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swimmer
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Joined: 15 Jul 2002
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Location: Netherlands
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 Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 11:16 pm Post subject: |
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Thank you Alex for a *very* elaborated write-up!!!
That's pretty much why I chose for Gentoo as my primary OS on *all* of my boxes and in the meantime I run *all* of them in ~ARCH without any problem at all!
Doesn't look like a sinking ship to me 
My best regards to all devs & users which contribute so much quality to this distro!
Kindly yours
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dE_logics
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Joined: 02 Jan 2009
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Location: $TERM
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| Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 1:40 am Post subject: |
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I don't understand why my inbox got flooded for a handful of posts in this thread.
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kimmie
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Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 531
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 6:21 am Post subject: |
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I wish this thread would die already, I'm sick of seeing it pop up, like a sinking, stinking corpse bubbling up to the top again.
Oooops, I just posted! AAAAAAHHHHHH. DIE THREAD, DIE!!!!! |
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theBlackDragon
l33t
Joined: 23 Nov 2002
Posts: 768
Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 7:23 am Post subject: |
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| dE_logics wrote: | | I don't understand why my inbox got flooded for a handful of posts in this thread. |
Someone hit refresh a bit too much while posting, resulting in like 3 pages of duplicate posts.
And Gentoo has been a "sinking" ship for years and years. Has never bothered me. If anything Gentoo has just trancended the hype surrounding it in the early years, seems like all the "cool" kids moved to Arch. Good riddance I say.
That said the entire thing with ssuominen seems to come down to the average company mentality where you got management making decisions and the employees trying to get work done despite the management's decisions and neither wants to deal with whatever it is the other is doing. I mean really, some of those replies in that bug could have come straight from a suit, which is pretty damn scary and a mentality most people don't want to deal with in FLOSS projects, at all.
While you can't escape institutionalization for any project of some size some of the people in that thread need to get a serious reality check. Devs wanna dev not deal with enough red tape to sink a bloody ship but it seems that point was quite lost on some of the rule following fanatics.
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mengzhao
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Joined: 18 Mar 2004
Posts: 13
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:10 am Post subject: objective measurement of "dying" |
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Put personal feeling aside (I love Gentoo), can we just honestly look at the figure that indicate "dying".
Draw the curve over time
1) Gentoo user/developer number peaked and declining
2) Development activity peaked and declining
3) Unresolved bugs increasing
4) Gentoo installation peaked and declining
5) THIS thread is growing FAST.
Anyone see the elephant in the room? |
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kimmie
Guru
Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 531
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:35 am Post subject: |
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| Where??!! That's not an elephant, it's a guy in a gorilla suit!!! |
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Naib
Watchman
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6051
Location: Removed by Neddy
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:40 am Post subject: |
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Sure gentoo is a sinking ship BUT it is a massive liner in a pond. Technically it is sunk but practically the water is of no threat
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dE_logics
Advocate
Joined: 02 Jan 2009
Posts: 2253
Location: $TERM
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 10:01 am Post subject: |
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Let's take the recoll bug for e.g... there's no one who's looking at that guy who's trying to be a maintainer.
Contributers are rare... the opportunity should be grasped.
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AllenJB
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Joined: 02 Sep 2005
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 11:46 am Post subject: Re: objective measurement of "dying" |
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| mengzhao wrote: | Put personal feeling aside (I love Gentoo), can we just honestly look at the figure that indicate "dying".
Draw the curve over time
1) Gentoo user/developer number peaked and declining
2) Development activity peaked and declining
3) Unresolved bugs increasing
4) Gentoo installation peaked and declining
5) THIS thread is growing FAST.
Anyone see the elephant in the room? |
Pics (graphs) or it didn't happen. With sauce.
Also, the fact that this thread exists in its present state would indicate to me a growing number of users who are actively interested in the distro. This would seem to counter 1 and 4 and turn 5 into a positive.
The number of unresolved bugs is a factor of the number of bugs solved over time AND the number of bugs created over time. The value alone can't be useful in this argument unless you prove that the number of bugs being created over time is increasing faster than the number of bugs being solved. This removes 3 from the arguments for a dying distro.
As for item #4, how are you measuring this? Number of installations per month? That's not a good indicator. Gentoo is not a distro where you have to reinstall / upgrade periodically like binary distros. It uses a rolling release system that allows you to install once and upgrade continuously. This along with rsync and stage mirrors and the fact that many people don't use the official cd's for installation makes it impossible to get any kind of accurate figures on install base for Gentoo. This removes point 4 from the list.
Number of items remaining on list of arguments for Gentoo being a dying distro: 0
The elephant in the room is the active thread on the distro forums tryin to argue that the distro is dying.
Last edited by AllenJB on Mon Jun 27, 2011 4:42 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Etal
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Joined: 15 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 12:18 pm Post subject: Re: objective measurement of "dying" |
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| mengzhao wrote: | | 2) Development activity peaked and declining |
http://cia.vc/
Myth Busted.
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Naib
Watchman
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6051
Location: Removed by Neddy
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 12:22 pm Post subject: Re: objective measurement of "dying" |
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| mengzhao wrote: |
Draw the curve over time
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you seem to have forgotten the url for this curve. can I see it please
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Gordex
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 1:32 pm Post subject: |
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Gentoo suffers from the same problems as every other FOSS project does. Get over it, accept reality.
For me it was and is still the best distro out there. |
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kimmie
Guru
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Posts: 531
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 1:54 pm Post subject: Re: objective measurement of "dying" |
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See? Gorilla suit. |
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phajdan.jr
Retired Dev
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1777
Location: Poland
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| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 8:19 am Post subject: Re: objective measurement of "dying" |
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| AllenJB wrote: | | The number of unresolved bugs is a factor of the number of bugs solved over time AND the number of bugs created over time. The value alone can't be useful in this argument unless you prove that the number of bugs being created over time is increasing faster than the number of bugs being solved. This removes 3 from the arguments for a dying distro. |
For an example, see the Chromium project (the open source project behind Google Chrome). Its open bug count keeps increasing, up to about 26000 last time I checked, but it's also gaining popularity very rapidly. The only conclusion you can draw for sure is that people are reporting many bugs, which means they're using the product. That's good!
Note that many bugs are minor, e.g. QA warnings, and do not directly affect users. My experience with Gentoo is that major problems are fixed very quickly, and if the maintainer is not responsive I commit the fix myself. If you have a bug that's sitting there very long, the fix is known but just not applied in the main tree, feel free to contact me. Any developer is allowed to commit fixes to the tree if the maintainer is not responsive.
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merlinBSD
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 15 Apr 2003
Posts: 122
Location: cairns FNQ Australia
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| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 3:32 pm Post subject: |
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I feel bad reading this thread as I am one of those people that have left for arch years ago...
I do not believe gentoo will sink because it has its fan base and its definite purpose.
Gentoo just lacks fast maintainance for 95% of the users who left for binaries based distro.
its weakness is also its strenght I reckon. Although it might have been a lot more popular before it is still a reference in the style. You do not hear of sorcerer anymore
It's not sinking IMHO, it's surviving strong. |
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Chiitoo
Administrator
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Posts: 2575
Location: Here and Away Again
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| Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2011 7:42 am Post subject: |
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Alekz49,
Good post! :]
It's a lot like me, I enjoy the freedom to do what I want. I'm a sort-of-a musician too so I'll be taking a look at your site there. -.^
And you prove one of my points I might or might not have brought up, which is that the forum itself is a strong point showing Gentoo going on, but in the mean time, I'm quite certain there is a HUGE user-base that has never registered to the forum. What I mean is that there are soooo many 'lurkers' there too that not all we have here is what is the Gentoo population.
I'm sure these numbers could be announced by the ones having access to them, and it's got to be huge considering the "price-range" pointed at to what the google search would cost in a certain thread ha!
Anyhoo, I'll try not to sound like a broken record this time so I wont repeat my reasons for liking Gentoo.
What I did want to say, in addition to liking Alekz49's post, was that if Gentoo really was dying, I don't think this thread would be here.
That is all, yes, really!
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swathe
n00b
Joined: 04 Jul 2011
Posts: 73
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| Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2011 7:54 pm Post subject: |
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| I last used Gentoo around 2008, and I don't get the feeling it's dying. From what I can tell as I move back to Gentoo is that as Linux has increased in users and popularity, Gentoo just simply hasn't had the influx of new users. I would think this would be more of a lull and as those new comers to Linux get more experience on the easy distros they will start to migrate to more difficult or in depth distributions. I could be way off the mark here but this is just based on what I have observed from the outside. That an there are many people who are scared of gentoo without ever giving it a chance or reading the handbook. |
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xahodo
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 17 May 2007
Posts: 82
Location: Gouda, the Netherlands
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| Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2011 1:27 pm Post subject: |
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I have some experience moving from distro to distro and have heard from other people what they think.
Mostly people will first step in with a simple distro, made for end users (to see what that "linux" thing is).After a while (in my case after 2 months of suse 7.2) people will start to wonder about other distributions to scratch some itch or in an attempt to get rid of some annoyance. After a while they will find the distribution which they feel satisfies their needs.
For some that is gentoo, for others arch, ubuntu, debian or whatever distro gives that warm fuzzy feeling inside 
Gentoo was the warm fuzzy feeling for me, but I am starting to get worried as there are relatively few devs opposed to the number of packages in the portage tree.
In addition to that there seems to be an awful lot of red tape involved. This causes me to wonder whether some devs even have the time to develop on gentoo. Not good, not good at all.  |
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statikregimen
Apprentice
Joined: 16 Jul 2011
Posts: 173
Location: USA/Michigan
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| Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2011 11:02 am Post subject: |
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| Well, I certainly hope it doesn't sink... I just got here!! D: |
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Ormaaj
Guru
Joined: 28 Jan 2008
Posts: 319
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| Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2011 2:08 pm Post subject: |
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Fixing problems while tracking upstream (gentoo) is getting harder. The rest of my git overlays from o.g.o are a piece of cake because I can just use submodules to pull them into one big overlay.
Last edited by Ormaaj on Sun Jul 17, 2011 5:51 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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gentoo-dev
Apprentice
Joined: 24 Jan 2006
Posts: 172
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| Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 9:45 am Post subject: |
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| Naib wrote: | | Sure gentoo is a sinking ship BUT it is a massive liner in a pond. Technically it is sunk but practically the water is of no threat |
Right, and it also means Gentoo is not going anywhere. |
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phajdan.jr
Retired Dev
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1777
Location: Poland
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| Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 11:55 pm Post subject: |
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| Ormaaj wrote: | | Fixing problems while tracking upstream (gentoo) is getting harder. The rest of my git overlays from o.g.o are a piece of cake because I can just use submodules to pull them into one big overlay. |
I think funtoo publishes a git tree that you could use.
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likewhoa
l33t
Joined: 04 Oct 2006
Posts: 778
Location: Brooklyn, New York
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| Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2011 12:40 am Post subject: |
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| gentoo-dev wrote: | | Naib wrote: | | Sure gentoo is a sinking ship BUT it is a massive liner in a pond. Technically it is sunk but practically the water is of no threat |
Right, and it also means Gentoo is not going anywhere. |
it doesn't need to go anywhere because it's a liner that everyone wants to be on, including google for it's chromeOS build. |
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nadir-san
Apprentice
Joined: 29 May 2004
Posts: 174
Location: Ireland
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| Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 12:09 pm Post subject: |
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| I love these 'gentoo is ding' threads, I remember seeing them when i first joined, and that was a while ago. |
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theBlackDragon
l33t
Joined: 23 Nov 2002
Posts: 768
Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 12:25 pm Post subject: |
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| nadir-san wrote: | | I love these 'gentoo is ding' threads, I remember seeing them when i first joined, and that was a while ago. |
Newbie
Gentoo's just no longer the hipster distro, if that is a problem for people... Arch is that way 
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