Poll: Do you think Gentoo keeps getting better?

[cazort]

I'm curious...this board is a site of a lot of complaining, and I myself feel that I fall on the complaining side more often than not. However...

I think that Gentoo keeps getting better over time. Some things that I think have been or will be big improvements for me, personally, have been:

• KDE Split Ebuilds
  
• The portage update that greatly sped up the "Updating portage cache" step
  
• This new version of portage that is able to resolve blockers
  

There are many more that I appreciate too...I'm curious to see what others will post though.

So yeah, thanks to all the peeps who keep complaining, and thanks to the developers who argue with them and listen to the arguments and ultimately keep making Gentoo get better and better. Heck yeah!
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Alex Zorach | Teacology | RateTea | Why This Way

[asturm]

Ultimately, yes.

[AllenJB]

I don't think the technical side of things has ever been an issue for Gentoo (other than lack of manpower). There is definitely room for improvement when it comes to communication with users tho.

[zyko]

Some aspects get better, some aspects get worse.

The paint is peeling off in some places. Documentation has been in hibernation for the last year. There is nothing at all on the new features of Portage, almost nothing about OpenRC, the devmanual is decrepit. The embedded project is fantastic, but nobody knows that because there is virtually zero official information. EAPI 2 documentation is great (thanks to ciaranm and spb), but again you basically have to go on a lengthy quest for the PDF. Research is done on the devlopers' blogs, via Google, in IRC, on the mailing lists and on the forums, not on gentoo.org/doc.

Portage is doing great:
- When emerging multiple packages, Portage can now collect individual elog messages and display them at the very end. Gentoo was pretty annoying back in the days when this capability was lacking
- Portage now tracks the overlay a package came from.
- Portage can finally take advantage of multiple CPUs with --jobs.
- --keep-going keeps me going.
- EAPI 2.

I don't know how much of this is thanks to Paludis, as I don't follow the Paludis project.

[Aquiles]

I don't know, but I feel like the ratio work/manpower is greater than it used to be, and I feel so because I find much more singularities than I used to find, for instance packages eternally masked, with new versions entering portage but none of the old ones getting stabilized (see boinc...), packages eternally with issues (see qtiplot, subtitleripper...).

So, I don't think it's getting any better, although I wouldn't say it's getting any worse either. I guess some things are getting better over time, and others are getting worse.

But don't get me wrong, I'm happy with Gentoo and I'm not planning to switch to another distro anytime soon. In particular because I think that the work/manpower ratio issue that I just mentioned is hitting most of the distros out there. Linux has grown so much, but the amount of people with time and skills to collaborate hasn't grown at the same rate, I believe. Well that's my guess.
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Aquiles

[avx]

Gentoo's getting better, the kernel's getting better, but a lot of software is getting worse, imho. Too much is going into the direction of Windows or OSX, amarok2 as a late example. The old amarok is good, but v2 will take at least another year to get to the functionality of the old one, but, it features a damn ugly design, yet.

[alistair]

[Gankfest]

Definitely getting better from when I first started out in Gentoo!
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Gankfest™ (>")> ~*

Everyone has to start somewhere, it depends on where you end up that counts! (>")>

[turtles]

I voted yes based on:

• Code:

  eselect news list

  still being in the works. That will prevent allot of users from hosing there systems. It gives you the news BEFORE you emerge.
  
• One of our company Gentoo server
  

  Code:

  uptime  15:05:20 up 385 days, 37 min ....

  
  
• Apache very easy to manage on gentoo.
  
• Services very easy to manage.
  
• dm-crypt/LUKS support was nice when I upgraded my laptop harddrive.
  
• Perl, Postgreaql, PHP all are well mintained.
  

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Donate to Gentoo

[baeksu]

I think a lot of the recent breakage has been due to changes in upstream.

For instance, the current problem with xorg and intel drivers is affecting other distros as well. In arch, they decided to roll out the new xorg, causing a lot of problems and complaints. In gentoo, it has been held back in unstable, causing less problems but more complaints.

The kde ebuilds took a while to arrive, but I think in the long run the work that was put into them has been beneficial to the users. And as there were unofficial layouts to tie us over the delays, it wasn't such a huge problem, at least for me.

Portage is better than when I started using gentoo, and the additional layouts have given more options to users.

Every distro has the occasional glitch, especially with desktop packages, but I think this is more due to big changes happening in linux, than on organizational problems in the distro teams themselves.

Of course, I could live without the constant complaining and in-fighting within the gentoo community, but I guess every time a project reaches a certain maturity point, there will be disagreement between the members on where we should go next.
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Gnome:
1. A legendary being.
2. A never ending quest to make unix friendly to people who don't want unix and excruciating for those that do.

[yngwin]

[lightvhawk0]

I'd have to say since the inception of Gentoo to now.
It's a great deal better.

As far as from 07 to 08 transitioning to 09. It feels slow.

The website needs some good polishing as well.
And the documents need some love.


Other than that to cure some of this, I just installed a funtoo.org stage3 with reiser4 just to have my good old roflstomped omfg-optimized bleeding edge gentoo feeling back. Also it's running software raid0.


I know I'm just asking for it.
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If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor. - Voltaire