Arch goes Gentoo?

Fox · 2004-08-09 17:10:38

The last days it seems arch goes gentoo ways. First the server project of Wojciech Szlachta and now arch for athlon-xp and amd 64. Maybe it's to easy to build your own distro with arch. What do you think about this?

Fox

hypermegachi · 2004-08-09 18:13:48

i think it's great that arch has the amount of freedom that it has. you have a great binary package system. great source package system. both very easy and simple to use. how can this be a bad thing? if you didn't like this freedom and liked everything figured out for you, you wouldn't be using arch anyways. you'd be using fedora or mandrake.

dp · 2004-08-09 18:17:30

the gentoo way?

?

again, also here, evolution can explain your observation:
different distros, no matter what principles they contain, will, if the need for something exist on fans of that distro, include also developement in this direction - convergent evolution :-)

i3839 · 2004-08-09 18:22:26

An Arch version specific for servers makes sense because servers care more about stability, while Arch more or less blindly updated to the newest software versions. So someonehand picking stable stuff isn't that bad, it's not something Arch would want to do, so a sort of fork is perfect for that imho (mind that I know absolutely nothing about that project).

Arch optimized for athlon-xp is not worth the trouble. But if someone has the time, think it's fun and recompiles everything anyway then why bother about it.

A special 64 bit version of Arch actually makes sense, because that's a very big change. It's just another platform.

If people fork Arch, or use it for their own distros then that's a good sign.

I miss to see any resemblance with Gentoo though, it took very long before there was any Gentoo based distro, and the more specific projects seem to come from Gentoo itself, and not from it's users (like the Mac port and the secure server thing).

Fox · 2004-08-09 19:17:24

What about good old binaries? The gentoo way seems to be popular nowadays.

Fox

Dusty · 2004-08-09 19:24:30

Fox wrote:

What about good old binaries? The gentoo way seems to be popular nowadays.

Most people don't compile from source on Arch unless the binary they want isn't available. (Some people lke to recompile everything, and to be honest, I have no idea why they don't just use Gentoo, since it was designed for compiling...)

The projects you outlined are all about binaries. Making a 64 bit fork means there are binaries for 64 bit computers. Without this, people wouldn't be able to run optimized Arch on a 64 bit processor without recompiling everything themselves.

Making a stable server style repository is about making binaries that are stable and not updated like current is; they are only updated for security fixes. Currently, if people want to use versions of software not supported in current, they have to compile from scratch.

I don't think it's inherently bad if people want to extend Arch to do something it wasn't meant to do originally. I do think it's bad if:

a) people try to extend Arch in ways that it *was* meant to do originally and create a new distro or repository instead of including it in Arch.

b) people try to extend Arch in ways that it *wasn't* meant to do originally and do try to include it in Arch.

But this is only my personal opinion.

Dusty

ravster · 2004-08-09 19:46:48

To me it seems the major objection with the current setup seems to be the 'blind updates'.
Why not just have a 'server' repo which has all the server specific packages, but only after these same packages have been around in current and extra for some time?

The only 'difficulty' I see with this is the investor's dilemma -- only use the versions that noone makes a noise about. Since posts that go like 'Oh hi there, I just wanted to say that the new version of package _____ works without any difficulties, thanks a lot O Great Maintainer' are not found normally, we would most probably need a position for someone who keeps an eye on these packages, and when such a quiet(read working perfectly) package comes out, (s)he should copy the package onto this 'server' repository. I am assuming, of course, that people will follow the rule to keep their systems regularly updated.

This repository would most probably be accessed by people with production grade systems, those systems which one should not play around with, while the normal packages(the latest ones, in current/extra) would be used by those who do not NEED such stability.

neotuli · 2004-08-09 22:02:20

The whole server branch sounds like a great idea. I know that if I ran a large-scale server, I would certainly not want the bleeding edge of software. I'd rather use software that has been on the proving grounds for some time, had security flaws caught and fixed, and had any quirks discovered. This would obviously help to keep the machine up and running without too much worrying about stuff going haywire, if it was gonna go haywire, it already did on someone else's machine...and so it was fixed before I got it.

As for the topic. Do you realize how many pkgbuilds are based almost entirly or in large part off the ebuilds over at gentoo? I know that when I can't get something to compile, and I suspect the software perhaps needs a small patch, I just hop over to gentto and take a looksie at what they came up with as a solution. I'm sure others out there do too, no doubt. As for arch becoming gentoo...mmmm...no. The primary mechanism for arch's package managment is and will continue to be (for the foreseeable future anyway) the binary repos. The abs system is used for custom jobs and keeping the binary repos up to date, not for building an entire system.

i3839 · 2004-08-09 23:04:40

Deciding which version is stable and which is not should be the programmer's job, not the distro's. That said, reality is of course different, but I would like to point out the main difference between a new version and an old "stable" one: From the old one all the bugs are known, so you know what you install and can expect. The new version can have less bugs (and most times hopefully will have less bugs), but the uncertain aspect is that you have no idea what new bugs there are, if any. I think that in practice that's the main difference between "stable" and "unstable" software. The above is basically the same as knowing that it works now, but may not with the newer version.

It would be nice to have an option in Pacman where you can tell to only download packages older than a configurable time, and which didn't had an update within that time, so that such package has proven to be somewhat stable. But that would require the date of when the package was made in the pkgbuild, though that's already present as a comment most times. If the date is known then it's very easy to implement.

Edit: I just realize that I could take the date of the package files from the database. That's less accurate because the files have the date of the sync, not of when the packages were made.

Edit2: Pacman -Qi seems to know the build date, but I see no such info in /var/lib/pacman/*, need to find out how Pacman knows that. I'll write a patch Wednesday if I don't forget it.

sarah31 · 2004-08-09 23:32:57

neotuli wrote:

As for the topic. Do you realize how many pkgbuilds are based almost entirly or in large part off the ebuilds over at gentoo? I know that when I can't get something to compile, and I suspect the software perhaps needs a small patch, I just hop over to gentto and take a looksie at what they came up with as a solution. I'm sure others out there do too, no doubt. As for arch becoming gentoo...mmmm...no. The primary mechanism for arch's package managment is and will continue to be (for the foreseeable future anyway) the binary repos. The abs system is used for custom jobs and keeping the binary repos up to date, not for building an entire system.

At one time I maintained about 450 packages for arch and i would say less than a quarter used "ebuilds" or gentoo patches. only when I could not find out what to patch myself would I even bother with looking at a gentoo build. In fact I probably used just as many crux build as I did gentoo.

I don't even know any programming language (except some php and html) and I learned how to recognize what needed to be patched and generate one. The rest of a PKGBUILD is the same instructions you would pass when compiling source on your own.

I think it is completely erroneous to suggest that arch builds are mostly constructed from gentoo builds. If that were the case then don't you think we would have just designed a script to transalet ebuilds to PKGBUILDs.

Feh what a suggestion :evil:

sarah31 · 2004-08-09 23:47:32

People can do what they want. I think it is cool that people want to make other ports but it would be even nicer if people could just make more package too. One of the criticisms of arch is the "small" repos. When people are making ports for i386 etc it is very hard to grow the repos or get more maintainers of packages.

It is cool that people wanna make a server repo but it would be even nice3r to have the security patches in such a repo available for all in the regular repos.

Dusty · 2004-08-10 00:58:32

sarah31 wrote:

One of the criticisms of arch is the "small" repos.

Some people, such as myself, think this is one of the advantages of Arch.

Sorry Sarah, just haven't argued with you for a while. :-P

Dusty

Xentac · 2004-08-10 02:01:12

Fox wrote:

The last days it seems arch goes gentoo ways. First the server project of Wojciech Szlachta and now arch for athlon-xp and amd 64. Maybe it's to easy to build your own distro with arch. What do you think about this?

I don't see how this relates to gentoo really... Apart from the fact that gentoo is just one of the other distros that does some of this stuff as well.

gvre · 2004-08-10 08:13:37

Fox wrote:

The last days it seems arch goes gentoo ways. First the server project of Wojciech Szlachta and now arch for athlon-xp and amd 64. Maybe it's to easy to build your own distro with arch. What do you think about this?
Fox

Is arch available for amd 64 and athlon-xp ?

Gvre

Fox · 2004-08-10 11:02:37

gvre wrote:

Fox wrote:
The last days it seems arch goes gentoo ways. First the server project of Wojciech Szlachta and now arch for athlon-xp and amd 64. Maybe it's to easy to build your own distro with arch. What do you think about this?
Fox
Is arch available for amd 64 and athlon-xp ?
Gvre

They are currently talking about this. Look in the Thread.

Fox

Fox · 2004-08-10 11:06:47

I think the Server Version is useful and I mean not that other forked distros of arch are bad. But seems that more and more people are recompiling everything. I just wanted to hear the opinion of other users towards this.

Fox

gvre · 2004-08-10 11:21:59

I believe that is a very good idea to have a stable repo and a -current repo. This is very usefull especially for servers. I have 2 arch servers, i have to ignore packages and i have to check for dependencies for ignored packages also. I would very happy to stay at stable version and to install just patches. I would very happy to see an amd 64 arch version

Gvre

Fox · 2004-08-10 11:39:36

gvre wrote:

I believe that is a very good idea to have a stable repo and a -current repo. This is very usefull especially for servers. I have 2 arch servers, i have to ignore packages and i have to check for dependencies for ignored packages also. I would very happy to stay at stable version and to install just patches. I would very happy to see an amd 64 arch version
Gvre

I would be happy to have an amd 64.

Fox

Arch Linux

#1 2004-08-09 17:10:38

Arch goes Gentoo?

#2 2004-08-09 18:13:48

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#3 2004-08-09 18:17:30

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#4 2004-08-09 18:22:26

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#5 2004-08-09 19:17:24

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#6 2004-08-09 19:24:30

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#7 2004-08-09 19:46:48

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#8 2004-08-09 22:02:20

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#9 2004-08-09 23:04:40

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#10 2004-08-09 23:32:57

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#11 2004-08-09 23:47:32

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#12 2004-08-10 00:58:32

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#13 2004-08-10 02:01:12

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#14 2004-08-10 08:13:37

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#15 2004-08-10 11:02:37

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#16 2004-08-10 11:06:47

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#17 2004-08-10 11:21:59

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

#18 2004-08-10 11:39:36

Re: Arch goes Gentoo?

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