On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 06:39:33PM +0000, Rob Fell wrote: > >I have to admit, it sounds like a lot of crunching. What kind of > >problems do you run into? * occasional major system upgrades (eg. major version of gcc or glibc, or the modular x.org transition) take a lot of time to compile since you may have to rebuild pretty much everything at least once. and in some cases a fair amount of fixing outdated config files. These are rare. Only really a problem if something fails part way through and you have to figure out how to proceed. Yes, that's happened to me. I've always found a solution on forums.gentoo.org. * occasionally dependencies get wedged where you have to remove a package before an upgrade, finish the upgrade, then reinstall the thing you removed. * the etc-update script isn't particularly user friendly (but god it's a million times better than having no help at all) * changing your mind about architecture is a pain. I built my current amd64 desktop with everything compiled 64-bit. Mistake. I haven't switched back yet because I haven't found the time to back up my data and start over. Normally people don't have that problem... I should've paid more attention before starting this particular install :) * occasionally you stumble on a bug where foo version X is incompatible with bar version Y but the ebuilds haven't been updated to avoid that problem yet. this means a trip to the search bar on forums.gentoo.org to find a workaround. * the gentoo proaudio ebuild is a bit bleeding-edge and occasionally new stuff doesn't work right away ... people are pretty on top of it though, it's a lively community. * I've still not found a no-hassle way to set up a roaming laptop. When I go somewhere new I end up using wifi-radar to see what's available and then end up manually configuring the new access point. That's about it. I've been mostly happy with gentoo for a couple years now. Upgrading does eat a little more of my time than I'd like, but I have never used a distro where that wasn't the case, and at with Gentoo there's a lot more control over what you do and don't get installed. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com
