Gentoo attempts to deal with developer conflicts (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 27, 2007 7:45 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

With every attempt to impose order, there will be those who feel restricted, even when all that is imposed is decorum. I have no blame, I wish all success.

Posted Mar 27, 2007 19:23 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Great comment until the fanboy paragraph. Overall, I appreciate the textured and eloquent view. Thanks.

Posted Mar 28, 2007 0:58 UTC (Wed) by rmunn (guest, #40618) [Link]

Users graduate to Gentoo from the binary distros, they don't graduate from Gentoo anywhere else. Those who do leave lack time or the ability to understand Linux & manage their own system.

This fanboyish statement is not entirely true. I, for one, am a counter-example.

I started using Linux around 1999. I started out with Debian. I first used stable, then got myself in trouble trying to compile-and-install more recent versions of programs over the top of the versions the package manager had installed. So I tried to run unstable, but I didn't have the Linux expertise to manage the occasional package breakage. I'd heard LFS (Linux From Scratch), a compile-your-own distro that ends up teaching you a lot about how the system is put together, so I switched to that -- and it taught me a whole lot. Now I understood what the package management programs (dpkg and so on) were doing for me. Eventually, I got tired of the repetition of "configure --help; patch -p1 < some-patch-file; make; make install" and the constant searching for dependencies, and switched to Gentoo, where I could just type "emerge some-package" and the dependencies and patching were taken care of for me. Joy! But I still ran into the occasional breakage. Some packages didn't seem to have been tested with certain flag combinations, so I sometimes had to wrangle with configure and make, then submit a patch for the ebuild. Still, all in all, not too bad. I certainly was spending a lot less time tinkering with the system, and a lot more time just using it for my work.

Then I saw some blog posts raving about Ubuntu. So I tried it. The version I installed was Warty Warthog, and while it seemed all right, I preferred Gentoo's flag flexibility. Sure it caused me the occasional problem when packages hadn't been tested on the particular combination of flags I was using, but it worked pretty well. So I kept using Gentoo. But six months or so later, when Hoary Hedgehog was released, I tried Ubuntu again. And it was incredibly smooth. I think the moment I was "sold" on Ubuntu was when I got my printer working with no hassles whatsoever, whereas on Gentoo I'd had to read a whole bunch of documentation to get my printer working. Suddenly I realized that here was a Linux distro that would let me use it for actual work and forget about the internals of the system. To use a car analogy, with Gentoo, I was spending maybe 15-20% of my time tinkering with the internals of the car, or waiting for it to self-assemble. (Waiting for things to compile). With Ubuntu, I was doing nothing but use the car to go places.

I said the statement above was not "entirely" true. It's true in part -- I could make the time to manage my Linux box if I wanted to. But I don't have the inclination anymore. And I don't have the need, either. If I needed to go into /etc and play around with the settings in there, I know how to do it. But the great thing about Ubuntu is how well-managed it is. I don't remember the last time I had to touch anything in /etc -- I think it was well over a year ago. Well, no, I've occasionally edited /etc/apt/sources.list to add a new repository -- but that's about it. (And even that, I could have done from within Synaptic).

So I wouldn't go back to Gentoo. However, that's not to say that it doesn't have its advantages. For software developers, for example, it's excellent -- no need to go find the separate foo-dev packages to get your include files, since everything was compiled and installed from source in the first place. But even software developers (like me, for example) may find they want to spend less time managing their system and more time doing other things, like coding. That doesn't mean they don't know how to do it, it just means they've found other distros more useful to them.

At the end of the day, though, we're all on the same team.

Posted Mar 28, 2007 7:48 UTC (Wed) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]

"My own view is that some recent comment is colored or even motivated
by envy of Gentoo's status as the top Linux distro, the one the pros use
(PACE Slackware)."

The top Linux distro is Red Hat, by far (I'm an Ubuntu user). Without all
the devs Red Hat pays, Linux, and Open Source would be much poorer. Novell
+ SUSE are a decent second place.

Other than that, nice presentation, but for the last part:
Troll. Teenager attitude ("PEACE <insert distro>"? kinda corny, isn't it?).

Posted Mar 30, 2007 6:06 UTC (Fri) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link]

The other was Gentoo's founder, who left 3 years ago to take paid work for a big US software monopoly, where he lasted c 12 months.

I've seen this claimed quite a lot lately. People, please get it straight. Daniel did not leave Gentoo for Microsoft. He left Gentoo in April of 2004 for financial reasons. He had accumulated a debt of over $20K while serving as chief architect and understandably needed to focus on providing for the welfare and future of his family.[1]

He was offered a job at Microsoft in June of 2005, over one year later. Seven months after that in January 2006 he resigned, citing frustrations with the inability to fully use his technical skills in his position at Microsoft's token "Linux Lab".[2]


[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.nfp/65
[2] http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39252292,00.htm

Posted Apr 2, 2007 2:38 UTC (Mon) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

> My own view is that some recent comment is colored or even motivated
by envy of Gentoo's status as the top Linux distro, the one the pros use
(PACE Slackware). Users graduate to Gentoo from the binary distros,
they don't graduate from Gentoo anywhere else. Those who do leave
lack time or the ability to understand Linux & manage their own system.

A word of advice from a (literally) grey beard Unix hacker: With this paragraph, you took your own eloquent description into a deep dive. There are many reasons to choose a Linux distribution, and to paint all Gentoo non-users as incompetent Linux administrators is such a grossly incompentent statement, it boggles one's mind. With that all your previous paragraphs are worth nothing any more, just fanboy shouting. Why should we believe you, when you're spouting such obvious infantile nonsense?

You wrote about the problem of Gentoo having too young contributors, "average age seems to be c 25". I hope you're not typical, otherwise the average age would be more like "c 6". (I assume that "c" means "ca." but actually don't know it. But maybe I'm simply too old, or you're not used to communicate with non-native English speakers, in your age.)

Posted Apr 7, 2007 20:19 UTC (Sat) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

>Users graduate to Gentoo from the binary distros, they don't graduate
>from Gentoo anywhere else

I switched from Gentoo, for the following reasons; maybe
distributions can learn from that:

- One of the main reasons I originally chosen Gentoo was that it had
AMD64/i386 multilib support. After one upgrade, my i386 binaries
using X stopped working, and did not work again while I was using
Gentoo. So one of the attractions was gone.

- The killer, however, was that on every "emerge sync", it might ask
you to do some major upgrading before anything else. At least once
that upgrading made me fiddle several hours with config files.
After that I avoided using emerge pretty much completely (I
basically never have several hours to spare), so another big
attraction of Gentoo was gone.

Eventually I switched to Debian. However, there are some things in
Gentoo that I miss in Debian:

+ The world file, which records the packages I explicitly installed,
rather than all the packages that have been installed. It would be
so much easier to get all the packages I need on a new machine if
Debian had that; a particular problem with extracting all the
packages from dpkg is all the implicitly loaded packages that change
names or get replaced between distributions.

+ In Gentoo, I just put "doc" in the USE flags, and I get
documentation. In Debian I have to ask for documentation explicitly
for each package. Moreover, for a lot of documentation I have to
add non-free to my sources.list (how about a separate GFDL area or
somesuch?).