Too many programs?
There is some kind of disconnect between what’s available via portage, and what people actually know about. A number of times recently, someone has posted to -dev asking “Shouldn’t there be a program to do foo?” only to have someone respond “Try program bar”. The most recent example of this was module-rebuild. Now, I knew about module-rebuild, and I know about genlop, and eix, and…, but most people don’t. Why is this?
Partly, I think it’s just human nature. People complain rather than looking for answers. I can’t even count the number of times someone has asked me about something, and I’ve gone and googled for it, and given them the answer. They could, and arguably should, have googled themselves, but they didn’t. People are lazy, they want the answers handed to them.
Partly, I think it’s a lack of documentation. We should have a page somewhere listing all the cool apps we have that make working with gentoo easier.
Partly, I think it’s the abysmal lack of speed of emerge -s. Before I discovered esearch/eix, I never used emerge -s, because it was so slow. Now, I use eix constantly, because it’s fast. Couldn’t eix be incorporated into portage, and the eix cache rebuild when portage metadata is rebuilt? That would make it alwasy fast and up-to-date for end users, and would could actually tell people to search.
What’s the final answer? I don’t know, but I’d like to see both of the above done at some point, as I think they would help. Ultimately, there’s nothing we can do about the first point, and we can’t really make it a policy to answer such questions with “Google is your friend” without alienating our user base, but we can still make it as easy as possible for users to help themselves.
I’d realy like some documentation about that. I’m not one of the users that will complain very vast. And also i know realy well (IMHO) how to use google. But it would be nice to get some centralized documentation about the handy tools you guys make.
I think it’s a problem that there’s not one centralized program that runs as a frontend to these wonderful programs. For instance it’d be great if there was one gui(?) that used the best programs made for portage in a YAST style. I don’t personally use ‘eix’ but find qsearch in portage-utils to be the b0mb.
For the portage incorporation - you know about eix-sync, don’t you? It’s included with eix.
Yes, and I have my own versions of the eix-sync script, because I use CVS rather than rsync (being a developer). That’s not the point though. The point is that eix should be what’s used when a user does emerge -s, because they’re much more likely to do it if it’s fast. They shouldn’t need to find out about eix, and emerge it, and switch to eix-sync instead of emerge sync.
The simple reason eix isn’t included? The code is messy (according to ferringb).. the rewrite incorporates all sorts of useful fixes, and when we considder the cache change possibly headed for 2.0.54, (huge speedup!) and how that breaks eix, which has no current maintainer… walaa, we have problems!
Extropolate this to portage/savior, and you see why its not such a good idea.
Well, eix itself doesn’t have to be included, but eix-like functionality (fast searches) is vital.
and when its included, like, not copied along, but the same kind of fast search included, who cares of maintainer? it will have to work when you update code is it is the code you update.. heh
also, anything 2 times slower than eix would be da bomb.
actually, 4x times slower should even be nice ;p
portage is probably 200 times slower for big searches and about 6 times slower for name search (which is quite fast, for portage, id say useable)
Slow searches aren’t the only problem. I use eix but many packages don’t have a proper (useful) homepage URL.
ie. kdewebdev http://www.kde.org/, portage-utils http://www.gentoo.org/, codebreaker (http://packages.debian.org/codebreaker).
If there isn’t a website for the package, it would be nice to have a link to a README file or the text version of the man page as the homepage.
Well, enter portage-utils and qsearch… speedups will not happen in the 2.x line of portage development, as it would take well… a rewrite, which is what the dev’s are working on anyways, come to think of it!
I’m glad I’m not the only one! I’ve been sorely tempted to switch to Ubuntu lately and for one reason: Good Defaults.
Now, I’m a control freak, so one of the things I love about Gentoo is that nothing gets installed unless I tell it to (dependencies don’t count). However, the big downside is that:
1. I find a way to perform a task.
2. There exists a tool that is far easier to use (e.g. module-rebuild).
3. I have no way of knowing such a tool exists BECAUSE I can already perform my task (hence, no need to google).
A “cool apps” page would be useful. Even more useful would be a “if we were like a traditional distribution, what we would install by default” page. The handbook already reads like this (i.e. if you don’t know / care, install this), but that only gets you a working base system.
I search http://packages.gentoo.org/ for packages. Dosen’t that make sense? Then you see most of the programs that are available, and then you can go to the homepages to see screenshots or try them out and then pick one.