Forget Hardy

[Derek Broughton]

Alan E. Davis wrote:

I'll respond to this bit first:
> I hope these comments are taken as constructive.

Wel, I asked :-)  I really am interested.  I think, as others have indicated
elsewhere, that Gentoo and Ubuntu are never going to be aiming at the same
targets.  Most users never will want to compile their entire system - or
take the time involved.  That doesn't mean, though, that if they're doing
something very well, we can't learn from it. 

> I'll answer this, it's worth explaining, although the comparison with
> Gentoo
> may be unfair (for which I apologize.  Gentoo HOWTOS are spot on. 
> Gentoo's
> own documentation seems to me to always be up-to-date.  Almost
> miraculously.    When I search for documentation, I don't see out of date
> versions, I don't have to wade and weed through out of date docs to get to
> one that works.  I don't know why, but the quality is exemplary.  I have
> also found the bugzilla site very much up to date.

That unfortunately didn't do a thing to clarify the question I asked. 
Which "docs"?

> And I apologize to say the following about Ubuntu's docs, because I am
> really having an excellent experience with Ubuntu right now, and I have
> referred a number of people to Ubuntu: I have had to sort through gobs of
> howto descriptions---google ubuntu and a few key words about a problem,
> and I get an array of hits, not all of which are specific to the problem

That's not a problem of Ubuntu documentation, or something Gentoo is doing
better - it's a necessary result of the fact that Ubuntu is vastly more
popular and there are many times more people blogging and otherwise writing
about their experience with Ubuntu.  Nothing Ubuntu/Canonical could do
could stop people creating their own, sometimes erroneous and often
outdated, pages about Ubuntu.

> Perhaps I can expand on this: I have personal issues with various points
> about Ubuntu, some of them involving earlier disatisfaction with Debian
> regarding kernel compiling and installing packages from upstream source.
> Earlier on, however, Debian distros---I used Knoppix alot, just to make
> the install easier---always didn't hold together for me: the complicated
> packages did not work!  
> But Ubuntu seems to have solved almost all of those
> problems!  How do I know, maybe Debian has too.  

I don't know either :-)  Everything Ubuntu does is available to Debian -
doesn't mean it gets incorporated, though.

> Some of my queries have never been answered, and I suspect
> that perhaps my verbose postings got in the way of what I was trying to
> ask.  

That can certainly happen.  When I read (or at least scan) at least 500
posts a day (not all Ubuntu related), I tend to skip when I can't figure
out the question quickly.  It always helps everybody if you can get an
accurate description of a problem in the first 4 or 5 lines of a post.  Of
course, there are times that problems aren't that easy to pinpoint or
describe.  In that case, you just have to think like a novelist, and grab
the reader's attention as fast as possible.
-- 
derek