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List:       gentoo-user
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-user] Progress bars??
From:       Frank Hellmuth <fhellmuth () yahoo ! de>
Date:       2004-01-31 21:21:09
Message-ID: 200401312221.21880.fhellmuth () yahoo ! de
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Am Saturday 31 January 2004 20:30 schrieb Jerry McBride:

> 1-PROGRESS BARS... man-o-man would I love a progress bar during an emerge
> update, instead of all the text that gets listed to console. And "updating
> portage cache"... WOW. That's a real friendly, informative screen update.
> :') Maybe just expanding the existing -quiet switch in emerge would be
> better?

Well, someone started something like that some times ago, don't know who. You 
have to patch make (and hope that your package use make for building) and 
even then you have to guess a lot. And a progressbar who's last percent takes 
longer than all other together is more anoying then no progress bar at all 
(and a very Windows typical thing...)!

> 2-HIDE THE GARBAGE... Do we really need to have ALL the compiler and emerge
> updated logged to the screen? See PROGRESS BARS above.

Well, gentoo is a source distribution, and that's how it looks if source code 
gets compiled. I can see what's going on and don't have to use top to see 
what's going on if I have the feeling something goes wrong. If I don't want 
to see it I minimize the terminal window. But you're right with a "emerge 
sync" I never understood 90% of the messages in it's output, I guess it's 
just rsync related stuff.

> 3-STARTUP SCRIPTS... Yup, Gentoo is beautiful. I use it all the time, on
> maybe a dozen computers of various architecture and brand. But I really
> have issue with the manner of organizing the system startup scripts. Could
> we please, use something more granular, more static? Like the good, old
> fashion SystemV stuff that they used in Caldera Open Linux? KDE ships with
> a SysV editor that would be a PERFECT match for something like this. I'm so
> tired of booting the laptops at work and wating for the "CACHING" to
> complete... If nothing else is done, please see PROGRESS BARS above.

This is one central point of gentoos architecture and I like it for it's 
fleixibility. Fo the progressbar-thing: bootsplash is in active development, 
I guess it would be more promising if you help them instead of trying to 
completly change gentoos boot concept. 

> 4-DEVFS is a horrible beast... Have odd hardware? Have odd drivers? You
> gotta' edit the devfs config file... Blah... Please go back to using a
> static /dev directory like Linus intended. :') It's one of the FIRST things
> I remove from my Gentoo installs and it's soooo much better.

Again, that was a decision made long time ago. Both have thier advantages and 
drawbacks.

Too me it looks like you want to change some of gentoos central points. I 
don't wanna be offensive, and I'm sorry If I do, (I have teeth ache from a 
root treatment at the moment...) but with that in mind, what features of 
gentoo *do* you like? ;)  

> Anyone willing to work/collaborate with me on implementing suggestion 3?
>
> The SysV stuff is pretty well documented on the net, the Open Linux stuff
> can still be found on the net too. All that needs to be done is developing
> an ebuild that wipes out the gentoo hack and slides in a decent startup
> script package that supports the gentoo layout. Do we really need
> dependencies in the startup scripts???

Of course we need them if we don't want them to be static and start to change 
the link names in the rc.x directory like I always do on a SUSE laptop to 
start the wlan card *before* the network, which Yast for some reasons yet not 
understood rechanges each time I launch it.

So, you basically want something like a central system setup utility with a 
GUI? Wel,l thats a hard thing to do it really right and even if you do it a 
lot of people will say "I want to configure and update my system in text 
mode!", especially here on gentoo, cause gentoos concept is not to be a "My 
First Linux" distribution...

Sorry if I sound too harsh, I apologize in advance, and go to narcoticate my 
tooth ache with a bootle of wine... 

Frank

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