Gentoo Haters/Lovers

rokstar83 · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 423 Location: MD

I know that someone has already posted about one of the articles, but Gentoo got slashdotted again and not in a good way. I'd post the link but it looks like they are down for the moment. The recent article was about problems with gentoo from developers own words. They were interesting to say the least, although who knows what the context for each one was.

At first I interpreted it as a "rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" however I can't say that I really have much contact or follow the gentoo developers aside from whats in the newsletters. So that makes me beg the question what is really going on behind the scenes? Are there problems at the hearts of gentoo that we don't see or has slashdot over exaggerated the problems? I see a lot of people who for whatever reason hate gentoo, and that may be the "loudest voice in the room is the only one heard" thing, but is this slashdotting another example of haters?

I've been using gentoo for only 3 years now so my history of gentoo's old days isn't really there, but I got to say I love it. I've tried a few others without much luck. To be honest Gentoo was the first distro I got running up in full mostly because of the learning that I was forced to do to make a CLI install work. I've encounter problems like some of the other folks in the "i'm leaving gentoo" posts but I haven't seen a total system meltdown like some of my friends have with other distros.

I'm not going to assume that this distro isn't without problems but I hear stuff about stagnation and over-extension and QA problems with portage and other such things. So whats the deal, i'm not nessessarily expecting a public response to these articles as I don't feel that they are warranted but as a gentoo user I like to know if I should be concerned.

Let me end this rather long post, with many question I know, with a little bit of praise. Thanks to all the gentoo developers who have made this distro possible. I have to use Windows at work, and its always a joy to come back to a nice stable system that I can rely on without fail and also does what I tell it to.

Thanks in advance.

[edit] Opps it wasn't a new slashdot article, it was a link through the seeds article to lwn article from about a month ago. [/edit]

rsa4046 · Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 4:42 am Post subject:

Could you post the link?

rokstar83 · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 423 Location: MD

Sorry about that,

http://lwn.net/Articles/197380/

Slashdot is back up it looks like.

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 6:19 am Post subject:

BlackEdder · Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 11:33 am Post subject:

There seems to be some strive in the developers community. Apparently there are flamefests on the dev mailinglist. You can see it spill over to peoples blogs (planet.gentoo.org). I wouldn't worry too much about it though. Gentoo's dev community is growing rapidly and it is normal to go through some growing pains when switching from a relatively small project where each dev knows eachother, to a much larger project where you need proper guidelines etc. I believe Debian went through a similar fase when they started getting 200+ developers.

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

Yeah, I was also nervous after seeing some suprising comments on Slashdot, but some of the devs on the boards said that things were probably exaggerated. There is a thread on the boards that talks about it:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-500288.html

rokstar83 · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 423 Location: MD

doh, didn't mean to post a dup topic on this, I guess I should have looked harder to see if anyone else was concerned about this.

Thanks, for the link to the thread.

Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

There are core issues with Gentoo, and there are many, but it seems like one of the core problems is with the devs themselves.

Just from what I have seen from some of the devs have posted, they seem to have an idea on what they want, and don't give two shits about the users themselves. They know how to handle everything themselves, and whenever something comes up, they seem to either say "Well, you're an idiot" or "Hmm, that sounds like a problem with _____, not my area".

Its a pain, and rather annoying. I've been in arguments like that. The devs have their own agendas, and there isn't any real core it seems to Gentoo that has taken control of things.

I've siad it before and I'll say it again: Democracy just doesn't work.
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rokstar83 · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 423 Location: MD

While i'm not going to debate the merits of democracy, this isn't really one. We don't elect the devs (and i'm not saying we should). To be honest i'm not sure if the userbase even elects the council (thats out of my own ignorance). My understanding is that the dev issue is more that the council doesn't really have the teeth to focus their efforts, but this is all hearsay.

I'm not try to flame anyone here i'm just curious.

Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

rokstar83 · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 423 Location: MD

If thats true it sounds like theres need for a feature freeze, but thats just me.

Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

Every program sometimes needs a rewrite. Portage seems to need one, but none of the devs are willing to do it because its alot of work and they don't want to.
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The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

rokstar83 · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 423 Location: MD

What specifically? The only problem I have ever heard of/had with portage is reverse dependancy and cleaning which are somewhat interelated. Other than that i've never had any problems with portage, granted I only see it through other programs, emerge, eix, equery and the like.

Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

Some of it is really slow. There are dup features (emerge -s, eix), outside apps that do so much of a better job (eix, equery) that should be in the system, and the related features removed. Then there is the problem with dep handling.
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The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

rokstar83 · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 423 Location: MD

I'm not quite sure when it happend but I notice a huge speed boost in the syncing, especially in the updating the portage cache. Used to be it would hang around 52% for a couple minutes before it would go again. Also I used to get weird I/O failures under heavy cpu load, which seemed to clean up though that may have been an upstream rsync thing for all I know. That speed boost definetly made me happy.

I guess I see what you are saying about the speed thing. There are a large number of speed boosting options on the wiki, and I can see what you mean about how some of them should be included in the main branch although many are as simple as putting portage on a different type of partition.

andrewd18 · Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 3:28 am Post subject:

If a step back is needed to regain the composure in the upper eschelons of our Gentoo distro, then so be it. (Just stabilize Gnome 2.16 before you do it! :lol:

) I think that, every once in a while, people need to stop working on new development and work on fixing what's available. Just like the 2.6.15 kernel release; the Kernel devs announced that they were gonna stop adding features for a little bit, and the > 2.6.15 kernels have been the most stable kernels I've used since the late 2.4's. I know a lot of users have loved the changes in Portage 2.1 versus its predecessors; I sure have, at least. So if we need to step back and do some cleaning, I for one welcome our Mega-Maid overlords.

Some of the projects that could be cleaned...
-- Portage (as nasty as it might be)
-- Bugzilla
-- More Bugzilla
-- Even More Bugzilla
-- Other things I haven't thought of, but they're probably in Bugzilla.

Honestly... we're almost at 150,000 bugs reported total, and it was only a few months ago that we were at 100,000. Let's go back through and clean some things up there.

I hope the things up at the dev/council level get sorted out. I have faith in the devs, despite the fact that I've never met or even chatted with them on IRC. We're pullin' for you, guys!

Regardless of the status in the higher eschelons of my favorite distro... thanks, Gentoo devs. I know you don't normally read the boards and whatnot, but if it weren't for your hard work, I wouldn't be converting my entire family to Linux right now. (I can see the devs now... "Whee, some kid converted his family to Linux; my work here is done."). But it's a step forward in my tech life (and it means less virus-related calls for help from the fam and more calls about insane CFLAGS :lol:

), and I appreciate the work you've all done to make it work thus far.
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Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

++ for the cleanup in bugzilla. Personally, they need to trash some bugs that may be outdated, and sort out which ones are serious, minor, and user error (some are obvious).

I'm not for a complete freeze of Portage, just reducing the number of maintainers there are and put them to working with programming.

I'd like to see Portage with its own USE flags/plug-ins so that it can handle a database (problem with this is, which one?). You could also include with that plug-ins for the search functions, and other tools (equery for one) to keep a minimal system if you want to.

I think some of the docs need work, and the doc page needs to be re-sorted on the site. That shouldn't be too terribly hard, the sorting I mean.

But yeah, at the core I think we need people up there who are willing to put their foot down and get something done and get things back on track. Give users the power back.
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The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

andrewd18 · Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 1:24 pm Post subject:

loki99 · Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 3:49 pm Post subject:

Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

loki99 · Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 7:47 pm Post subject:

Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

loki99 · Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 9:28 pm Post subject:

Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

From what I've seen, outside of user reps, users have little voice amoung the devs. I've seen feature request go unanswered, or the respond "Well, give us the patch or we won't even touch this" given (not that blunt, but almost there).

Its rather annoying.
_________________
The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.