it :)? --Philip Nilsson 09:22, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

All for it here. --NightMonkey 20:26, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

I removed the links above and the language links that I could verify had links on their respective Wikis (and added one to sv_SE). I commented out the ones where my language abilities failed me. --Philip Nilsson 10:09, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

In keeping with the discussions above, I have once again cleaned up some of the external links. There were far too many, and some were links to different aspects of the same site. An external link to "Gentoo Philosophy" isn't necessary. It's summarized by this article and if a reader wants to know more about specifically that, they can find it from the main gentoo website link. I think that too many external links can overwelm and cloud opinions of a reader. This is bad form for any encyclopedia. The External Links is meant as a springboard for finding out what information you desire to discover after reading this article. It is not intended to be a "Oh, we didn't cover the following topics, but you can learn every corner of Gentoo if you read everything listed here". I basically have cut back a lot of the links to support sites and informational sites. I just feel like sometimes a simple link to a Google search query would be more effective. --Coplan 17:03, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Criticisms 2

Does the last part of this section which starts with "Gentoo has been seen by some as an adversary of Debian." really belong in this article? Perhaps this would be better in the Debian page criticism section instead? Bragging about how the Gentoo user community is friendlier than Debian's hardly makes for a criticism of Gentoo. - 207.161.59.161 02:51, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I think it is factual and grounded enough to be encyclopedic. ¦ Reisio 08:19, 2005 August 24 (UTC)

I disagree, only to the extent that it should be easily and well referenced. Why is it noteable that "some" see it this way? Who is "some"? How many is "some"? I don't believe that any non-technical criticisms (e.g. "community sport-flaming") deserve much (if any) coverage within distribution/OS articles, as surely most of the readership is not served well by this knowledge. I'm open to other opinions, though. --NightMonkey 07:46, August 25, 2005 (UTC)

I'm having trouble understanding why you guys are interpreting Gentoo has been seen by some as an adversary of Debian as bragging or flaming - it's text on a page; it means no more than what it literally means. Maybe it's not worded perfectly, because Gentoo is absolutely not an adversary of Debian - Debian is the most popular distribution ever and I doubt a source-based distro can threaten that (besides, their logo is way cool). What Gentoo does do, however, is draw some former Debian users. If you've ever compared Debian and Gentoo documentation or #gentoo and #debian on freenode, you would know why (I've only compared the documentation personally, but hear about the channels regularly). ¦ Reisio 19:03, 2005 August 25 (UTC)

Screenshot?

Is it appropriate to have a screenshot of Gentoo, since there is no "default" look and feel to it? Why show this guy's screen with KDE instead of my screen with Fluxbox? For other distros, such as Fedora Core, Suse, or Ubuntu, a screen shot might add something to the article's content, but I think that for Gentoo, it is irrelevant.

Just my $0.02.

Qwe 05:23, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

I think it's irrelevant for ANY Linux distro article at top right - a section on a distro's privately-developed theme for some WM or DE with a screenshot would be fine - but as people insist on it for some, balance of power makes it not unreasonable to allow it on any. ¦ Reisio 07:50, 2005 August 24 (UTC)

I agree, so I inserted an image of Portage, hope that helps --AndersL 14:34, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

How about a screenshot of porthole in action, since it's a GUI frontend to portage? I could make one since I'm playing with it right now. --Bk0 (Talk) 15:00, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Prelink and benchmarking

From the article, ``While Gentoo has been proven to be faster in some situations because of Prelink and the minimalism one can achieve through very selective software installation (which may prove difficult with some binary distributions)' '. First, I notice there's no citation for this. (I can recall benchmarks where Gentoo was compared to other systems with no noticable performance differences.) Second, prelink is not unique to Gentoo. It is available at least on Debian and Ubuntu and presumably other distributions as well. 129.110.241.254 20:54, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

fink is not chroot!

Not sure what the guy was smoking that wrote that Fink is chroot. Fink isn't chroot... it's just a bunch of files under /sw, just like darwinports uses /opt/local, and so on. Needs research to verify that, and if so, rewrite that paragraph. --Randal L. Schwartz 02:19, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

History

I expanded and reworded the history section as I read Making the Distribution. I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of dates. I found a page that claims to have enoch-0.75 source (http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/enoch/enoch-0.75/?fl=e), but it appears to be quite broken. It suggests it was released in December 1999, but I was hoping for something firmer before adding dates to the article. JohnWhitlock 09:59, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

John - I think the gcc stuff you've just added leaves the impression that Gentoo was widely known for it's speed at that time and that this was spread to the rest of Linux. Nothing wrong with your facts - just the impression they leave. I'd rv that whole addition frankly. It just doesn't add anything relevant - imho :-) Snori 11:13, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I can get to the files through the FTP server. There doesn't appear to be a fixed release date, but the dates in the CHANGES file are consistant with a Dec. 1999 release. JohnWhitlock 10:26, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

I've just done a fairly bold revision, which I'm pretty happy with. I'd like to see some other items in here tho' - dates of the "firsts" Power970 etc. I won't be doing that, so feel free...--Snori 02:49, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Portability

Needs someone who understands what's going on (or not) with "Gentoo for Mac OS X", Gentoo/ALT, Gentoo/FreeBSDGentoo/NetBSD, Gentoo/OpenBSD Hurd etc to reword and update. --Snori 05:39, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Stage 1?

In the Installation section, it says:

More advanced users will note that the new installer also brings back the stage 1 installation as a common installation method.

I tried to find an adequate description of the three different stages in the current documentation (to link to for context/explanation) but was unsuccessful. (Boy, when they remove doc support for something, they remove doc support for it!) I would try a brief explanation myself, but I'm not sure I would get it right. Can someone else do this? Even though the sentence is prefaced by "More experienced users", it would be nice to explain to others — especially non-users — what this sentence is referring to. - dcljr (talk) 18:53, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, damn... there it is right in the section I was referring to! Okay, I just added "(see below)" after the words "Stage 1 installation". I really should read the article before "complaining" about it! <g> - dcljr (talk) 18:57, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

There's no point in stage 1 anyways (unless you hate yourself more than regular Gentoo users do). After a few weeks, you've already rebuilt all of the base system anyways. Kurt 12:45, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

About Fanboy

What problem could fanboy occasionally cause? How their "unrealistic" claim could do harm to others? Please elaborate on that. --Zhangle 03:00, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

It sometimes leads other to wrongly see *any* user of Gentoo as claiming excessive and unrealistic speed increases etc - ie more reasonable users are 'tarred with the same brush'. An irritant only, no real harm.

Irony?

 Unofficial mascots include Larry the cow (ironically, not a penguin, since Linux kernel itself uses a penguin, Tux, as its mascot)

I can't say I see the irony in this. I can't say I even find Tux relevant enough to be mentioned.

Look at the disambiguation page and you'll get the point behind this remoark 62.221.215.214 20:33, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Quality Assurance criticism

"Quality assurance. Gentoo allows fast access to the widest range of the latest available software from upstream developers, so packages may get into “~ masked” (Testing), and even be unmasked (Stable), with less testing than in other distributions."

I removed the above statement as it has no basis that I know of. Packages stay in masked and unstable until the flow of bugs on the Gentoo Bugzilla slow down, or until multiple people from architectures report the release as stable. How is that any less worthy than the other systems? If there are multiple verifiable references for this it could warrant a place on the article. Ansell 11:10, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Gentoo Based Distributions

There seems to be a lot of distros in this list...many of which don't have any external information (be it on wikipedia or its own website) and many of which are links to a forum...not a formal page. I believe we should apply some sort of notability clause. What should be our criteria here?

GNU/Linux

I will not involve myself in the quagmire-cum-debate that is the Gentoo Linux - Gentoo GNU/Linux debate. However, until (or if ever) Gentoo begins calling itself GNU/Linux, it is highly inappropriate for the Wikipedia entry on it to refer to it as something it vehemently claims to not be. Falcon 06:10, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Security

This webpage talks about Gentoo in a great amount of detail, I would argue too much detail for a wikipedia article. However, it does not once mention security. Security is a very big component of any operating system! Security pro's and con's are a major reason people choose to use or not use certain OS's. I added a link to the GLSA at the end of the article, but don't you think we should create a heading or at least subheading to talk about security? We should at least have a paragraph or two. Cazort 01:34, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

With a OS like gentoo the security is totally in the hands of the admin, what to enable and so on. --BJ 01:36, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes. This is important to mention. I think it would be informative to provide a simple comparison of what particular security options are available (and which ones are stable and well supported) with Gentoo. I think there could be some stuff talked about how the GLSA is maintained and how it compares to what other distros do.