Alan McKinnon schrieb:
> On Saturday 10 May 2008, davecode@(protected):
>  
>> Hi,
>>
>> We plan to eval Gentoo. We await 2008 final. The comment is, Gentoo
>> home page gives no clue about status. Convincing people that Gentoo
>> is "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
>> motion on the home page. That's about all most people inspect.
>>  
>
> I think you misunderstand how Gentoo works.
>
> First of all, there's no such thing as "the latest Gentoo version". What
> you do have is the current state of the portage tree and that is
> constantly changing.
>
> All that "2008" is, is a workable snapshot of a basic system that you
> use to install Gentoo. The next thing you do is update the tree to the
> latest state, and update the system by recompiling everything that has
> changed since your CD image was built.
>
> There's only one reason to wait for the 2008 CD, and that is if you have
> hardware that cannot boot from existing installers due to driver
> issues. So this is a bootstrap problem, not a latest version problem.
> For example, this very notebook I'm using now is 7 months old, and I
> used a 2005 installer CD to install - it just happened to be the only
> one I conveniently had handy at the time.
>
> Gentoo is not Ubuntu, don't try to think of it in Ubuntu terms. Don't
> claim that "this confuses new users", because those new users are
> mistaken. Shoehorning Gentoo into something where the latest installer
> is of vital importance is never going to work and all attempts to do so
> will fail, in much the same way that awaiting "linux kernel 2.6 SP9" is
> also never going to work out
>
>  
>> So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
>> test.
>>  
>
> That's a false assumption. You or your users are looking at a blue sky
> and asking why it isn't green with pink dots because those colours are
> nice.
>
> Doesn't work that way.
>
>  
>> Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new
>> reported, maybe?? At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected
>> final release date"? Counting lines of code or something?
>>
>> Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present
>> expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask.
>>  
>
> OK, so this is what you'd like. Unfortunately you can't get it. What
> could be done though is a nice big clear link to an article that
> explains how Gentoo works and why OS versioning is not relevant.
>
> Perhaps a chart laying out the latest stale and unstable versions of
> major packages, categorized by arch would suit your needs.
> Distrowatch's list of packages provided would be a good place to start.
>
>
>  
That was what I meant to say! Thanks for this more epic explanation!