What's wrong with Gentoo, anyway?

[M]

Yeah, then lets remove php from the tree, who use that anyway, or perhaps remove gnash, I read on mailing list that actually someone proposed that I don't know the answer but you should remove broken and unmaintained ebuilds, not unmaintained.

[chimpushrm9]

[d2_racing]

In fact, because it's when it happens that we see what is going on the side track and then we can ajust after that.

[Hypnos]

This is why you need true multiple repository support, so developer territory can be demarcated in a sane way and users can ditch crappy trees.
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Personal overlay | Simple backup scheme

[darkphader]

I'm with Diego - Samba ebuilds have been fucked a long time, and that split to multiple packages seems quite absurd - you don't make more ebuild work when you can't even keep current with simple straightforward ones.
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WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Grep

[kernelOfTruth]

[zyko]

[Etal]

Is it still that bad? From what I've seen (as a user), things have calmed down a lot since the exherbo folk resigned/got kicked out ... or at least it's not publicly visible anymore.

[yngwin]

It's not bad at all. Most people are friendly and nice to work with. Of course there are the occasional fights and nervous breakdowns, but that will happen in any organization of this size.
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"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

[Naib]

[saellaven]

I've thought about going through the process of becoming a gentoo developer before, but there are two main things which stop me.

1) There is oodles of needless bureaucracy. From the outside looking in, there appears to be a lot of meetings about having meetings to discuss when how something will be done, followed by a lack of implementation of the idea as

2) the petty bickering between devs takes over.

There seems to be a conflict between developers wanting to do their own thing (it is a hobby for them after all) and the overall bureaucracy trying to dictate what is supposed to happen with little follow up (because the devs want to do their own thing).


Add into that the stuff that Diego has pointed out, like wasting time on useless test questions that are no longer relevant and I ask myself why I should bother jumping through all the hoops just to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare. I realize that the purpose of the tests is to make sure people understand what they are doing so they don't screw up the tree for everyone (not to mention the systems trying to build that tree), but what's the point of even having them if gentoo devs can trash all over the tree once they get access anyway?

In short, gentoo needs stronger leadership while also taking into account that devs are autonomous and into their own thing. Until that gets fixed, which after watching the fireworks every few months, I doubt will ever happen, then maybe more outsiders like me would be willing to join. In the meantime, I file bugs, sometimes with patches on stuff I can track down myself, and keep my own private overlay since patches don't seem to get picked up due to lack of developers (take this trivial patch to let stable php build with stable db in bug 289669 that has been sitting there since October). It seems everyone in the php herd is AWOL and they're not the only herd short on people or the only package without a maintainer, but there are potential devs sitting out there who would join if not for the way gentoo's bureaucracy is so poorly run.
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Ryzen 3700X, Asus Prime X570-Pro, 64 GB DDR4 3200, GeForce GTX 1660 Super
openrc-0.17, ~vanilla-sources, ~nvidia-drivers, ~gcc

[aidanjt]

You can't have autonomous developers and strong leadership, the two are mutually exclusive. Certainly the developers are volunteers and they should be afforded latitude to pursue projects they find interesting. But from time to time you need to pull in the reigns and coordinate to get specific problems dealt with.
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[Hypnos]

[aidanjt]

[Hypnos]

drobbins seems to be trying out a similar organizational model with funtoo. He's using git to pull from Gentoo official and to allow others to pull from him, though I suppose he figures that with his reputation downstream users will be mostly using his tree and associated tools.
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Personal overlay | Simple backup scheme

[Dr.Willy]

[kernelOfTruth]

[d2_racing]

In fact, since Daniel removed the Sunrise overlay that was included inside the Funtoo tree.

[Etal]

[beandog]

[beandog]

[aidanjt]

[kernelOfTruth]

well, I'm not interested in becoming a dev BUT let's start with some constructive criticism and suggestions:

everyone wanting to see a change (either from dev oder users side):

*) either re-write the recruitment process

or

*) make a list of suggestions where and how the process of recruitment and status as a dev can be improved


otherwise we're still at the same spot in a year or more ranting here and there about how bad becoming a dev and gentoo's structure is


I hate today's society's structures and how people tend to talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk and at some point make constructive arguments, suggestions but despite putting this to work afterwards still keep on talking afterwards


hey - it's crystal clear: talking is easier than work but it has to be done otherwise we'd still be sitting in our caves


like some of the (kernel-)devs write:

talk is cheap
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https://github.com/kernelOfTruth/ZFS-for-SystemRescueCD/tree/ZFS-for-SysRescCD-4.9.0
https://github.com/kernelOfTruth/pulseaudio-equalizer-ladspa

Hardcore Gentoo Linux user since 2004

[saellaven]

[saellaven]