Gentoo Announces 'Seeds'

rvale writes "Gentoo has announced a new project called Seeds. Aiming to provide out of the box images for various common tasks, it could be the answer to the common complaint that installing and customizing Gentoo takes too long. However, with other developers and Council members complaining that the project was improperly set up and those backing the project refusing to back off, lending weight to recent claims that Gentoo is suffering from management problems, will what could be a massive step forward degenerate into a repeat of the Sunrise disaster?"

Comments

No, bad

[tomstdenis]

NO MORE!

Spend more time on fucking Q & A. I'm tired of trying to talk people into Gentoo only to find out that the tree is half-fucked all the time [like packages marked stable requiring other libs NOT IN THE FUCKING TREE YET].

No more extras, fix the base!!!

This is the problem with OSS. Everyone wants to get famous for the next big breakthrough and nobody wants to maintain the shit.

Tom

Re:No, bad

[slapys]

"This is the problem with OSS. Everyone wants to get famous for the next big breakthrough and nobody wants to maintain the shit."

Seriously. I submitted several UI bugs to the Xfce bugzilla site recently and none of them were addressed. People want to develop fun new features, but unfortunately that's not all that software is.

Re:No, bad

[Rix]

Really, I find that most people would rather complain about what they don't like than actually do anything to help fix it.

Re:No, bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that most project owners would rather complain that other people don't fix things for them than actually do anything to maintain their own code.

Re:No, bad

[naasking]

you don't see Microsoft telling it's customers "You don't like explorer? Fix it yourself!"

No, Microsoft says, "You don't like explorer? Tough shit!" On rare occasions it's "You don't like explorer? Well I'm afraid it's far too integrated into Windows your Honour."

Re:No, bad

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread explains why there will always be a place for proprietary software you must pay for. That's so someone can be paid to do uninteresting but necessary stuff.

Re:No, bad

[orasio]

I don't think that actually happens.
A project owner with an itch to scratch, will scratch it, they _do_ maintain their own code.
Maintaining their own code, but for other people, and for free, is something that they usually do, but some times they just don't want to. There is where you see some project owners complain, about users that want tailored free maintaining right now, without contributing.
There's no implied contract that says that the original coder will fix _your_ problems for free. That's one of the best things of the GPL, you have the power to make stuff happen yourself. Even if you don't know how to program, there are a lot of programmers that will do it for you, given the right compensation. That is the actual meaning of "free" as in "freedom", and not as in "beer".

Re:No, bad

[Dhalka226]

I mean how do you get the right to brag "Oh, I'm a Kernel developer, see my code-fu muscles" when you can't invest the money to actually develop seriously?

It's very easy: You look at the whole picture.

Your workstation is the result of 800 Gentoo ports being installed. 200M lines of source code. Your own words. Well. that sounds pretty fucking awesome to me. And you got all of that for free.

You're having a problem? Sorry. But even one problem, or five, or twenty--out of 800 installed packages--is still a damn good mark. And those developers you bitch and moan about being immature for not fixing your specific problem (without you even taking the time to report that problem) are clearly providing you a service that you like. If they weren't, the system wouldn't be acceptable for your use andyou would switch to something else.

Don't like the way that your problems aren't getting fixed in the OSS world? Well, you're free to go install Windows or OS X or some other, non-free-world operating system. There are NO problems with any of those OSs, I'm sure. And if there were, I'm sure Microsoft would be happy to release a patch just for you when you... well, don't report it. But I'm sure they'll get your report telepathically.

Seriously, you have one of the absolute worst attitudes I have ever seen. It's not just your posts here. I'm sad to say that I recognize your name because your attitude is constantly shitty. Maybe if you weren't such a high and mighty ass all the time, people would be more inclined to care what your problems are. Hell, if those "occasional" bug reports you file read anything like the drivel you spew here, no wonder your problems don't get fixed.

Re:No, bad

[stuuf]

Why does it have to be proprietary for someone to get paid to develop it?

What's the difference?

[PhrostyMcByte]

I havn't used Gentoo since its early days, when there where no big binary downloads for it. My question is, if you aren't going to compile from source to get that extra level of customizability, what's the difference between Gentoo and say, Debian testing/unstable?

Re:What's the difference?

[really?]

Err ... completely different colour high horse to look down on other from?

Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously, because I'm a Gentoo developer and I don't feel like getting fired for speaking out against a certain clique.

Gentoo is, at this point, royally fucked, and this is a perfect illustration of why. The project no longer encourages technical discussion, debate or getting things done. Anyone trying to have technical discussion is called out and accused of flaming by the once great Seemant (who has not done any development himself for years) and his horde of fanboy minions (most noticably, Jakub) who skipped the usual recruitment process (Seemant throws a hissy fit any time any of his recruits are rejected for failing the quiz), who would rather that people did things without planning and jumped ahead with the kind of fuckups that OS X and Sunrise were than that anyone had a disagreement. Instead, it favors fancy announcements and poorly thought out publicity under the guise of 'making things easier for the users'.

If you look closely, you'll see that Gentoo has not actually done anything for about two years now. Even an attempt to change the color of the website failed after over a year of work. And this is a shame, because it has so much potential. Honestly, I don't know how to fix things. I don't have enough time or enough of a reputation to persuade people to learn from past mistakes (yes, this is Sunrise all over again).

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[Penguin Follower]

I have been using Gentoo for quite awhile and I don't have any gripes. Someone has to be doing something (maintaining packages) or I wouldn't have to emerge --sync and emerge -uD world every few days.

Except that as another user noted above, there's a problem with the base install where PAM and shadow libraries conflict with each other (obviously there are packates from the stage tarball that depend on each?) and it was a problem in the 2006.0 release. Something like that should have been fixed for the 2006.1 release. I had a lot of "fun" getting around that problem (and a lot of wasted time!).

I mean basically "out of the box", you've just finished the install and you reboot into your new gentoo system only to find a PITA of a problem the minute you go to install a package or set of packages that depends on Pam or shadow. I still have the 2005.whatever release still running on my main linux box because of this (I was smart and tried 2006.x on a different system first.)

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[Otter]

This was covered on the mailing lists, GWN, and forums. Don't blame Gentoo because you can't use the tools or read.

That pretty much sums up the problem with Gentoo, nowadays -- searching the forums is now a routine tool for getting your updates to work. It used to be that Portage was the biggest advantage of Gentoo; now it's one headache after another.

And we're not talking about an xmms extension or Firefox theme here. We're talking about fundamental login and security functionality, and the "simple" solution is searching the forums for "emerge -B shadow && emerge -C pam-login && emerge -1k shadow"!

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[wolf31o2]

Well, I'm not going to post anonymously. In fact, you're more than welcome to see exactly what I think. I know for a fact that this is going to make me a few enemies and probably piss off quite a few developers. Quite frankly, I agree with the poster here on many things, but definitely not on all of them. Gentoo really needs a few things to remain a top distribution. For one, we absolutely must stop doing this experimental crap and start focusing on improving and fixing what we already have in the tree. We need to focus on improving the quality of the distribution more than adding new "features" that do nothing more than make things easier on the lazy and the incompetent. There are simply too many Gentoo developers moving in too many directions. We have no focus. We have no direction. Worse yet, if we had one, we have no way of enforcing that we actually move towards it. Gentoo needs a good house-cleaning to remove some of the "problem children" and get us back to, oh, I don't know, maintaining packages and fixing bugs. Sure, that's not very glamorous, but we *are* a community-based Linux distribution. Perhaps we should get back to actually working on that, instead of trying to come up with new projects which sap resources from other places.

It is my personal opinion that the Gentoo developer community is too large and too diverse to properly work towards any real common goals. We have also diverged too far into essentially two camps, those that want the new whiz-bang features and want them now, and those that want a good, stable, reliable, and flexible system that is capable of meeting the demands put upon it. I definitely fall into the second category. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for experimental things, but they should be done outside of the scope of the main project and brought into the project once they've been proven.

I tend to believe that Gentoo needs more internal structure and needs more *well-designed* process to get things done. I don't think that red tape is the answer, but there has to be something done to solve this current anarchy. General development in the business world follows many stages, from initial design, through development, testing, QA, then deployment. In too many places, Gentoo developers are completely skipping the design and jumping straight into development. What this gives the world is a poorly designed product that is extremely hard to maintain and keep the quality up on over time. Beyond that, general testing an QA is being skipped in far too many places, or being done "after the fact" once something is in the wild.

I hope that the election of a new Gentoo council will bring about change to make Gentoo for the better, but truly fear that unless we start taking a hardline position on many of these new projects that we will fade into oblivion under the weight of our own garbage.

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[agaffney]

I only have one thing to say to this....damn straight!

Re:Yes, Gentoo is a mess

[petrus4]

Anyone trying to have technical discussion is called out and accused of flaming by the once great Seemant (who has not done any development himself for years) and his horde of fanboy minions (most noticably, Jakub)

This sounds to me like the same old story with regards to any form of participation in the terminal sociological disease we call "the Linux community" in general.

Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, and Bruce Perens are the broader community's resident egomaniacs. RMS in particular considers anyone who comes anywhere near Linux to automatically become his bitch by default. The other two aren't quite as bad, but they're not much better. From what I'm seeing here, it seems the seperate communities of some distros have the same type of "celebrity" problem...people whose output of actual work ceased years ago, but who insist on staying around and trying to demand that those who actually *are* working bow down and worship them on the basis of *past* accomplishments. Stallman is the single biggest example of what I mean, here...you need to go back *at least* 15 years to point to any of his programmatic contributions, and yet he still hangs around now, shooting his mouth off, demanding credit for things that don't belong to him, and causing nothing but problems generally.

I'm working on something almost entirely alone as a way of avoiding this type of garbage. If I need to deal with anyone, I talk to the people who are doing the various sub-projects' actual gruntwork, direct on Freenode...the proverbial people in the trenches. They're the ones who really build Linux, day in and day out, and they generally get zero credit for it. I remember what ESR once said about this, and I'm going to expand on it:- If you're not producing actual code, but are simply looking to build your own ego or a clique, then kindly sit down and shut the fuck up so that the rest of us who *are* doing something useful can concentrate.

The various social, psychiatric, and neurological disabilities of a number of people associated with Linux by themselves constitute the operating system's main problem...nothing else. Said people need to get over themselves, and above all, quite honestly disappear if they're not willing to do anything genuinely constructive.

That is who gets my own respect, though...people doing actual work. Linux's "celebrities" are formally invited to go and perform anatomically impossible acts with various sharp-edged gardening implements, as far as I'm concerned...and that goes triple for RMS.

Sunrise disaster

[urbanradar]

For those who have no idea what exactly the "sunrise disaster" in the summary is supposed to mean, like I did, here's the link: Project sunrise.

Re:Sunrise disaster

[paskie]

And what exactly is disastrous about it? According to the timeline it is alive and nothing hints about any disasters...

Re:Ill informed post

[ArcherB]

Whether or not making gentoo installable without spending endless painful hours of your time on it is a good thing?

That's already been done. It's called STAGE3

Re:Yes, but look who's back......

[On Lawn]

Way cool.

He's always been a person who does something first, and then talks about it later. I remember way back in the Stampede days, it was all just an idea that code could be compiled to run faster. And the Stampede team just did it.

But what really made Gentoo nice was when DRobbins took from BSD the ability to turn on and off features for the whole system from the bottom up. Having watched Turbo Fredriksson chaff on Debian's package scheme (although I don't think it felt as painful to him as it looked to me) Gentoo was a welcome suprise.

But I have to say, I finally understand what the poster might be getting at. The problem is not Gentoo as much as it is a general problem that Gentoo has not solved for itself. And that is managers vs doers. The person linked as a complainer wants more management, and the people in the LWN article want more doing. Management is overhead if all you do with it is make decisions. Management streamlines and makes the doers' job easier when done right.

I remember the golden days of slashdot ended for me when I realized that it was filled with managers not doers. Everyone was giving opinions on what everyone else should do, from software development to technical development. I suppose it is only natural, slashdot is a place to talk and think. So that is who it attracts.

So it is funny to me that this debate that seems to have come full circle, and probably will continue to hound projects like Gentoo. The person who posted the controversy seems to have completely missed the topic, and his summary shows it. But I hope all the best for Gentoo. I'm sure they'll figure it out with a few hard knocks here and there. I don't think Gentoo will go anywhere, unless a better source distro comes along. And if so, I have no problem with that.

[this is good]

[AtariDatacenter]

I personally benefited from the Ubuntu 'server' install CD. One of the options was clearly labeled something to the effect of, "INSTALL LAMP SERVER". (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php) In no time at all, I went from bare metal to up and running Drupal. I can't tell you how much of a time saver it was. (And out-of-the-box pretty secure, unnecessary daemons all disabled.)

Squash key bugs first!

[starseeker]

I use and like Gentoo Linux, primarily because it is a distribution that lets me install virtually anything, including odd obscure scientific software, with a minimum of fuss. Additionally, many times when things work, they REALLY work because the distribution doesn't get in the way.

But I'm considering trying KUbuntu for my next go-around. In addition to the new software compile requirements gradually outrunning my computer's hardware, I must agree that the smoothness of massive universal upgrades just hasn't felt "as clean" of late. The most important environments for my linux box I will usually wind up building myself anyway (Maxima, Axiom, BRL-CAD, various Lisp packages) and for the rest of it I'm less interested in building for hours upon end for minor upgrades. Particularly if there is a decent chance of introducing problems.

Conceptually, I like the idea of a system that can build itself from source code - there's something clean about it, and also self sufficient. If a system can build itself, it means most everything on the system is pretty solid as far as having what it needs in place. But waning horse power and a focus on things other than endless system tweaking may motivate me to shift.

Originally, I loved that Gentoo let me turn on exactly what I needed to get my hardware to work well, and that was my primary motivation for using it. I still love its documentation, and that I suspect may someday outlive the main Gentoo project itself. But I think it might be time to check out the alternatives again, and lower my monthly power bill ;-)

Re:They're in for a world of hurt

[cloricus]

Only the first thirty posts and there are disgusting posts from pissed off users... I hate to be the one to say it - though having to read through several sets of Debian issues and their comments on /. and seeing a lot of Gentoo users flaming I think I should - maybe Gentoo should get its own house in order before it attacks other distros?

Now for the constructive part of this post. Why is this even a problem? Seriously, sit down and talk through the issue, it's not that hard. They don't want to do what you want and you don't want them to do what they want...I've heard of this one before I think it's called life? Gentoo while a bit off some times is a damn good project and one of the shining stars for the Linux communities...and you keep the windows newb gamers off the rest of our backs so for that you get extra brownie points. So for the sake of every one else just talk it through instead of fighting...

Re:Ill informed post

[KhanReaper]

I hate to admit it, but I think that many people have misinterpreted what Gentoo really is and for whom it is geared. Let's be candid: it's really not about excessive CFLAGS.

Take a good read of this article; it outlines some of the fundamental differences in philosophy between BSD and Linux. In some respects, Gentoo's portage system attempts to reconcile the differences between BSD's ports tree and the absence thereof in Linux as well as the concept of perpetual updates through make buildworld. (I know a guy who's maintained the same install of Gentoo on his laptop for over four years who has kept it up-to-date by using portage without a re-install. Talk about impressive for a Linux distribution.) Yes, it is true that Gentoo does not have a native pkg_add that FreeBSD does to install ports, but what Gentoo offers is as close to that as one can get in Linux; and it is one hell of an improvement on the base concept, might I say. In many respects, if you want to criticize Gentoo over having to compile things to keep it up-to-date, then BSD ought to be brought up for discussion.

Still, it is nice that Gentoo can be updated without having to perform a complete re-installation of the operating system. I hate to say it, but performing "s/old release/new release/g" on /etc/apt/sources.list, apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade is not always as clear as one might expect. When the average user who lacks strong familiarity with dpkg's options is in this situation, I have seen the results: They are very depressing. And while it is true that emerge updates can break, they will at least teach the user in time how to deal with them and learn quite a bit. The same can be said about other distributions, too, so the exclusivity of this issue to Gentoo is really a moot point.

.

What about customization? Sure, some BSD packages may have makefile-based booleans, but in no way are the centrally documented or are they centrally documented. FreeBSD KNOBS comes close, but it still is not exhaustive. There is no real comparison with USE flags. If BSD had it so well, I wonder why people are trying to port portage to BSD. (I love BSD, mind you, so I am not being unreasonably harsh on it.)

What about fundamental design? It is meant to be flexible and dynamic. Ever notice how many directories are suffixed with ".d" in /etc on Gentoo? A lot are. Yes, some other distributions do use the enumerated ".d" directory paradigm, but none seem to do it as much as Gentoo. Gentoo seems to use ".d" directories whenever it can. So if a new package wants to add something to the path, it merely adds another entry to /etc/env.d which specifies this path. I find this system so great, that I've re-implemented it in Debian/Ubuntu across 100+ computers at my work for the special in-house, non FHS-friendly applications. Talk about a compelling innovation.

And when it comes to configuration changes, Debian has debconf, which allows some packages to preserve changes across updates through configuration file regeneration. While this is nice for preseeding, this is not helpful when there are major updates or when you've made hand-made modifications. Yes, dpkg will bring about a diff of the two files, but does dpkg's integrated configuration diff mechanism really hold its own against Gentoo's dispatch-conf? If you've used dispatch-conf, the answer is no.

Yes, it is true that there are some quality assurance failings with packages in Portage, but let's put that aside for a moment. When it comes to making packages for Gentoo, it certainly beats making them for Debian. Yes, Debian has its nice policy manual, but it is not always up to date or the easiest thing to read. Gentoo's documentation let's a first-time package builder build a package in very little time; whereas Debian or Redhat's syste

This is how Free Software dies.

[RLiegh]

So, let's recap. Debian is having to pay developers in order to get a working distribution out of the door anywhere near on-schedule; NetBSD is embroiled in a scandal surrounding the undue influence of Wasabi on the core team -when it's not flayling wildly trying to cope with its' other management problems, and now it emerges that gentoo has been stuck in a political quagmire for years holding back even the most frivilous of changes (forget any major ones).

We've reached the point where all-volunteer, non-commercial unix-style Operating Systems are drowning in personality conflicts; and the only technical strides and achievements are coming largely from private companies (Sun, Redhat).

This quaint social experiment of altruistic development has shown two things: as much as you may dislike corporate culture, corporate structure and the incentive of a paycheck are what is needed to gain any sort of professional-quality software going out of the door on a regular basis.

Remove the structure, remove the incentive and before long you're left with nothing more than quibbling dorks and software packages like gentoo which half of the time are badly broken because no one can be bothered to work on them.

Re:This is how Free Software dies.

[drew]

this must be the perfect example of the old physics experiment rule:
"When you need to ensure a close fit to a line, make sure that you use only two data points."

OK, so you mentioned three open source projects that are having trouble right now, and two commercial companies that aren't.

What happens when you add Ubuntu, KDE, FreeBSD, or Firefox to your list. (OK, nix Firefox. Bad example).

Or for that matter, look how much corporate structure and financial incentive have helped Microsoft to get Vista, IE 7, and Office 12 out the door on time.

Any group can be run badly, and any group can be run well if there is enough interest and leadership. This incident reflects poorly on the leadership and members of the Gentoo project, nothing more and nothing less.

Re:This is how Free Software dies.

[Spit]

The large projects that succeed all have an arbitrator who has final call on any conflicts: Linux has Linux and OpenBSD has Theo. Sun and Redhat have executives. The decision maker is the final step required in a project to prevent ego-paralysis. It is telling that OpenBSD and Linux are two of the most innovative and complex projects around.

Note: Linux is a kernel.

Re:QA vs. Q&A

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Um.... OSS Sucks, and yet you still use it? Um.... Look. You're using the most user-unfriendly chunk of OSS there is. You're complaining it's user-unfriendly. I've installed both Ubuntu and the old Mandrake, I've done it for myself and non-techies, it was easy, I'm actually pretty happy overall. I'm not a demon-monster-coder. I can code enough to do it for a living.

Your continual 'OSS Sucks' comments are mildly offensive, seeing as you're judging an entire community based upon your experience with a small piece of it. They show you personally lack in certain areas of consideration.

OSS doesn't have any real problems, it's individuals within the system. The system / movement / whatever you want to call it itself mutates all the time. It's a software project that has lasted and lived in the same area for over ten or fifteen years, and managed to keep up with modern technology. There aren't a whole lot of codebases like that out there.

I'm sorry you think OSS sucks as a whole. But I don't agree and flaming the crap out of all the people that don't is just trolling.

Re:Ill informed post

[DAharon]

I completely agree with you that people who are unfamiliar with Gentoo, are largely ignorant of what it's like to actually run a Gentoo system. CFLAGS? I don't really run any fancy CFLAGS. USE flags? If a program can benefit from a certain use flag, I add it. It's Portage and the Gentoo toolset that really makes Gentoo a joy to work with. I am always hearing people complain about how hard it is to install, and how it always breaks. I always ask myself, "What the hell are they doing"? I have been running the same Gentoo install for at least 3.5 years now on my desktop. I play games, surf the internet, write papers, download stuff on it. It also acts as my wireless router, MythTV machine, and file/ftp server. I emerge -uD world at least once a week and encountering a problem is a rarity. I just don't get it. How can everyone be having such a devil of a time maintaining just a basic Gentoo "surf the internet" computer, when I've had such an easy time for so long?

I give up..

[B5_geek]

I have just spent the last 2 days trying to install Gentoo. First I tried the newest 2006.1 LiveDVD. It wouldn't get past gpm (general purpose mouse), so I disabled gpm, and it got stuck on the next section.

I went to IRC, #gentoo@freenet.org and the sage advice I got was: um, yeah 2006.1 is bjorked, try 2005.1.

So I did. I popped in the LiveCD, let it boot and upon once complete I had a CLI. (surprised me, all other LiveCD's I have used actually booted to a GUI) Not a problem, I can handle this. I followed the directions in the handbook exactly. Everything went smoothly untill it came time to reboot (after setting up grub).

Reboot. Grub panics because it can't find what it needs. I got the edit menu and try to fix it. No luck.

So I go through the whole process again. This time I even went so far as to make my partitions the exact same size so that everything would be verbatim. reboot, same grub panic.

Third try; I avoid the Stage 3 install and do everything live via the online handbook.
It works! Glorious Rapture I can now boot to a CLI. The handbook on the CD is DIFFERENT AND WRONG. The online handbook is accurate and worked.

So now it's time to start installing apps. MC and rar were the first to be installed, portage was complaining about using an old profile, so I switched it manually. It still didn't like it, so thanks to help on IRC I emerged eselect and was able to change my emerge profile. I test it with a couple other small apps, and errors are all gone.

Now I need a web-browser, so I can google for answers to questions that I have. emerge lynx
Emerge now throws up some access violation. Next I try links, same error.

I think to myself, I'll get back to those later. so I emerge fluxbox (expecting to get xorg too, but I didn't despite flux's obvious dependencies).

Flux installs with no errors.
startx -> nothing
ok, so now emerge xorg-x11, and I get another Access Violation. I toss in a knoppix CD, get online to google these access Violations, turns out that it is (possibly) due to a font conflict between 2 differnet packages that need to be installed (that both need the same font).

I quit. Back to Debian for me. Apt I missed you.
I have tried:
redhat, mandrake, suse, slackware, DSL, puppy, linspire, debian, ubuntu, and now gentoo.
They have all caused me grief. But I still love debian.