Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>]

Quoting Jaanus Heeringson <jaanus AT heeringson.com>:
> So I'm at it again, burning the midnight oil.
> 
> I have recently read a lot of different articles about Linux in general 
> to try and get a grip on the "feel" out there, and this is some things i 
> found out:
> 
> 1. There is a confusion about choise of distro. At least more than there 
> was a few years ago, mostly due to the big ones starting to charge for 
> updates etc. People change distros often and simply can't make up their 
> minds. This is good for us, and we should take advantage of it.
> 2. Gentoo is big. It is almost allways mentioned alongside the other 
> large commercial distros. This is good since more people are interested 
> in sourcebased distros, and bad because we have a lot of work to do if 
> we want to make ourselves heard next to them.
> 3. A lot of the intermediate users are very tired of choise. They simply 
> don't want to research at every corner to install the appropriate stuff 
> (which MTA, DNS etc) and are asking for a "preferred setup". This maby 
> don't concern us yet, but it might in the future.

This distro is all about choice, so the best option for this would be 
default-*
packages such as we currently have.
 
> I'm a bit interested in gentoo and how it differentiates from SMGL. I 
> have read in on it a bit, but don't currently have time to install it 
> now. What I have found so far does not seem very impressive, at least 
> not when it comes to the base system. This of cause is not enough, so I 
> need more input reguarding this issue. I'm sure there are a lot of you 
> out there that try Gentoo now and then, so could you please describe 
> your view of the differences between Gentoo and SMGL? What's good & bad? 
> What are the major differences?

They have versioning support which is why a few of the people in my LUG use
Gentoo instead of SMGL. For some reason they think it's actually needed, but
since we're all about option it could be handy to add it, but I've heard that
would make Sorcery quite a bit more complex and need more work. Gentoo already
has pre-compiled binaries for a basic system (X, GNOME, KDE, etc.) for quick
installs and offers more advertising and more products (e.g. Unreal Tournament
2003 Live CD).

We have more options for each package on what you can do. Though with emerge 
you
can specify "USE" flags to change some behaviour it is not obvious from a new
user's perspective. Ours is much more intuitive and allows for more
custimization, but theirs requires less work and time to just get something
installed (no queries to go through, no options, etc.). They also have a 
system
for "merging" config file changes, though from what I've seen what they call
"merge" is just a `mv -i <newfile> <oldfile>` with backups. We also have
self-healing, which I haven't seen in any other package system besides our
predecessor. As has been mentioned, their system does not allow for parallel
processing (no downloads in the background while things compile in the
foreground) and I'm not sure how their SMP system works (multiple make jobs),
but I'm sure they support ccache and distcc. Gentoo also has a "prettier"
bootup, but that could also be a downside for installing onto older hardware
and making more work for their ISO team. Their installer is basically, "follow
these instructions" to get installed; no intuitive, step-by-step GUI to
facilitate the process, though I hear one is "in the works."

It may just be that I'm used to Sorcery, but I found emerge (Portage) to be
non-intuitive and not as feature-rich, but then I didn't try, or even want to,
learn about it much, so that could be a failing on my part.

> My gut feeling is that in order to get some attention we will have to 
> compete with Gentoo to get it, and since they actually are a for profit 
> company, it will be quite a task. In my opinion we need to find a couple 
> of point on how we differentiate us from Gentoo in a good way.

Yes we do, but they also have a reputation for not listening to their users
/and/ having loudmouth, misbehaved users. ;) We have a reputation (from what
I've heard) of having the most helpful and courteous channel and developers.
Haven't heard anything about our users, probably because they're not as vocal
as Gentoo's.

-sandalle

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Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us                  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/  #196285  |  http://www.shock.wsu.edu/

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