Is Gentoo in crisis? [LWN.net]

Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Jan 17, 2008 21:13 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668)
Parent article: Is Gentoo in crisis?

I'm not a fan of Gentoo but it seems like the only substantive problem here is the management
of the foundation, followed by trolling by this Daniel Robbins guy.

The other two things mentioned in this article aren't really relevant. Consider Debian (my
preferred distro, as it happens). The DWN newsletter has been intermittent at best since Joey
Schultz gave up on it years ago. Since then it's been painfully sporodic and currently hasn't
been published since July of 2007!

The website, too, is pretty much only updated for security fixes, and I assume that's done by
an automatic script somewhere. Other than that it's tragically unmaintained (wasn't that a
campaign promise of the current DPL to fix?).

But nobody's going to take those two data points and try to extrapolate that Debian is dying.
The number of packages supported continues to boom, more developers are coming on board, bugs
are getting fixed, and progress is getting made. I think the problem with the newsletter is
that it's a fairly big responsibility to put that together every week, and the stress of a
weekly deadline can zap the energy out of such a volunteer project. A website seems like
something that can pretty easily slip through the cracks when compared to the immense problem
of maintaining a modern Linux distro.

So it seems like Gentoo needs to fix its foundation, or move to be under an umbrella
organization with a staff that can keep things straight, but other than that this whole thing
looks like controversy drummed up by Mr. Robbins as part of a power grab.

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Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Jan 17, 2008 22:26 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Daniel Robbins is funny. 

I got into Gentoo for a while years and years ago, when he was in charge. He took a very
strong stance against orginizational misfits.. people who bitch and moan about this or that or
love to tell other people what they should be doing and do not contribute to anything. 

His approach was to tell them to put out or get out. If they don't put out they get kicked
out. Very strong stance based on experiances with early distributions and how infighting
destroyed coeciveness. The vast majority of the friction comes from a minority of people who
just don't create or contribute anything but drama. It only takes one or two of these types of
people to go around unchecked that can destroy a otherwise healthy open source project.

If Gentoo kept that attitude alive it probably would be much more successfull then it is now. 



> But nobody's going to take those two data points and try to extrapolate that Debian is
dying.

You forgot to add in that Gentoo lost it's non-profit status through no good reason except
pure laziness or incompetence. To the outside world it looks like nobody in charge realy gives
enough of a shit about it to keep it running.

If you combine that with the fact that there is no sign of progress and no updates to either
the OS or the website then it looks bad. 

Of course looks can be deceiving. I haven't paid any attention to Gentoo once I figured out
how to live with Apt-get being rather controlling.

Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Jan 18, 2008 5:44 UTC (Fri) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]

> I haven't paid any attention to Gentoo once I figured out
> how to live with Apt-get being rather controlling.

Hear hear.  Learning how to properly wrestle control back from Apt (diversions,
stat-overrides, config files, alternatives, pinning, etc) is very useful.  Things are so much
smoother when you're working with the system rather than against it!