Gaim Devies don't like Gentoo Users? huh? WTF?

Message

kres · Post by **kres** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 4:33 am

Hey... just caught this at the end of a gaim emerge:

"If you experience problems with gaim, file them as bugs with
Gentoo's bugzilla {Snip} DO NOT seek help in #gaim giam developers
do not like gentoo users."

Is this for real? {blink} {blink} Or just a joke?

silent.c · Post by **silent.c** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 4:40 am

Many maintainers do not like gentoo users. We strip debugging symbols of their packages. And that is a touchy issue that kinda pisses them off.

HolyCoitus · Post by **HolyCoitus** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 4:50 am

I was sitting around their IRC chat and a group in there just randomly started bashing on how the Gentoo community was the biggest group of morons in all of Linux, and they were all ignorant newbs... I was taken back to say the least, considering that I really doubt some standard moron with no computer experience could install Gentoo.

They were just bitter though about the fact that the compile process and extra customizations that the ebuilds can bring add more layers for bugs.

Abraxas · Post by **Abraxas** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 5:14 am

HolyCoitus wrote:I was sitting around their IRC chat and a group in there just randomly started bashing on how the Gentoo community was the biggest group of morons in all of Linux, and they were all ignorant newbs... I was taken back to say the least, considering that I really doubt some standard moron with no computer experience could install Gentoo.

They were just bitter though about the fact that the compile process and extra customizations that the ebuilds can bring add more layers for bugs.

They're just lazy. It's so much easier to debug something with only a few itinerations. With Gentoo there are numerous itinerations of every application because of the different CFLAGS and USE flags used on different machines.

Hypnos · Post by **Hypnos** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 5:39 am

Abraxas wrote:They're just lazy. It's so much easier to debug something with only a few itinerations. With Gentoo there are numerous itinerations of every application because of the different CFLAGS and USE flags used on different machines.

Laziness is not restricted to debugging -- there's a lot of sloppy code out there, and sometimes it breaks with optimizations, or, more likely, different compile-time options (libraries used, etc.).

Cerement · Post by **Cerement** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 7:46 am

Gaim started it!

zerojay · Post by **zerojay** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 8:34 am

I hate to say it but I just recently discovered how much the Gentoo community is reviled even by people who aren't developers. I really don't understand why it is that way, but that's just the way it seems to go. Oh well.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 9:22 am

DarkStalker wrote:I hate to say it but I just recently discovered how much the Gentoo community is reviled even by people who aren't developers. I really don't understand why it is that way, but that's just the way it seems to go. Oh well.

I wouldn't say it's reviled. But there is definitely a stigma of some form which comes down in part to Gentoo being relatively successful.

Mindstab · Post by **Mindstab** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 9:44 am

I think charlieG has it

anyone anywhere who achives success usually has issues about it

look at music
any band that achieves success after a while is seen as "seeling out" by some one. often hard core old fans

I m sure you could come up with more examples elsewhere too.
success and popularity have their price.

ursusarctos · Post by **ursusarctos** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 11:54 am

I'd say there's a pretty good reason why. Gentoo puts users in touch with the realities of their OS to a level that most other distributions don't. Other distributions allow you such access, sure...you can compile gaim from source on RedHat or Suse or Mandrake if you feel like it, but in those situations, it's likely to be experts doing the compiling. Mere mortals will just get a binary package from the developers, or just install what came on the shiny cd.

Compare that to Gentoo. The gentoo newbie has to do a lot of compiling, but he doesn't really understand the intricacies of what's going on. The documentation is really well written and the forums can give great support, but the converse of that is that more than a few users end up compiling their own systems from scratch by typing in a few commands and letting portage take care of all the rest. In short, Gentoo probably has a higher percentage of users who know just enough to be dangerous.

From the perspective of the developer, this causes two things to happen. First, as others have pointed out, gentoo compiles are more likely to be a lot more varied and rigorous. I'd agree that the developers shouldn't be irritated about these. But additionally, I'd imagine that Gentoo is more likely to produce bug reports by clueless newbies who assume the software is buggy, just because the magic portage isn't working. After a few dozen such bug reports, I can well understand how they'd get pissed. If the bug reports are poorly written and/or incomplete, or (worse yet) submitted by some misguided soul who thinks running Gentoo makes him a 1337 Haxx0r, they've got a pretty good case for saying to the Gentoo devs "Hey, you put these users here, you deal with them!"

Now granted, there are all sorts of wizards using gentoo, and they've got a lot of knowledge about the system. Moreover, in the long run, I'm sure Gentoo will produce a more literate and competant user-base than a lot of other descriptions. But at the same time, there are those in the community who could use gentle reminders to stay out of the way of others as they take their first steps.

Soviet Bread Line · Post by **Soviet Bread Line** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 12:06 pm

It's good to be loved. hehe

asimon · Post by **asimon** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 12:47 pm

I remember an older version of Rhythmbox where they even opened a pop-up windows at program start with a similar notice.

If developers really make the expierience that say 70% of all backtraces from Gentoo users only list "unknown symbol" and another 20% use such aggressive compiler flags that gcc produces bad code than such notices make sense.

asimon · Post by **asimon** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 12:53 pm

charlieg wrote: But there is definitely a stigma of some form which comes down in part to Gentoo being relatively successful.

Very relative! It may be the third fastest growing distribution when counting by percentages of growth, but looking at the absolute numbers ...

But after this logic there must be much more stigma against Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, all much more sucessfully than Gentoo. Is this so?

Spawn of Lovechild · Post by **Spawn of Lovechild** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 1:50 pm

I lovingly remember the original Rhythmbox developer putting in a warning to all Gentoo users - developers really don't like us, we optimize their code and hit every compiler problem out there.

They are however forgetting that the bug reporting guide states that you should strip flags to see if a specfic error presists, and most people here can inherit debug if they really have to.

But it's true there are a lot of idiots using Gentoo, then again there's a lot of idiots using LFS (or any other distro that depends on you building from source) as well.

Vann · Post by **Vann** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 3:05 pm

As a once-active Gaim patcher, I'll say that Lovechild is basically right. Gaim on Gentoo has bugs that no other distro has, and many Gentoo users (used to) post bugs to Gaim's bug list or go on IRC and complain. This is annoying.

And they don't unilaterally dislike Gentoo users -- I was one then, too. Of course, I don't use the ebuild so never had any of the mystery bugs that compiling with absurd CFLAGS introduces.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 3:08 pm

Spawn of Lovechild wrote:But it's true there are a lot of idiots using Gentoo, then again there's a lot of idiots using LFS (or any other distro that depends on you building from source) as well.

EDIT: ...or any other distro. period.

Spawn of Lovechild · Post by **Spawn of Lovechild** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 3:12 pm

charlieg wrote:
Spawn of Lovechild wrote:But it's true there are a lot of idiots using Gentoo, then again there's a lot of idiots using LFS (or any other distro that depends on you building from source) as well.
EDIT: ...or any other distro. period.

True, but in this context the complaint over us was related to our love of CFLAGS - I doubt a redhatter compiles gaim from scratch - he would in 99% of all cases use the rpm.

stonent · Post by **stonent** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 5:14 pm

We expose the oddest compiler/compiling bugs because our varied flag usage.

ewan.paton · Post by **ewan.paton** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 6:22 pm

stonent wrote:We expose the oddest compiler/compiling bugs because our varied flag usage.

that sounds like a good thing to me, if the code can live in a gentoo enviroment it must be stable

TheCoop · Post by **TheCoop** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 6:27 pm

gentoo is in fact good for the OSS community, as it forces the developers to really check their code and make sure it is 100% stable, which they don't like

christsong84 · Post by **christsong84** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 6:50 pm

TheCoop wrote:gentoo is in fact good for the OSS community, as it forces the developers to really check their code and make sure it is 100% stable, which they don't like

I thought everyone knew that developers in general are lazy...

I know I am...heh

stonent · Post by **stonent** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 7:20 pm

Maybe I'm just obsessive compulsive, but I'd fix warnings too if I were someone who does this.

Syntaxis · Post by **Syntaxis** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 8:39 pm

Mindstab wrote:success and popularity have their price.

Spot on. *Any* distribution that's at least reasonably successful is inevitably going to experience things like this.

I'm sure you could come up with more examples elsewhere too.

Off the top of my head, two similar instances involving Debian come to mind:
1) The Micq developer's deliberate sabotage of the Debian package (http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/20 ... 00771.html)
2) The Mplayer developers taking advantage of every opportunity to express their hatred for the distribution (e.g. http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-d ... 22821.html).

G-Style · Post by **G-Style** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 9:28 pm

As long as your good, there will always be haters.

tsigo · Post by **tsigo** » Tue Feb 24, 2004 10:05 pm

There needs to be a "I used Gentoo when it was underground" t-shirt.