I’m kinda sick of Gentoo.
See, I installed Gentoo a long time ago because I wanted something that was a little more “current” than what I was getting out of Debian Stable. So I tried out Gentoo on my household server machine (named “junkyardog”)
It’s dumb. Really dumb. See, the whole idea of Gentoo is that you keep extremely current by building everything from source packages… but at the same time, it’s all wrappered up in a friendly interface so that you don’t need to spend your life knee-deep in code.
It’s basically the worst of both worlds. See, it’s not stable enough for anybody who uses their machine for something useful to really be interested, so it doesn’t attract much real attention from the people who will dump money on your plate to really solve any problems, nor does it attract any interest from companies who use it as a standardized distro, just a Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers. It’s invariably broken and in need of hand-tweaking when you want to install something. And the friendly interface just doesn’t make things that much easier than something like FreeBSD’s ports tree.
Oh, and they found an exploit in their web-based package search tool in August It’s now the end of October and it has yet to be fixed.
So I’m kinda annoyed because I’m not sure what the best way to wipe out my existing Gentoo install and replace it with something reasonable like Debian Stable. So I’m right now waiting till I feel like blowing a few hundered dollars, buying some new drives, and retiring some old drives (Drives, for me, have a 3 year lifespan, with no exceptions) and using that as an excuse to start over with a fresh install.
I did a little more work on Rm today. Stuff that once seemed to be far off in the distance is now nothing but a quick hack that slides nicely into an existing framework. I wrote three whole subsystems.. granted one subsystem is 128 lines, one is 109 lines, and one is 40 lines… but still… at this point all of the fundamental ways that data can be stored in the Rm system have been written. But I can’t finish things because I can’t seem to get ImageMagick to work on junkyardog and it’s pretty much the only game in town for Ruby.
Update: I finally figured out how to get ImageMagick working properly. I found myself upgrading automake, autoconfig, and perl and one of those seems to have resulted in things working again.