SnEptUne wrote:I have been wondering ever since the forum isn't as active as it used to be, but is Gentoo dead? There are definitely sign that it is going downhill, for example:
Bugs reports are not even assigned after being submitted for over a week,
Not all bugs will get immediately assigned. But there definitely are people working on it. At the moment, many members of the community are in the middle or revision / exams, so have reduced time available to work on things - this affects all open source projects every year.
portage is not growing at the rate as it used to be,
I'm assuming you mean the number of packages in the tree isn't increasing. This is a good thing. The current number of packages is, I believe, about right. Too many packages in the tree and you'll have too many of them not being properly maintained.
There are many overlays where experimental and unsupported packages are being continually developed - both official and unofficial.
Check the gentoo.org front page or the -dev-announce mailing list for the "Automated Package Removal and Addition Tracker" messages - looking at the past few weeks there has generally been many more packages added than have been removed.
Gentoo's developer pages are being abandoned,
The project pages have never really been kept up-to-date. This is an ongoing issue. There are moves within the developer community starting to happen that I think will see this situation improve.
Documentation is being continually maintained and updated.
Gentoo Wiki is still being "rebuilt", and
The Gentoo Wiki is a totally unofficial project. The owner and admins are not Gentoo Developers and it has no direct links to the Gentoo developers. It was a conscious decision not to try and restore the entire content of the old wiki - this is already available in archives and such. The old content was, in my opinion, largely out of date or bad in other ways. In many ways the loss of the database was actually a blessing, in my opinion.
New content is constantly being added to the wiki (including content recovered from articles from the old wiki).
custom overlays are not being maintained as it used to be.
This is up to the overlay maintainers. Most overlays are completely unofficial. I run one (a very small one that's basically there because it's not hard for me to make my overlay publicly available) and I update its contents when I get round to it. I do provide support when people contact me about issues, but those cases are very rare.
The official overlays are very much active - there may be some which are not very active, but largely this is not the case. These overlays are generally used for proxy maintainership and experimental packages / eclass changes.
Or am I just being paranoid? I really like Gentoo and hope it will last for as long as Ubuntu.
Largely developers do not have the time to go out of their way to keep users informed of every change they make. Keep an eye on the gentoo.org front page, as well and planet.gentoo.org and planet.larrythecow.org (unofficial user blogs planet) and of course the -devel and -dev-announce mailing lists. Gentoo development is as active as ever, in my opinion, and that's not likely to change any time soon.