It would be nice, to have a short explaination of the different stages or a link to that explaination. On the download page are also hardened versions. For them I am also missing the explaination in the manual. The link above is just an example. The other achitecures are affected to. As follow up, also the translations are affected. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Open e.g. above URL and see
We don't explain the stages because we only support installing from a stage3 tarball. The other two are explained in our other documentation, and the hardened stages appear in the relevant hardened/security handbook. Discussing them is beyond the scope of the regular installation handbook, since we do not want users to assume they have any choice and that they can just mix-and-match when installing.
If you had added your comment to the manual you had fixed this bug. ;-)
Well regarding hardened the stages are not documented at all (AFAIK) in our current documents. I think I should try either making a patch over the handbooks explaining how to make the install with hardened stages (it changes very little) or a new set of handbooks explaining that. Regarding the other stages (i.e. stage 1 stage 2) I think last time I read the handbooks found a comment regarding they are old and unsupported. And I can't find them on any mirror. Frank, where did you find references to stage 1 or stage 2 if you did?
We already have a security handbook. Installing a complete hardened system is far enough outside the normal installation process for the majority of our users that I don't want to add stuff to the existing ones. The GDP can't maintain two sets of handbooks -- it's up to the security/hardened teams to maintain that sort of documentation, in their own /proj/ space. We're not even going to make the user aware that there are stage 1/2 tarballs in the handbook. It's not something they need to know about. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/faq.xml#stage12
My situation was as following: I read the first chapters of the handbook and then clicked the mirrors link. after choosing a close mirror I felt a little lost by the different available choices. That was the point where I thought, the handbook should explain that clearer. Re 3: In part=1 chap=2 b is a section "The Stage3 Tarball" with a references to stage1 and stage2 tarballs. A short sentence like in faq.xml#stage12 "This is for development purposes (the Release Engineering team starts from a stage1 tarball to obtain a stage3) but shouldn't be used by users: a stage3 tarball can very well be used to bootstrap the system." would IMHO be very useful in that section. OTOH I saw only in the experimental branch stage[1|2] files from 2006. So the section is probably obsolet and could be replaced by a simple "For historical reasons the stable tarball is called stage3. In ancient times there were instable stage 1 and 2 tarballs but they are dropped." About Hardened: From http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/index.xml: "Hardened Gentoo is a project which oversees the research, implementation, and maintenance of security oriented projects for Gentoo Linux." and "These solutions will be available in Gentoo once they've been tested for security and stability by the Hardened team." are the essentials which would tell this are not the files a starter wants. IMHO adding the above sentences would save the starter the time of googling that unexplained terms and references. BTW, while the section 2.a. "Hardware Requirements" also mentions the LiveCD, that is has no later section.
