State of affairs
June 22nd, 2006Well, its been a interesting week for me at least. I’ve gotten quite a few people annoyed at me it would appear because I’m actually going to attempt to do something about at least one problem in gentoo. It’s amazing in some ways that people will complain about the problem and then turn their back when it comes time to do something about it. It really makes me wonder in some ways how much these people care about the project they are working on. Its also much like the people who will support you in private, but will walk away when its in the public eye. Its nice to know you support me in private, however that doesn’t do any good when I actually need the support. Its appreciated but discombobulating.
All of this combined with the fact that working on gentoo has not been as much fun as it has in the past. Has made me consider retiring. I’m sure a few people would like to see me go, but its not quite yet that I’ll be going. Sorry to disappoint you on that matter. The reason I mention this is because, a lot of developers are considering the same exact thing. There’s lots of questions of why this is, and lots of if’s about what is causing it.
One that was brought up by talking with seemant, was the fact that Gentoo isn’t the same kind of a community project it once was. Its also not a business either. We’re in a transition to something that isn’t either. As there’s a whole great huge percentage of devs that would hate to have this be a business. There’s also some that would love to see it become one (I’d like to hear from people from each side their reasons for your thoughts on the matter). So where in the middle do we fall? No matter the problem, there always seems to be a middle. As a organization, we don’t have a rich uncle to support the development of the product and hire people like flameeyes to work on it full time. I’d love to as a organization be able to do such a thing, but financially it isn’t feasible. Our community is great with support, technical and financial. It keeps the infrastructure equipment running in a fairly content state. We also are quite lucky with the vendors that we’ve become associated with. Without their donations we’d not be where we are today.
So in many, many ways we are a very lucky community to have the support internally and externally. So why do we still have the issues we have. Its a matter that people really do truly suck at being humans. There is little to no herd mentality within the human race. Many people are far better off in the lone wolf state then actually interacting and communicating in a effective manner with other people.You can’t force those people to work with a pack well, however there are ways to keep them from invading and taking over and controlling yours. That just takes one member of the pack to stop and say no, and in theory others will follow. In practice, with gentoo development, the opposite happens. The person who stands up notices that the rest of the herd has just kept on moving away.
Well, I think I’m filling the shoes of another dev who wasn’t known for brevity either. So who actually reads down to this part at all?
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:06 pm
It seems the answer (to who reads the whole post) is “me”!
I have been trying to understand the “seeming mass exodus” of developers from Gentoo. Everyone seems very civil on
“planet/universe”, in bugzilla, and on IRC. What’s the big deal? If there are disagreements on the forums, I have yet to come across them.
As a fairly recent convert (I only switched from Slackware two or three years ago), I have wholeheartedly embraced the “Gentoo Way”. The design philosophy seems extremely professional and sophisticated. I have been trying to get more involved — submitting patches/etc to bugzilla and so forth. Am I wasting my time? Is Gentoo falling apart? Or is it just that a few disgruntled devs are leaving for greener pastures?
June 24th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Atomopawn:
The real disagreements/flamefests/frustrations have been happening on the gentoo-dev mailing list. Read the archives of the last four months (trace the path of ciaranm’s departure, paludis & profiles, project creation (inc. sunrise), and various proposals and talks on courtesy. Then you’ll begin to understand the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more things happening on the private dev-only mailing list, too.
Only a few of the devs who left I would consider to be “disgruntled” and/or “angry”; the rest have mostly been dismayed and saddened.
tsunam, hang in there. yeah, you took some flak over the recent me-spyderous-you-helpfulness subthread, but you were right. i should probably post something to that along the lines of “hey everyone, chill, *i* was the wronged party here, but spydie and i got over it/talked it out”, but it sorta bloomed into a long discussion.
you do good work, and i don’t want to see you go!
June 26th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Hi Guys
I am new to the Gentoo project, and am but a user - not a developer. I dont know anything about the politics of what goes on behind the scenes, but I do know this - coming from a Windows background, and putting up with the mediocrity and frustration that is Windows and the Microsoft world, discovering a distro like Gentoo was a huge buzz and rekindled my love of computing and operating systems.
I would hate to see a project like gentoo dissipate into nothing - once you have had a taste of complete control of your operating system, you do not want to go back to OS’s which try to hide everything from you and dictate what you can and cant do.
I really hope that Gentoo does not go the way of the dinosaur and become extinct. It really is a fantastic Distro.
My hats off to all the developers who dedicate their time to producing such a fantastic operating system. Well done guys - great job and i hope that whatever dissention is going on behind the scenes can can all be sorted out and the gentoo project power on.
June 26th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
Wish I could understand what all the Gentoo advantage is all about. An OS is supposed to be transparent and run programs, and Linux is Linux. How does Gentoo run Firefox or AbiWord better than Fedora or Ubuntu? All I can see is that with normal distros it takes about 30 seconds to a couple of minutes to install a binary app, with Gentoo it takes 10-20 minutes to do the same thing with source. With a binary distro it takes about 20 minutes to install Linux, with Gentoo it takes about one to two days.
Whats so great about that? Where the hell is the advantage?
To my mind Gentoo appeals to people who want to play around with the operating system in the way that some people like to tinker underneath the bonnets of their cars. I see no benefit whatsoever for normal end users.
June 26th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
My understanding, and please someone correct me if I am wrong, is that you can tweak gentoo to maximise the performance of your hardware and build it to your exact requirements.
Its not that its better than any distro, you use the distro to suit your wants or needs.
Lets face it, any distro would be better than Windows.
In my case - I am a tinkerer, and I love to try to get the absolute most out of my hardware. Hence I love Gentoo. I am only new at it, and am still learning heaps.
The Distro’s you mentioned - fantastic - excellent for people who want an operating system that just works - and works well and they can get on with the job they need to do - let face it - in the Linux world, practically everything you need is readily available for you to use through one form or another.
Me - i like to tinker and adjust and try diffent things to get the absolote most I can from my hardware - thats why i love working with Gentoo so much.
June 26th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Stolennomenclature: That’s the common misconception about gentoo, and distro’s in general.
Gentoo isn’t about performance so to speak. A lot of times the difference is so miniscule that it really isn’t worth the time.
What really are the two key features of gentoo, is the ability to customize it to what you need. Not what a developer figures mosts users want. Don’t need cups because you don’t own a printer? Then simply put -cups into your /etc/make.conf files USE flags and off you go, making smaller binaries in the process. Distro’s like debian, fedora, or even ubuntu are precompiled binary blobs that are good enough for most peoples needs. It has cups, it has qt3 and qt4 bindings, java and so on and so forth. Its not always a simple matter to remove those without going and compiling it yourself..and trying to trace down what you need to do so.
Which brings us to the other advantage of gentoo. That is portage, its a absolutely amazing package manager. I ran away from linux about 8 years ago when I hit dependency hell and said its not worth the pain of searching for this rpm or that. I work in a job where I deal with Redhat, fedora, suse and ubuntu daily and I’m always happy to go back to my little gentoo workstation where I don’t have the problems that binary distro’s have. I’d not of become a developer for gentoo if I didn’t fell that It has all this going for it.
Gentoo is however knowing for being called the “ricer” distro, and in some ways that’s warranted, however it was never the reason I started using it, nor most people that I know.
The community and the customization are what draw the people in.
June 30th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
stolennomenclature: STFU. Your thread doesn’t have anything to do with tsunam’s entry. Your irrelevance is frustrating!
Roddles: good answer. I couldn’t have said it any better.
tsunam: The counterproductive nature of large-group dynamics can be disheartening! I’m sorry for your frustration but appreciate everything that you’ve done for Gentoo. FWIW - I concur: People really do truly suck at being humans sometimes.
August 18th, 2006 at 5:18 am
Hello
As a Gentoo user, I was recently thinking about writing an input to Gentoo.org, in order to warn them about the bad way they seem to go at the moment… I see that even some people “closer to Gentoo” like former devs have exactly the same concerns.
I have 15 years experience in software development, I used Unix since 1987, installed my first Linux on a 486 in 1991 (Slackware), passed to Mandrake, then Suse, to finally land to the Gentoo world.
I am not a Linux architect, not a Linux/Unix system developer, but as ancient developer, software project leader, technology watch manager, and now quality manager, I may consider I am able to “feel” what is happening in a software devt organization, by “sniffing” some flavours sweating out through the walls.
I will of course not write here the exhaustive contents of the document I intend to write to Gentoo.org. Just some few key items, unordered. This will also help me prepare the final paper.
In early 2005, I succesfully installed and configured a Gentoo 2005.0 on my brand new Asus laptop. Not so easy, but feasible. I was so pleased with the result, that I repeated this with a more up-to-date version (but still in 2005.0 profile) on my brand new (too!) desktop computer.
In a very short time, because of my professional experience and of my past at using other Linux distribs, I was convinced that the Portage concept war far beyond all other approaches to manage, maintain and update a Linux system. No need to repeat once more here all the benefits and strenghs of this approach – if there is only ONE topic of unanimous agreement about Gentoo, it is Portage.
Then, one month ago, I decided to create my own live CD, for personal needs and for ‘continuous learning’ purpose. In the meantime, I thought ‘this could be an opportunity to experiment the latest version, i.e. Gentoo 2006.0’.
And the nightmare started. I had MANY compilation issues, always blocking. Faced MANY inconsistences between compile options coming with the Stage3 binaries, and the USE flags setup by default in the 2006.0 profile.
I also experienced the HUGE PAIN to have bugs considered and solved. You submit a bug, one guy comes and sets it as duplicate of another (sometimes irrelevantly), you reopen, a second guy starts to exchange with you, and before you finish the discussion a third one comes and reclassifies the bug as « RESOLVED – INVALID ». To end the story, a fourth one comes and says something like ‘hey, padawan, please be more careful before submitting bugs related to glibc’ (i.e. don’t touch my Gentoo baby, it is the best of the world, it is perfect, believe me poor human I am a Jedi). At this time, I am stuck at emerging KDE, what has been quite feasible using 2005.0 profile.
Finally, I had a look at the bugs.gentoo.org statistics. A clear confirmation (from my standpoint) of current increasing mess at Gentoo.
- Over time, the stocks of ‘new’ and ‘closed’ bugs are continuously increasing at approximately the same rate, i.e. either more users face a stable quality level, or same amount of users face a worse quality level, or more users face a worse quality level
- In parallel, the stock of ‘assigned’ bugs is stable over time, or let’s say even slightly decreasing : this means that to fix this increasing flow of bugs, the same (or slightly lower) amount of people are assigned ; in other worlds, more and more bugs are going directly from ‘new’ to ‘resolved’ or ‘closed’ without proper action undertaken (let’s say, without having been just considered seriously)
Other elements ? Some Gentoo devs are leaving, and the content of their blogs or on-line testimonials is completely consistent with what I ‘feel’ and express in these lines. Other users also complain in blogs or other forums, about the pains they experienced with Gentoo – and sometimes some experienced Linux users. The anwsers from Gentoo ? « You are wrong, we are the best, we have a lot of developers, you don’t know what you speak about, etc… ». Do you know what for sure happens to a business when not listening to customers ? It will be the same for a non-profit organization which would pretentiously misconsider its users.
My conclusions ?
- Gentoo is no longer under control
- The ‘mess’ begins to be visible, but the immerged part of the iceberg is still to come
- Gentoo is no longer ‘fun’ for users, except those who fortunately installed a system long time ago and ‘just’ have to maintain : they would probably reconsider their opinion if they try 2006.0
- At this time, Gentoo is just ‘fun’ for hoards of devs who are not under control, misconsider the users, let’s say they are coding for their own pleasure ;
What should be done ?
Put all operations under control. A hoard of devs, even with cutting edge skills, cannot perfom correctly if not in a proper organization, with clear and respected rules.
Become user-focused (if this is still part of the Gentoo ‘dream’ and social contract).
How will it happen ?
- either, by setting a « benevolent dictator » who would have all power to impose the necessary new laws and setup organizational and operational stability,
- or, leaving Gentoo go on this way, and crash (this could occur in the next 12 months, not more) ; like in business when you go to chapter 11, it may be very positive and fruitful to clear all and restart on brand new, fresh, and sane principles.
I STRONGLY EXPECT Gentoo to survive. The « nice Gentoo », that of the initial dream. Not the one that it is becoming now.