Gentoo in trouble?

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 8:02 pm

After reading some of the comments on this Slashdot article, it makes me wonder how projects like Debian and Gentoo manage to stay afloat at all with all of this internal conflict. Even some Gentoo developers admit in the comments that Gentoo has no real direction anymore, and that they need to focus on cleaning up existing code, rather than introducing new features and projects.

This comment by a Gentoo developer is particularly interesting:

Posting anonymously, because I'm a Gentoo developer and I don't feel like getting fired for speaking out against a certain clique.

Gentoo is, at this point, royally fucked, and this is a perfect illustration of why. The project no longer encourages technical discussion, debate or getting things done. Anyone trying to have technical discussion is called out and accused of flaming by the once great Seemant (who has not done any development himself for years) and his horde of fanboy minions (most noticably, Jakub) who skipped the usual recruitment process (Seemant throws a hissy fit any time any of his recruits are rejected for failing the quiz), who would rather that people did things without planning and jumped ahead with the kind of fuckups that OS X and Sunrise were than that anyone had a disagreement. Instead, it favors fancy announcements and poorly thought out publicity under the guise of 'making things easier for the users'.

If you look closely, you'll see that Gentoo has not actually done anything for about two years now. Even an attempt to change the color of the website failed after over a year of work. And this is a shame, because it has so much potential. Honestly, I don't know how to fix things. I don't have enough time or enough of a reputation to persuade people to learn from past mistakes (yes, this is Sunrise all over again).

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 8:56 am

Doesn't seem like he has any real points other than flaming people he doesn't like. He doesn't back up any accusations. As far as Gentoo not actually doing things over the past 2 years, I see lots of changes since I last tried Gentoo a few years ago. Moving to only supporting stage 3 installs, for example, had to be a difficult decision, but it solves a lot of user problems and probably saves a lot of support time.

I'm not going to draw any conclusions based on this one rant.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 5:50 pm

This sounds like a personal dispute to me. Yes there are people that just complain about everything but I know that technical discussions go on all the time and jakub although he may or may not have skipped the recruitment process still is knowledgeable and has helped many people on #gentoo-sunrise (although not near as much as genstef but that's just because he lives 24/7 on the channel just to serve people). I do think that there may be some internal conflicts but development is happening and I can see it even though it's not as noticeble as something like Ubuntu it most definitely is happening and I think Gentoo will live on for a long time. As far as the direction it is going it doesn't seem to have a concrete roadmap, rather if something needs done it is usually brought up in the mailing lists and taken care of.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 6:36 pm

So, how's your iAudio these days, anyhow?

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 6:41 pm

Snarkout wrote:So, how's your iAudio these days, anyhow?

Pretty good, the battery life is decreasing noticeably and both the headphones that I got with it and my old iAudio M3 are now broken (although so are the other 2 I bought seperately). But other than that it's still working fine. Maybe in a year I will start looking for something else (hopefully by then COWON will get their act together and make a X5 successor otherwise I'll probably look elsewhere).

Post by **Patrick** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 7:24 pm

My Iaudio5 is still working great. I'm on another set of headphones but that's expected.

hellonorman · Post by **hellonorman** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:49 pm

I have been using gentoo off and on since the 1.2 days ala 2002. Even when I wasn't actually using it I still hung around the forums since then as well.

I do believe that gentoo is at a crossroads right now. For all it's elegance it doesn't appear that portage can scale any further. There's too few people who understand the code well enough to hack on it without breaking it.

I also don't believe that a project this large can survive without a final authority. Someone who can say this is what we are going to do now lets get to it. The last two years have been pretty stagnant as far as development and innovation are concerned. Even when the gentoo council ultimately approves an innitiative nobody can agree on how to go about getting it done.

I'm not saying gentoo is going to dry up and die tomorrow but if it can't settle on a direction and then convince developers to work toward that then I think it will begin to fade pretty rapidly.

Linc · Post by **Linc** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 10:20 pm

hellonorman wrote:I have been using gentoo off and on since the 1.2 days ala 2002. Even when I wasn't actually using it I still hung around the forums since then as well.

I do believe that gentoo is at a crossroads right now. For all it's elegance it doesn't appear that portage can scale any further. There's too few people who understand the code well enough to hack on it without breaking it.

I also don't believe that a project this large can survive without a final authority. Someone who can say this is what we are going to do now lets get to it. The last two years have been pretty stagnant as far as development and innovation are concerned. Even when the gentoo council ultimately approves an innitiative nobody can agree on how to go about getting it done.

I'm not saying gentoo is going to dry up and die tomorrow but if it can't settle on a direction and then convince developers to work toward that then I think it will begin to fade pretty rapidly.

Since portage is almost a copy of FreeBSD's package system and NetBSD's port's system (which btw is portable and run's on linux already), you would think that they could adopt one or both of those and just keep on trucking.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 1:44 am

Linc wrote:Since portage is almost a copy of FreeBSD's package system and NetBSD's port's system

Portage is a clone of those two, implemented in Python, with some slightly different approaches, and goals, but essentially does the same thing.