Re: Gentoo/Alpha (was: Fw: Latest RH for AXP?)

[Will Woods <will woods hp com>]

Damien Dye wrote:

> > > when did they release another rc stage 1 ?

Finished building it yesterday. It will appear on the gentoo mirrors 
soon (in experimental/alpha/stages).

> would be nice if there was an alpha page like there is for all other popular
> platforms.

If you mean the install docs: they're here:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-alpha-install.xml

They just aren't linked from the front page yet. Once we build a new 
liveCD (should happen this week) and get some people to look over the 
install docs, they will be there.

> may be sysV boot scripts instead of bsd style also ( as an option).

Well, that's your preference, but gentoo actually has more of a "soft 
runlevel" system. Basically you have an arbitrary number of runlevels 
with names like "default", "boot", "nonetwork", "offline", or whatever 
you like, and you can switch between them at will. Also, the init 
scripts have knowledge of their dependencies, so they start/stop 
themselves in the right order automatically. You can read more about it 
here:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/rc-scripts.xml

> > This statement makes no sense, propolice isnt a dependency or requirement
> > by any package in our portage tree, its just a patch to gcc.
>
> portage would not let me build packages ( testing gcc works no)

That's strange. What makes you think it's propolice that's the problem? 
It works fine for me - I'm typing this mail in Mozilla 1.4, running on 
an XP1000, and the entire system was compiled with that gcc..

> > No ebuilds _require_ propolice, And never have. Its entirely optional.
>
> maybe some documenation telling users where to turn off that requirement.

What would be the point of removing the patch? To the best of my 
knowledge it's disabled by default. You can enable it by putting 
"-fstack-protector" in CFLAGS if you want/need to compile your system 
with it.

> ( if there is it is hard to find may be a search engine on the site!)

try using "site:gentoo.org" in a google search.. it works quite nicely.

> I do also read the ebuilds for some gentoo packages as to see what is being
> patched and configured in cetain packages.
> Am no dising  gentoo it is fine on my x86 pc's but it just looked as alpha
> was a one off port @ rc1.

Yeah, rc1 was done half a year ago - things have changed a lot since 
then. We also lost the lead of the port, so we had to redo building 
stages and liveCDs on our own. But at this point it's stable enough for 
me (and quite a few others!) to use it as my desktop machine.

-will