philosophy of design; request for instruction

[test]

On Tue, 2020-06-09 at 00:49 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Monday, 8 June 2020 20:00:31 BST Erik Quaeghebeur wrote:
> > On maandag 8 juni 2020 18:13:23 CEST, Paul Vixie wrote:
> > > Kontact Version 5.14.1 (20.04.0)
> > > KDE Frameworks 5.70.0
> > > Qt 5.15.0 (built against 5.15.0)
> > > The xcb windowing system
> > > 
> > > how do i get a KDE PIM that new without using an OS that's crossed
> > > over to
> > > systemd?
> > Gentoo <https://gentoo.org/> can deliver this, of course. It is
> > different
> > from other distributions in multiple ways, so you'll have to learn how
> > to
> > do things the Gentoo way. But much is the same. It brings with it its
> > own
> > set of time-sucking issues.
> > 
> > I like Gentoo, because it gives me (the feeling of being in) control,
> > which
> > I do not have with debian/Suse/Fedora.
> 
> The main thing Paul would have to learn is its package management
> system, 
> which is true of any distro. It's complex, but wonderfully capable and
> robust, 
> 

It depends on what you consider "robust".  My experience is that Gentoos
package management is a nightmare, giving you mysterious error messages
with every update that are impossible to understand and finally leaves you
unable to fix all the dependency problems it's running into because they
are not fixable.  After a short while, you run into a dependency loop in
that you need to update stuff which needs to be updated before you can
update, and at point, you have to reinstall from scratch.

That makes every update a dreadful experience which is best be avoided.  If
you are ok with spending lots of time trying to figure out what the error
messages mean, whith asking for help on their mailing list and with going
through all that at least once per week, with compile times amounting to
many hours even with 2x6x2 cores, then you may consider Gentoos package
management "robust" --- like in that emerge usually doesn't crash.

For a machine you want to use at home, let alone in production, Gentoos
package management is fundamentally broken and non-working.

> 
> [...]
> It's main advantages, for me, are the feeling of control you mention, and
> the 
> ability to tailor a system to suit you, without much of the bloat that
> comes 
> with a binary distro,

You don't get so much "bloat" when you start with, for example, Fedora
server.  From there, you can install more stuff, and you are likely to get
more "bloat" when you install more --- but then, the "bloat" means that
stuff just works to begin with, and when you find you don't need something,
like ModemManager, for example, just remove it.  If you have a modem, you
may want to keep ModemManager.

The "bloat" means you can open the spreadsheet your workmate or your boss
is waiting for you to do something with within a few minutes.  If you use
Gentoo, expect to have them wait until tomorrow or the day after until the
compiling is finished, or until next week when you finally fixed the
depencency problems for this time, or never.

So what is "bloat"?

What do you really need to tailor?  You can compile emacs without X11
support or install emacs-nox.  I guess you can compile apache with only the
modules you actually use, but what's the point?  That you have to spend
lots of time to get back to it and look into it later all over again when
you suddenly you need a module haven't compiled last time?  You can compile
exim without mysql support, but what does it matter other than wasting time
on configuring it, fixing dependency problems for exim and all its
dependencies and compiling everything?  Or KDE?

If you really want to do that, Gentoo can be a good choice.  If you want to
use your machines for other things, Gentoo is not a good choice.

>  nor being forced into a single solution to any given 
> problem.

You are not limited to the software that comes in the packages of a
distribution --- though it can be tedious to compile some things on some
distributions, especially when the distribution has aged some.  For
variaty, Debian may be the best choice because there's a package for almost
everything in Debian.

>  You do have to spend CPU cycles on compiling everything in situ, but 
> I don't find that a great burden; this box runs 24x7x52 on BOINC
> projects, and 
> a bit of compiling fits in well.
> 

So you're not really using it and let it run by itself automatically.  I
would use Centos for that; what would be the point of using Gentoo for
this?