> > About his pondering on whether Gentoo is right for him and about Gentoo > having been more and more work to maintain recently -- I wholeheartedly > agree. I just haven't found anything better, yet. >
It hasn't been more and more work for me, but then I try to maintain a minimalist system, which means I avoid these bloated, do-it-all-for- everyone monstrosities like KDE or Gnome. A simple window manager is good enough for my purposes. But what is meant by "better?" If you seek to eliminate the work of administration, that is, as I understand it, not the goal of Gentoo. In order to customize a system to ones liking, one has to to understand thoroughly how the system functions. Gentoo facilitates customization but it does not eliminate the need to understand -- and understanding can involve a lot of work. If the user is not willing to research and explore, then the user should indeed be advised to seek elsewhere. IMO, for one who seeks control and the ability to customize, there is nothing better than Gentoo. The only alternative is to build and maintain a system independently, in the manner of Linux From Scratch. But I've been down that road. Until recently, I used to compile all my own packages and completely administer my own personal "distribution." It was a fair amount of work, but with the proper organization and a lot of ambition ambition, it was quite feasible. However, certain developments in the Open Source world eventually served to dampen my enthusiasm. The most significant of these developments was the splitting of the X Window package from one into literally dozens of individual programs. With this change -- as well as several others that I won't mention -- the work load slowly became more and more unbearable, and I realized that I would not be able to continue doing it alone. After considering a lot of possibilities, I discovered Gentoo and realized that my needs could be once again be fulfilled without the excessive burden. It should also be considered that perhaps the upstream developers are making things more difficult. Many new packages that have been released seem to break everything that depends on them. For example, a new jpeg library, version 7, was released recently (which has not yet made it into Gentoo) that will require a rebuild of every program that processes images, and this includes the extensive GTK package as it uses libjpeg for its pixbuffer loader. Another example is the new gcc compiler, version 4.4.x. I have noticed that many packages will fail to compile with the new version of gcc and this necessitates that the previous version, 4.3.3, be also kept installed on the system. Lastly, do I need to mention the fiasco with the update of the xcb package for X Window? Once again, a single change has broken everything that has gone before. It has to be admitted that these upstream developers are not making life any easier for the distribution maintainers. But that's the nature of progress, I suppose. Fortunately, Gentoo can give the serious user a set of tools to better deal with these inevitable changes. Frank Peters
