Managing Gentoo - a study in quotes [LWN.net]

Managing Gentoo - a study in quotes

Posted Aug 31, 2006 17:43 UTC (Thu) by g2boojum (subscriber, #152)
In reply to: Managing Gentoo - a study in quotes by landley
Parent article: Managing Gentoo - a study in quotes

> The purpose of the editor isn't to write the articles, the purpose of the
> editor is to decide what goes in the magazine. And the editor does this
> by saying "no" to anything that's not good enough. The main power at the
> top is veto power, but it's still extremely important.

Actually, the existing council (committee) actually does a pretty good job
of vetoing bad ideas. What most of the quotes are suggesting, however,
is that veto power isn't really enough. A number of Gentoo developers
strongly feel that the folks at the top of the heirarchy should be setting distribution-wide goals and guiding the rest of the developers in achieving those goals. In the current system the setting and achievement of goals is mostly limited to individual developers and projects.

> I've said for years that Gentoo was replacing Debian. I'm sad to see
> they're being a bit more thorough about it than I expected. Who is in
> charge?

Ultimately, the people who choose to develop the distribution are in charge. That's always the underlying reality of a community distribution. Volunteers will work on what they find interesting, or useful, or necessary, and they will "vote with their feet" if they are not allowed to work on stuff that fits those categories. Leadership under such conditions is therefore an exercise in herding cats. It may be necessary, but it is by no means simple.

Incidentally, although people often scoff at the notion of leadership by committee, the job of leading a distribution is easily a full-time job for a single person. Since our devs aren't paid (by Gentoo, anyway), that isn't a very realistic strategy.

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