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Poll: Would you follow a Robbins led Gentoo fork?

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Would you leave the current Gentoo for a D.Robbins led "Gentoo fork"?

Yes

49%

[ 194 ]

43%

[ 168 ]

Only if he retains and uses the Gentoo trademark to form a "New Gentoo".

[ 28 ]

Total Votes : 390

Author

Message

bakters
n00b
n00b

Joined: 14 Jan 2008
Posts: 7

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 10:12 am Post subject:

Rad wrote:

Sorry, but you're wrong, bakters. It's really the case that many were against kicking him out, including some of the most popular developers (who often also happened to disagree with the way ciaranm put things) at the time - like seemant.

You mean that you counted all those who silently supported Daniel, but didn't post? I don't think that it's possible at all, so you are guessing, just like I did.

Quote:

More to the point, that's exactly one of the reasons why I'd not like to see DRobbins in charge. Because not only he has found no better way to deal with a controversial discussion around PMS -where he himself apparently was opposed to doing any compromises in favor of the new package managers- than first harassing ciaranm in public with a slew of inquisitive questions as to how he was related and allowed to contribute to a standardization process in Gentoo at first (which is the picture perfect model how one creates citadel of inaccessible developers in the first place), then demanding him to be removed (and doing so before ensuring that such a ban is warranted in other team members' eyes as well). And after that he left. Maybe you want such a leader, I surely do not.

He was asking questions in a civil and polite way. Before one deals with any problem, one must first get the hang of it, so he asked. In a civil and polite way; I stress it again. But he found, that even asking simple questions is very difficult, due to a punk in search of a fight, so he wanted to get rid of him (makes sense, if you ask me).

Of course he could sit low and do not complain, like most developers, but then he would become just your average dev, which is a waste of time for a guy like Daniel and a waste of resources for a project like Gentoo.

Quote:

EDIT: Oh and please don't simplify this to me saying "zomg th3 ebil demagogue DRobbins bulied my hero ciaranm". I see problems with how ciaranm reacted as well, so he would also not be a viable Gentoo project leader to me - assuming we even needed one ...

Ciaran was a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself. Behaviour like his shouldn't be tolerated. It drives projects down because it makes working for one an unpleasant experience. After a while you will find, that most of the people who still stick around are more or less fine with it, but you are lucky if you are able to replace those who simply didn't want to.

berferd
Tux's lil' helper

Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 117

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 3:17 pm Post subject:

AllenJB wrote:

If you read the posts in order - 337 then 338 - it seems to me that some of the issues he raised in 337 appear to be cleared up by the time he writes 338. I could be wrong, but that's the way it seems to me. For example, by 338, it appears that the Gentoo devs have put support behind his project and plan to be using it to atleast partly replace baselayout in the future.

Haha, you don't disappoint. It "seems" that the Gentoo devs support his project? Is there any way to know for sure?

I think this part of post 338 makes another good point:

Quote:

As they are all external projects there should be no favouritism and it comes down to technical merit. Well, not quite as the entire Gentoo tree assumes baselayout is present, but it makes things easier anyway.

tanderson
Retired Dev

Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Posts: 193

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:19 pm Post subject:

berferd wrote:

AllenJB wrote:

Haha, you don't disappoint. It "seems" that the Gentoo devs support his project? Is there any way to know for sure?

I think this part of post 338 makes another good point:

Quote:

Yes, gentoo does(will?) host a git repository for it. So I guess that's as close as you can get to 'supporting' :wink:

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berferd
Tux's lil' helper

Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 117

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:40 pm Post subject:

gentoofan23 wrote:

Yes, gentoo does(will?) host a git repository for it.

So does it or doesn't it? It sounds like you're confused as well. Some OpenRC stuff seems to be hosted by Gentoo.

gentoofan23 wrote:

So I guess that's as close as you can get to 'supporting' :wink:

That's really sad if it's true. To me "supporting" would mean a commitment from baselayout's current maintainer to split it like UberLord says here.

(edit: double "it")

tanderson
Retired Dev

Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Posts: 193

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 9:44 pm Post subject:

berferd wrote:

gentoofan23 wrote:

Yes, gentoo does(will?) host a git repository for it.

So does it or doesn't it? It sounds like you're confused as well. Some OpenRC stuff seems to be hosted by Gentoo.

gentoofan23 wrote:

So I guess that's as close as you can get to 'supporting' :wink:

That's really sad if it's true. To me "supporting" would mean a commitment from baselayout's current maintainer to split it like UberLord says here.

(edit: double "it")

So that means that gentoo does support it because they are hosting it. Uberlord just hasn't made a release of it yet. Uberlord *was* baselayout's maintainer. The council decided to give Uberlord a git repo to develop OpenRC.
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Rad
Guru
Guru

Joined: 11 Feb 2004
Posts: 401
Location: Bern, Switzerland

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 10:28 pm Post subject:

@bakters: I'll skip the other points for now since they're not extremely important. If you want a response to these as well, I'll provide it.

Lets get to the core:

bakters wrote:

Well, here I think that's not the case. He came back, saw people asking to discuss a specification, which prompted him to do a very inquisitive interview with one of the stakeholder and turn his words against him to try and block the discussion off by declaring it outside the scope of the Gentoo project.

He was wrong doing that, on every level - he neither had the mandate to play police, nor was he right about the policies he tried to enforce, nor was that the right way to deal with an established and running project that merely asked to be discussed in an official meeting. Civil wording notwithstanding, he was being impolite, aggressive and out of line.

omnio
n00b
n00b

Joined: 16 Jun 2007
Posts: 51

Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 12:46 am Post subject:

speeddemon wrote:

Personally I still think the whole expat issue was a huge mistake on the devs part too, although not like you may think. The breakage was unavoidable, thats obvious. However my big problem was that the dev's plan was as follows "Ok stuff is going to break, run revdep-rebuild and everything will work again.". Then of course, ALOT of peoples systems broke, which still isn't the problem, it was going to happen when they upgraded expat. BUT, then, all the sudden, the magic "revdep-rebuild" didn't work for a lot of people. It didn't work for me, which meant alot of time sorting out all the 40 something packages I had to re-emerge, and then figuring out which order to do it all in. And the only dev's I saw commenting, were blasting the user's who were upset. They refused to accept any responsibility for any of it. They never seemed to treat it as a serious problem because the breakage wasn't their fault; in their minds they did all they needed to, they provided a tool that should fix the problem, and they let us know there might be a problem by putting a paragraph at the end of the emerge. If you had a problem, it was your fault for not reading the documentation and running the provided fix. My problem is the provided fix didn't work, and I had no idea I was going to be doing an update that would break stuff.
[...]
And every time somebody questions a decision, it seems like some dev snaps at them, basically calling them stupid, and tells them that no matter what things won't change just because.

I hear you. Revdep-rebuild didn't work for me either and fixing this issue was just above my powers and my spare time. And the only way I could find a solution was to come to IRC. Which is in itself a very strange thing when you think about it, it means that using IRC is a necessary condition of running Gentoo. Plus, in the old days such a major problem should have easily made its way into the GWN, but... what GWN? However, from what you said I realize now that I was a happy case since I didn't have to interact with anyone, I just came to #gentoo, read the topic and "talk" to mzbot.

But those days are over... oh wait, they aren't. Now I have to make a fresh install to some other machine and I'll have to upgrade expat again. I must have been a very bad person in a previous life.

Urban Cowboy
n00b
n00b

Joined: 09 Oct 2007
Posts: 64

Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 3:05 am Post subject:

Depends on what is different. _________________ Anything worth doing is worth over-doing. Moderation is for cowards.

steveL
Watchman

Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 5153
Location: The Peanut Gallery

Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 2:08 pm Post subject:

omnio wrote:

But those days are over... oh wait, they aren't. Now I have to make a fresh install to some other machine and I'll have to upgrade expat again. I must have been a very bad person in a previous life.

Bah just use update -- expat upgrade is in the /etc/warning file and it gets handled automatically. (Also picks up libintl.so.7 or summat which isn't in warning but the devs kindly give us an elog/ewarn about.)

Nephilim666
Tux's lil' helper

Joined: 07 Jul 2007
Posts: 148

Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2008 1:51 am Post subject:

OMG! I just wonder how much whining the devs will take, before quiting out of sheer frustration.

batistuta
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 29 Jul 2005
Posts: 1384
Location: Aachen

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 3:13 pm Post subject:

omnio wrote:

But those days are over... oh wait, they aren't. Now I have to make a fresh install to some other machine and I'll have to upgrade expat again. I must have been a very bad person in a previous life.

It sounds like you don't mind doing that. It even looks like you enjoy doing this. I don't know... but I have so many other things to do with my spare time, that fixing a broken Gentoo is not a priority. And that's when I've switched distro on one of my boxes.

On one hand, users are not allowed to whine because Gentoo is volunteer-based and all that. So we must either help and fix issues, or shut up. On the other hand Gentoo is production ready, and calling it an "experiment" would get you the title of troller. Then calling the stable branch "outdated" is a sin, because that's the price to pay for stability. And calling the unstable branch a compiling bomb is forbidden because breaks are to be *expected*.

Gosh men! To be honest, I'm up to the point that I don't know anymore what Gentoo is. And I like to take the opinion that nothing is wrong with it. That's the way Gentoo is. If a distro doesn't meet your demands, move to another distro. And sadly, this is happening. Because other distros meet the needs of those who are leaving. I say this is sad, because those people are not stupid newbees. They're people who do offer support now and then in the forums, help with the wikis, etc. They just don't have time go through the hassle of major breakage.

I'm not trying to rant or whine about Gentoo. My deepest respect to all its developers. I'm just trying to point out that things are not as perfect as some think

omnio
n00b
n00b

Joined: 16 Jun 2007
Posts: 51

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:12 pm Post subject:

batistuta wrote:

On one hand, users are not allowed to whine because Gentoo is volunteer-based and all that. So we must either help and fix issues, or shut up.

I see your point. And I know that is very easy ATM to be considered a troll but I should say that I've been watching gentoo-project these days and I find quite disarming the attitude of some devs.

George Prowse wrote:

Attitude is another. For instance, I made a comment on -dev (I think)
that without users Gentoo would be nothing and the response I got was
basically "p**s off, we develop because we want to".

Wulf C. Krueger wrote:

No, most of those users do exactly that: They *use* what *we*, the Gentoo
developers, provide. They can become developers easily enough and then
they may vote all they want.
And they can always vote with their feet - on their way out. Gentoo is
about choice and one such choice can be to leave.

I also took the time today to look again at both The Gentoo Social Contract and The Debian Social Contract, and I think it's interesting that the Gentoo one lacks this part:

The Debian Social Contract wrote:

4. Our priorities are our users and free software

We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments.

Whether this is right or wrong is up to everyone to decide, I pointed it out just to underline that an improvement in social skills would be welcome.

seqizz
Tux's lil' helper

Joined: 14 Jan 2008
Posts: 103

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:04 pm Post subject: :\

look the results.. "this community" shouldn't "fork", distro is not important i think..

Bluespear
Apprentice

Joined: 20 Jul 2005
Posts: 164
Location: Switzerland

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:22 pm Post subject:

Probably not, unless gentoo will reach a critical point with maintenance and the fork is more up-to-date + stable. But instead of switching for a fork, I'll probably look somewhere else: a strong organised distribution which wouldn't die because of childish behaviors. I hope trustees will show it was not an error to refuse the offer and they can deal with the situation (as well as devs).

numerodix
l33t
l33t

Joined: 18 Jul 2002
Posts: 743
Location: nl.eu

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:31 pm Post subject:

batistuta wrote:

Very well put, I agree completely.
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omnio
n00b
n00b

Joined: 16 Jun 2007
Posts: 51

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 8:43 pm Post subject: Re: :\

seqizz wrote:

look the results..
"this community" shouldn't "fork", distro is not important i think..

Actually I don't like this result at all. I would prefer something like 70-90% to follow Robbins, or the other way around, 70-90% to not follow him. This almost half-split result shows a rather schizoid community (read: ill). What saddens me more is that I don't believe in the community's power to heal itself, at least not any time soon and with the same userbase and developer base.

Last edited by omnio on Tue Jan 22, 2008 11:28 pm; edited 1 time in total

dleverton
Guru
Guru

Joined: 28 Aug 2006
Posts: 517

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 9:27 pm Post subject: Re: :\

omnio wrote:

This almost half-split result shows a rather schizoid community (read: ill).

You do understand the concept of "opinions", right?

AllenJB
Veteran
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Joined: 02 Sep 2005
Posts: 1285

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 9:39 pm Post subject:

ill informed, maybe. 50/50 is hardly an odd outcome. To me it shows that the majority don't know exactly what they want. Judging from the results of discussions in general, they'd rather the problems in Gentoo were fixed, but would follow a fork if it looked more promising. If you want a snap poll that shows a 90% sway in someones favor, see the original "should we accept drobbins offer" poll.

omnio
n00b
n00b

Joined: 16 Jun 2007
Posts: 51

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 9:45 pm Post subject:

AllenJB wrote:

ill informed, maybe. 50/50 is hardly an odd outcome. To me it shows that the majority don't know exactly what they want. Judging from the results of discussions in general, they'd rather the problems in Gentoo were fixed, but would follow a fork if it looked more promising.

If you want a snap poll that shows a 90% sway in someones favor, see the original "should we accept drobbins offer" poll.

I know that poll, of course. I'm just saying that a sane result would be a more polarized one (no matter into what direction), from a statistical and sociological point of view, since it would show a little more cohesive community.

Last edited by omnio on Tue Jan 22, 2008 11:24 pm; edited 1 time in total

jonnevers
Veteran
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Joined: 02 Jan 2003
Posts: 1594
Location: Gentoo64 land

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 10:24 pm Post subject:

omnio wrote:

Whether this is right or wrong is up to everyone to decide, I pointed it out just to underline that an improvement in social skills would be welcome.

as a user myself, I have never recognized Gentoo as a "user oriented" distribution. It has always been geared towards developers and very high functioning computer users.

in fact, I've heard it several times that Gentoo isn't a distribution in the traditional sense but more of a "meta-distributon" where "users" would use say Sabayon and not Gentoo directly.

if you need a "user oriented" level of support, then use an appropriate distribution. this is free software after all, find what scratches your itch the best and give back what you can. i personally don't consider a lot of the negativism against gentoo being posted right now being "giving back" or "contributing" in a worthwhile sense.

given how un-"user friendly" people keep calling Gentoo, these forums are damn near the best Linux forums on the internet.

batistuta
Veteran
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Joined: 29 Jul 2005
Posts: 1384
Location: Aachen

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 7:56 am Post subject:

jonnevers wrote:

given how un-"user friendly" people keep calling Gentoo, these forums are damn near the best Linux forums on the internet.

That phrase summarizes a lot, and left me thinking for a while. When you read the description (pros/cons) of each distro, Gentoo always gets two items under the "pros" list: these are the large number of packages, and the great friendly user community and forums. The first one is one is the hard work of the devs. Kudos to them. But the second one is thanks to its users. I personally (my honest opinion and nothing more) is that since other distros like Debian, FreeBSD, Ubuntu also have most packages you'll ever need, the user community is really the best of Gentoo. And when some devs leave us outs, I can only chuckle. But not all devs are like that. Lots of them are very nice people and you can't judge all of the under the same umbrella.

That said, I believe that if Daniel forks and the Gentoo community migrates, Gentoo will be left with a whole. That's exactly the reason why I think the idea of Daniel taking control of Gentoo is not the right way. We should respect our own rules. As I've mentioned in another thread, giving Daniel the strings of Gentoo would be like asking in a messed up democracy for a military government. Instead of that, just let us be guided by the open sourced spirit: let the best distro survive. Daniel should fork. Waters will be turbulent for a while, but in the end we will all win. We will get something based on free spirit. And if Gentoo dies this way, at least it will reincarnate in something better, and it would have died based on its own rules, not in those from someone else.

BVer
n00b
n00b

Joined: 11 Aug 2005
Posts: 7

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 9:55 am Post subject:

jonnevers wrote:

as a user myself, I have never recognized Gentoo as a "user oriented" distribution. It has always been geared towards developers and very high functioning computer users.

good point.

it seems to me there are no major technical issues forcing users to leave Gentoo these days (given that its users are rather advanced in average and able to overcome them).
it is a current political debate and the overall Gentoo image what worries users (not updated webpages, the foundation paperwork, the cancelled 2007.1 release -- all these "unimportant things seen from outside").

what Gentoo needs now is a perceived and visible stability. it looks like things are fortunately moving again (releng meeting, foundation reinstalled, GMN ... good news). there will be no calls for a fork soon.... (i hope)

c0d3g33k
n00b
n00b

Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 43
Location: S.E. Connecticut

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 5:07 pm Post subject:

batistuta wrote:

jonnevers wrote:

given how un-"user friendly" people keep calling Gentoo, these forums are damn near the best Linux forums on the internet.

This simple statement is so profoundly telling that it bears repeating, since it's quite true from my experience. I just grabbed the following from the Wikipedia entry for Linux:

Wikipedia wrote:

"Online forums are another means for support, with notable examples being LinuxQuestions.org and the Gentoo forums."

I don't know how long this has been on the page or who put it there, but to the extent that a Wikipedia page captures the current gestalt viewpoint of the wider Linux world, having the Gentoo forums mentioned by name is pretty impressive in my book. The current disconnect between the "official" part of the Gentoo community (aka "the developers") and the "unofficial" part (aka "the users") is all the more disappointing when one considers the high level of skill and knowledge on both sides of the "gap".

I have to admit I'm quite baffled at the way the "voice of the community" was dismissed as hysterical and largely irrelevant in the recent kerfluffle. Even the Planet Gentoo postings come across as a bit patronizing to me.

Whether or not a "benevolent dictatorship" is a desirable solution (probably not, though it works pretty well for other projects), I would think that the lack of confidence in the current leadership situation would be quite sobering. Perhaps more emphasis should be put into rectifying the situation rather than the defense of the status quo I've been observing.

Lucipher
Tux's lil' helper

Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Posts: 78

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 6:37 pm Post subject:

Phenax wrote:

Unless the current Gentoo messes up on me and starts being archaic, then sure. Until then, I'm satisfied where I am now.

+1
I'm fine where I'm, but if one day Gentoo breaks I'll follow some other distribution like Gentoo and never get back to Mandriva, RedHat, SuSe, or even Debian and its gremlins :twisted:

CosminG
Apprentice

Joined: 19 Jan 2005
Posts: 166

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 7:27 pm Post subject:

If it would get better than gentoo, then yes.

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