Bugs not getting squashed quickly enough?

[gcasillo]

It's just my perception lately, but it seems like patches are not being applied in a timely manner in order to squash bugs. The community is submitting patches for bug reports, but the submissions are left unanswered and bugs persist. Sometimes they persist for weeks, and sometimes they go months without a reply from a knowledgeable dev.

I have been reluctant to raise this issue or challenge anybody on it, but it's my sense that this has grown worse over the last year, and without a discussion or my gaining a deeper understanding as to why this is, Gentoo will continue to suffer where I may be compelled to take another distro for a spin. I really hate to write that. I believe Gentoo and the "Gentoo way" are invaluable to the FOSS and Linux community. I count on this distro to tailor many computers, servers and PCs alike, to meet the needs of myself and my employers.

Am I being unreasonable to expect a patch to be applied so that a bug can be removed from portage within a couple months? Yes, I am running keywords, but I prefer to run the latest versions where possible and mask bugged packages as necessary; this method has worked very well for me.

[audiodef]

I feel ya. But one of the best things about Gentoo is being a source-based distro, you can always find the sources and compile them manually, without portage. Or write ebuilds for sources you know work. Or fix the sources (and write an ebuild to share with the rest of us). For any of these, you'll find people who can help, since you're likely not the only one wanting a fix for a particular program.

That's the kind of route I take when something isn't working, because I know I can't wait around for someone else if I want to get going on it. But that's a good thing - in proprietary systems, you're just plain, old SOL and at the mercy of the people who built the proprietary software.
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[gcasillo]

While the ability to compile and build things manually is nice when absolutely necessary, I'm running Gentoo for portage's ability to tidily do that legwork for me. It is tedious and cumbersome build manually frequently. I ran into an issue tonight where I updated my kernel, and while rebuilding LIRC for that kernel, I ran into the aforementioned bug again.

I don't mean to disrespect the effort that is made to keep portage up-to-date. I realize some issues take more time to resolve, but I just wish that once patches are submitted that other users confirm might resolve the issue, that those patches then in turn get into portage quicker.

[AllenJB]

There's more bugs than the current pool of developers can handle. Always has been, always will be. The situation hasn't changed at all. The particular bugs which are still open, and whether or not that affect you changes, but the way things are generally doesn't.