Is Gentoo in crisis? [LWN.net]

January 16, 2008

This article was contributed by Donnie Berkholz

It all started with a blog post by Daniel Robbins. That was on January 11. But of course, it didn't really start there. That's just when the internal furor over the revocation of the Gentoo Foundation's corporate license became public. Developers had been trying to figure out what to do in the internal gentoo-core mailing list for about a week, and as such things do, it leaked.

The larger-scale problems didn't even start there. The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter hasn't been posted for 13 weeks, and the Gentoo homepage hadn't seen any changes in the same amount of time. Furthermore, Gentoo's second release of 2007, dubbed 2007.1, never happened and on Monday was announced canceled.

What do these problems mean? Is Gentoo collapsing? Another blog post by Daniel Robbins suggests part of the answer—serious communication problems exist between developers and the rest of the Gentoo community. The relevant aspect here is that developers are so focused on working in their little areas that they fail to tell the world what they're doing. Everyone wants to develop, and nobody wants to spend time telling the world what's being developed. Most developers don't want to spend time doing anything but develop. In the same way, developers don't enjoy spending time dealing with "boring" issues like donations, copyright, tax returns, etc., nor are they generally any good at it.

Development remains active in the background—new versions of packages appear, bugs are fixed, the gentoo-dev mailing list is quite active, and so is IRC. Developers continue to blog on Planet Gentoo. But none of that is apparent to Gentoo users, who go to the homepage, read the weekly newsletter, and wait for the next release. To users, things can look like they're in stasis.

That's where Gentoo needs to concentrate its efforts: telling the world what developers are doing. To accomplish that, the project will either need to find new contributors interested in doing this or streamline its processes so that less effort is required to communicate (for example, automatically including Planet information or new versions from packages.gentoo.org on the homepage). Specifically, one hope with the foundation is to hand off the work to people who enjoy dealing with it, so developers can concentrate on development—people at Software in the Public Interest, or the Software Freedom Conservancy. An announcement on the Gentoo homepage proposing a move to a monthly newsletter brought nearly 20 offers of help in only 2 days, so it may be that the project hasn't been looking for non-development help in all the right places.

Gentoo isn't dying, but its developers need to tell that to the world.

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Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Jan 17, 2008 14:24 UTC (Thu) by shieldsd (subscriber, #20198) [Link]

Another case study in the problems of open-source governance. Success requires not just good
code, but equally good leadership, each and every day. A project cannot just be just a union
of developers, rather one needs a collective group working in unison.

A key point made here is that success also requires lowering the barriers of entry to
potential new developers. As Daniel makes clear, the path to become a Gentoo developer is now
too long and too arduous. Long-term sucess requires  making the project more hospitable to new
members.

thanks,dave
http://gotoxo.wordpress.com

Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Jan 17, 2008 18:05 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

OTOH, you'ĺl get nowhere fast if the developers of the code aren't up to snuff. And maintaining a distribution is much worse than any run-of-the-mill project: There the problems are in the interaction of components that, by themselves, are already complex; and the codebase to be managed is the sum of thousands of individual packages.

Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Jan 19, 2008 1:22 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Another case study in the problems of open-source governance.

I think you mean community-developed software governance. Open source software can be produced by strongly governed, highly organized companies such as IBM or Sun without the kinds of problems we're talking about here.

Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Feb 12, 2008 12:09 UTC (Tue) by pratyeka (guest, #50465) [Link]

I wholeheartedly agree that barriers to new developers are too high.  I have modified an
ebuild before, submitted patches for a couple (from memory) and am trying to create some
totally new ones.  But it's really hard to get help... eg: #gentoo-dev doesnt give voice.

Two other points:
 - And the whole overlays thing is really user-unfriendly.
   My suggestion is that there should be a 'search overlays as 
   well' flag on emerge (which triggers downloading every overlay), 
   with flashy red warnings etc. if a user tries to install overlaid 
   packages.  This saves USER time and hassle, which is more important
   than computer time.
 - Gentoo's VOIP is totally broken, asterisk is ancient, heaps of packages
   are missing.  I'm trying to get in to this but the people I ran in to
   on IRC (#gentoo-voip) seemed defensive almost to the point of 
   hostility.  That's fine but roll over, I'm going to just make some
   ebuilds for asterisk/asterfax.  Screw this 'overlay' stuff, it's
   like someone's private domain.

Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Jan 17, 2008 21:13 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]

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.

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!

Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted Jan 21, 2008 4:13 UTC (Mon) by kamil (subscriber, #3802) [Link]

It's not just communication.

Remember the fiasco with packages.gentoo.org? It was down for months because of a security breach followed by an endless quarrel between various Gentoo groups regarding who was responsible for fixing it. Finally, a new version of the code was put online, but it is seriously lacking in features and doesn't seem to be evolving (essential features such as Search are missing, making it next to useless).

These are not signs of communication problems. These are signs of a project desperately lacking effective leadership.