The installation section of the Handbook should mention as an option the ability to replace agetty with mingetty for non-X text consoles. Most users won't want to run serial consoles, and mingetty saves some memory and loads noticeably faster (at least on my system). Pointing out that they can get these benefits if they switch their *getty implementation is IMHO a Good Thing(TM) to have in the installation instructions, where other such decisions are already being made. IMHO it would be even better to have mingetty be the default (including the mingetty ebuild in the base system, and pulling agetty out of util-linux into its own ebuild), and having optional instructions, or a separate HOWTO, for those who want to run serial consoles... but I realize that might not be feasible, if only for political reasons.
Second point has nothing to do with Docs Team, I'll suggest you creating another bugreport. To the first point, I'm not sure that the Handbook is the best place for such recommendations, it should go to some wiki, forum thread or whatever.
Well, the two approaches are mutually exclusive, obviously; I just mentioned the second as a tickler in case somebody else decides that that's a) actually better and b) politically doable, in which case I'd figure this bug would get reassigned/reclassified accordingly instead. The problem with putting an item like this on the Wiki are that it will be ignored there by people who might be interested in it but don't know about it. In IRC, for example, we continually tell people to read the Handbook, especially when attempting installs (especially since there's no other way, presently at least, to get it installed without the step-by-step install docs in front of you), and then the HOWTOs on gentoo.org. We never tell them to do all of that and then peruse every single document on the Wiki that might conceivably have something to do with their system. It only hurts that the quality of documentation on the Wiki has been reputed to be variable at best. In this case I'm of the opinion that a separate HOWTO wouldn't help much, because a document titled "Mingetty Installation Guide" or some such would only appeal to those who already know what it is and why they'd care about it. (And those people probably don't need information on how to use it, anyway; at that point, they probably already know that, too.) The point is that people *don't* know it's there, they *don't* know they have a choice, so they're forced to accept the Gentoo default out of ignorance. We tell them explicitly about the choice of syslogd's, the choice of crons, etc., but this is a choice that we hide from them. That goes against the philosophy of, "It is very important that you understand that *choices* are what makes Gentoo run. We try not to force you onto anything you don't like." (Handbook, section 1a)
Definitely not in the handbook. Maybe a note in http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-tipsntricks.xml but I still fail to see the point of replacing agetty by mingetty. Smaller memory footprint? agetty is not using a lot: root 2102 0.0 0.0 1324 40 vc/6 Ss+ May02 0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux Speed? My P100 feels OK with agetty. Making it the default: I doubt it but it's not our call anyway. Talk about this on the gentoo-dev mailing list. Serial consoles are not political, they are useful, often essential, even in the x86 world.
Thanks for the suggestion anyway.
