How to improve the pace of Gentoo and attract more contributers [LWN.net]

How to improve the pace of Gentoo and attract more contributers

Posted Sep 15, 2011 2:46 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831)
Parent article: The state of Gentoo

Bring back D. Robbins... and Seemant Kulleen. And do something about some of the current devs, who seem to be in their own little world, with little consideration for their *users* or fellow devs.

Gentoo sometimes reminds me of one of the movie "Almost Famous" where you have a dynamite rock band, but do to all the hubris, in-fighting and poor management, never reached their full potential.

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How to improve the pace of Gentoo and attract more contributers

Posted Sep 15, 2011 4:49 UTC (Thu) by robbat2 (guest, #40105) [Link]

seemant retired mainly due to lack of personal time to contribute to Gentoo.
I wonder how many devs are on the brink of similar.

drobbins is around on Funtoo.org

Posted Sep 16, 2011 15:48 UTC (Fri) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

Mr Robbins is involved with the Funtoo project which is a "fork" of the Gentoo ebuild tree. I hesitate to call it a fork because I'm not sure is applicable in a source based repo. Besides a lot of Gentoo installations are heavily "forked" with the use of overlays which allow customisation much like Ubuntu's PPAs only much much better.

I do occasionally submit stuff via the bugzilla but I have to admit my interest in additional development tailed off while waiting for the GIT conversion which as noted has been due RSN for some time. There is a difference between diff'ing a unified CVS tree and manually tracking each change you've made and the ability to branch a git repo and keep a stack of changes that get magically resolved when they are merged upstream. I suspect having more modern tools will help with lowering the bar to contribution and encouraging more developers to get involved, even if only peripherally at first.