Submitted by Daniel Robbins, original creator of the Gentoo project, offers a solution to fix the recent leadership crisis at Gentoo: “I have received permission from my employer to return and serve as President of the Gentoo Foundation, renew its charter, and then work in some capacity to help to get Gentoo going in the right direction from a legal, community and technical perspective.”
Its good to see he is taking charge again, the community, while still active didnt seem as steady as it once was, hope to see more active development come to gentoo, and show why it is a great unique meta-distro.
He hasn’t taken charge yet. This is just a proposal. The Gentoo developers and trustees (if there are any left) have to agree to it, which doesn’t seem likely since his plan is to get rid of them.
I’m just a user, but I’m all for a benevolent dictator. It’s clear that Gentoo needs direction.
Nothing against anyone in the Gentoo camp, but when Robbins ran it, it was the Ubuntu of its day. If Gentoo wants to continue to be relevant and not just a niche system, I think Robbins is the best guy for the job.
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What? It might have been the easiest of the source based distros, but it was still the sort of thing that you waited for a three day weekend, for which you had nothing else planned, to try to install. Hardly “the Ubuntu of its day”.
I can recommend Ubuntu to nontechnical users. I would *never* have even considered recommending Gentoo.
I may be wrong, but I’m fairly sure he meant “the Ubuntu of its day” in reference to the strong community and overall popularity of the distro back then. Certainly, it was the distro you went with if you wanted source-based control without the needless headaches of “roll your own” or the various obscure source-based distros out there.
And think about this too: Would Ubuntu be so great, so powerful and so easy to use if it wasn’t for the unprecedented community involvement with the project? The users truly do make the system what it is, and whether you like Ubuntu or hate it, the user base helps to make it a good distro all around.
While I don’t run Gentoo myself (I’ve recently converted to OS X for the second time), I sincerely hope that it can come back into the mix stronger and better.
On the other hand, when things get confusing and technical, I’ve seen links on the Ubuntu forums to Gentoo documentation.
Someone suggested in a previous article that they thought Gentoo would become the launching point for a thousand distributions due to its amazingly flexible nature… I’d say their documentation has been their real gift to the Linux world.
Edited 2008-01-13 04:43 UTC
I do not think that anyone would find fault with Gentoo documentation. But when things get confusing and technical, Ubuntu makes it less confusing and technical, whereas Gentoo just writes even *more* documentation. The best documentation is that which is never needed because the software explains itself. This is not to say that one could not point to a a zillion (but declining) things in Ubuntu that *are* more confusing than they should be. But if so, one could probably point to 10 zillion in Gentoo. I’m sure Gentoo is great for people who want to learn about all the nuts and bolts. But they are really two completely different distributions for two completely different kinds of people.
It depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
If you want to get your disk formatted so you can install, a ext3 format wizard is great.
If you want to learn about filesystems, partitions, RAID, LVM and encryption and how to pick the best options, then you need full technical documentation.
I agree with the value of documentation. Another place gentoo could will provide a lot of value to other communities is really when it comes to the processes they develop for quality assurance.
My understanding and experience has always been that when compiling from source you get to uncover more design flaws and obscure bugs than other cases. With good documentation, which they are somewhat known for now and a focus on developing guidelines for proper quality assurance, regression/unit testing and effective bug reporting I think they so much more to offer.
I talk as someone who used gentoo and see how that experience helped me along the way. Also one should never under estimate the value of having access to knowledgeable people who are willing to share their wisdom and understanding, none of this our way or the high way crap I seem to be picking up.
In the early day^aEURTMs gentoo was more about sharing advanced concepts in a down to earth manner with tips and articles and options presented to with a clear explanation of the differences (why you may want to use this kernel, that logging application or a host of other alternatives). I am not sure how pervasive the recent trends of removing options instead of accommodating choose and waiting out instead of embracing new advances is but it feels nothing like what it used to.
On the other hand, when things get confusing and technical, I’ve seen links on the Ubuntu forums to Gentoo documentation.
I have not been browsing Ubuntu forums since I am not a Ubuntu user, but I too have seen in quite a few places links to Gentoo howtos. I guess it’s because Gentoo people have seen quite an effort in creting all those howtos, they’re usually quite good quality, and they can be followed on almost any distro provided you install the correct tools.
So, in essence, even though people don’t ever use Gentoo they are still benefitting a lot from it
Save yourself 5 minutes, you don’t have to read the article. Basically, Dan suggests to come back to Gentoo and to lead the project again, if the Gentoo people agree.
When he left, Gentoo was at its top. Since then, it’s been very badly managed and has dropped to hell in the mind of the Linux community.
As seen on Distrowatch:
2002: Gentoo: N^Ao3
2008: Gentoo: N^Ao15
Nothing like a good leader. See Ubuntu. Gentoo needs its great leader back to do some clean up.
But I’m not sure if Daniel Robbins returning is the best solution.
There seems to be a lot of hate from a few people within Gentoo, as I’m sure that he doesn’t particularly like some of the people involved as well. Robbins rejoining is likely to cause just as many problems as it may solve.
Technically Gentoo doesn’t seem to have moved that far, something I thought it was great for. Some of my annoyances for it include:
– Slow package updates. I know that bugs can occur as a result of buggy packages released too early, but many Gentoo developers seem extremely slow at moving packages into stable. You know things are slightly wrong when other distributions stablise things ages before Gentoo does.
– Bastardisation of Gentoo Linux. I really don’t care about Gentoo/BSD! Although I’ve tried Paludis I don’t want development time of a package manager to be split by developers with a different agenda. I’d rather Gentoo concentrated on Gentoo Linux instead of trying to do everything including the Gentoo GNU Toaster/Fridge/Oven.
– Lack of improvements to Portage. Things haven’t advanced enough. The removal of packages bringing in use flags (eg. installing mysql would add a mysql use flag), this is probably a good idea but nobody has bothered adding default use flags per package!
I still like Gentoo, however it’s more of a love-hate relationship these days.
It would be disastrous though. Imagine the conflicting use flags if every single package added its own use flags to the system. Installing mysql should never add a mysql use flag. However adding a mysql use flag ought to result in mysql being installed. Your suggestion would completely screw up sane systems.
Not necessarily. In Source Mage GNU/Linux (that is a source-based distro, like Gentoo) dependencies are set locally by users when they install packages, and it works just fine. When you install a package in SMGL, the package manager asks about each dependency whether you want to install it or not. When you upgrade or reinstall the package, the package manager remembers the dependencies you’ve chosen earlier.
If you don’t choose anything when the package manager asks about dependencies, it goes with the default choices. Once a package has been installed, all subsequent packages are compiled by default with that installed package as a dependency. (So it’s kind of like adding use flags on the fly as you install new packages.) The time period that the package manager waits for your answer before proceeding with the default choices can be configured.
In SMGL you only need to answer all the dependency questions the first time you install a package — on subsequent installs the package manager remembers your earlier choices (although you can build the package with the “-r” option if you want to reconfigure it).
It’s also possible to configure dependencies globally in SMGL (like setting use flags in Gentoo) but that is really not necessary because the “set dependencies when you install new packages” strategy works fine. In fact, I first thought I’d install Gentoo because it’s the most popular source-based distro, but then the Gentoo installation instructions told me I had to set use flags and it just seemed very counterintuitive to me to decide dependencies before I had installed any packages.
So I decided to go with Source Mage instead.
You have to remember that USE flags are like a dependency filter that allows one to pick and choose which of to possible features one would like their packages to be compiled with. I think your point is well made USE flags should be acknowledged by the packages but packages should not change anything. If it is a feature that the package can not do with, then its a hard dependancy.
I can’t help but think of him as that guy who dumped running Gentoo to go work for Microsoft. Now he wants to run Gentoo again. Go figure.
I would definitely have him X-Ray’d for Borg implants and analyzed for psycho-conditioning first. There’s no telling what might have happened to him inside those walls.
Edited 2008-01-13 00:23 UTC
Let drobbins come back.
Then maybe we’ll get somewhere… right now nobody knows what is going on – and the devs usually wont reply – and if they do they do so a month of 5 later.
*crossing my fingers*
Kill Gentoo, don’t return! This is the perfect opportunity to reinvigorate Gentoo by wiping the slate clean of the current political/organizational cruft and carrying forward the original principles into a new distro. Get developers excited again with a fresh start based on the best of the existing distro along with some new ideas. Such a rebirth could bring some great things.
Obviously there would be resistance, but you’d just need to establish in people’s minds the idea that the existing distro is “Legacy Gentoo” when pushing the new one, because there’s nothing a Gentoo user dislikes more than being out-of-date.
You could call the new distro “Genthree“, get it? hahaha Thanks, I’ll be here all night.
Gentoo is dead, long live Gentoo!