I have a few questions I thought I'd relay here. I would like to know how their current Gentoo User Relations Project is going. Might be something to ask them about tonight. Though I don't know if Gentoo really needs it, given the already impressive documentation and forums.
Related to the user relation project, I'd like to know the general philosophy they take towards users. I love the power and control Gentoo puts in your hands with the USE flags and other tools of portage, and I like that the Gentoo community has helped me learn how to do many things from the CLI. Some distros like SUSE and Ubuntu can make some of this stuff easier and more intuitive with graphical tools, but I like how Gentoo kind of gives you the equivalent of a Haynes Manual for your car, and lets you get your hands dirty. So I'm kind of interested in whether Gentoo devs are leaning towards more graphical tools, or basically doing what they've been doing, which to me is empowering users with great docs, how tos and great package management tools. Maybe they have something completely different in mind, I'd like to hear their thoughts on it, anyhow.
I'd also like to hear about what sort of organizational structure and processes have helped the Gentoo team create such brilliant documentation. As far as I'm concerned, they already demonstrate great care for Gentoo users with that one area alone, not to mention that the forums and irc channels are great and filled with knowledgeable, non-elitist, helpful people. Seems like most distros could learn from Gentoo in at least one of these areas.
It appears that at least some people in Gentoo are considering scrapping portage and trying out different package managers, such as paludis, which has a few differences from portage listed on their website. Paludis isn't written in python, so according to the author it's much faster, but given that portage has been in python all this time, I wonder how developers would feel about using a different language to code the package manager. I also saw that pkgcore was mentioned (sorry, no good info that I can find on pkgcore yet, except that it seems to be python-based). It sounds like the smart package manager has a pretty good idea, code most in python, with bits of C to take care of the nasty parts. Probably not much info on this sort of thing yet, but it's something else to throw out there tonight.
Also, what are the odds that the compile time/gcc screensaver jokes are kept to a minimum this time around? Since it seems to be an obligation to bring up either the compile time or ricing every single time gentoo is mentioned, perhaps everyone should just get it out of their system early on during the playful banter and get it out of the way.
