Re: [tlug] Gentoo (was Kubuntu 11.10 日本語入力 How?)

["David J Iannucci" <jlinux@example.com>]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011, at 15:03, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> I was happier with Gentoo for a long time, but recently I've become
> less happy.  I find that the number of times I can't update because of
> some really screwed dependency that can't possibly work even on the
> uploader's machine, etc, has increased a lot lately.  This is probably
> the big one because it is in my face pretty much weekly.

I can't say I've had problems lately, but I also haven't done any mid-
size or larger updates lately either, but I'll admit... I perhaps
painted a slightly too-rosy picture of Life With Gentoo :-) Certainly
there have been a number of times in the past where I have *seriously*
dorked up my system (if I may borrow your verb :-) by not being careful
(read: doing something really st00pid).

Although it's good advice in general anyway, I'd advise anyone
wanting to play with Gentoo ferg*dsake NOT to do it on their only
working machine!

> Which leads to: Gentoo docs are profuse but by and large suck badly.

I agree... the quality of the docs leaves something to be desired, but
there are a pretty good selection of them, which is something, and I
have found that I usually don't need to consult them, because I can
usually find answers in the web forums.

The forums are one of the things I like best about the OS... there's a
lot of info there, if you're patient about sifting through it, and the
experienced people tend to be quite helpful. I have been able to find
the solution to countless problems in the forums, without needing to
post asking for help. As long as you're not sailing on the bleeding
edge, someone else has had any given problem before you.

The one (and probably only) thing that sucks about the forums is the
terrible search engine, which sometimes seems designed (configured?) to
prevent you from finding the results you need. And then there's the
front page of the main Gentoo web site, which gives one the idea that
they are actively trying to scare n00bs away...

> It's very hard to find out how to debug problems with Gentoo
> infrastructure, or how the infrastructure actually works.

If I understand what you mean, that level of stuff is most below my
threshold of wanting to know :-) But perhaps I've been lucky in not
having had problems there...

> Japanese input regularly seems to get screwed up for a while on both
> LibreOffice and FireFox, then eventually gets undorked.  But since
> this are both many-hour builds, it's not pleasant to deal with them.
>
> I'm also far less than pleased with the most recent version of
> LibreOffice, which is ugly, can't handle common Word files from my
> employer, and crashes all the time.

Firefox doesn't take all that long to build, but LibreOffice/OOo is
really a bear, which is why it's the one package that I use the pre-buit
binary for :-)  I've found the binary version to work better/be more
stable anyway, so it's a no-brainer for me.

> So Gentoo quality control leaves quite a bit to be desired, IMO.

FWIW - I have heard tell that, at least as of a few years ago, Gentoo
had arguably the most dysfunctional developer community of any major
distro, with some of the worst in-fighting. I have no trouble
believing it.

Dave