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Is Gentoo in crisis?
TheCoop1984 writes "A recent article on distrowatch, and an extended thread on the gentoo forums, have pointed out that gentoo is not what it used to be. Daniel Robbins came back and went again after only a few days, developer turnover is as high as ever, personal attacks on the mailing lists are common, and people are generally not happy about the current state of affairs. Is gentoo rotting from the inside, and can anything be done about it?"
I do, when I did my rounds trying various Linux distros, it had the fewest dependancy-hell type errors. I found it the least difficult to get working as I needed it, and to keep it working.
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
But nothings really stopping you from compiling the source code on any other distribution either. Simply download the source and compile it. Sure Gentoo does this for everything, but we don't really need this for everything. For the packages that do require it, go ahead and compile, you can do this on any Linux system. And as for things like KDE, most distros that I've used don't have a single "KDE" package. They have about 100 packages (or more, or less, never bothered to count) that you can choose to install or not to install, based on what you want to include on your computer.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The big idea of Gentoo is to create a distribution in which components are distributed in source code form only, and compiled by the user.
I've been a Gentoo user for about 4 years and that's never been the goal, that's the means through which it achieves its goal.
Gentoo is a system designed to allow a user to easily put together their own personalised system aimed at doing whatever they like on whatever they like (hence the big pile of supported architectures). It's about providing as much choice as possible.
With source packages you can compile binaries to be as stable as possible (leave out GCCs optimisations) as fast as possible (turn them all the optimisations on) or even to compile small binaries (for better performance on systems with hardly any cache). See? Choice.
Right now there are 220,000 files, some ~100 bytes and others ~0-4k. Just to support portage. Space-age filesystems or not that's a lot of tiny files to be scattered around and updated piecemeal. What happens is that gentoo starts taking more and more time to do syncs and searches, not to mention everything else slowing down.
.zip file. In a zip each file is compressed individually, so you could still do rsync diffs. There's an index at the end so you can do really quick lookups (bypassing the whole slow path of inode / namei). The fs can do read-ahead and caching much better on a single file, and it won't have to do a seek for every file.
A good solution would be to put portage into a
This is the kind of real, fundamental problem that gentoo should be solving. Gentoo should be the lightest distro, not a huge sprawling mess.
Ever heard of glsa-check, ? Did you ever consider that with gentoo you can roll your own updates from upstream and test them without fear of major breakage instead of waiting for a distro-supplied .deb to finally come out three days after the vuln is made public? Do you claim that distro-provided defaults are sufficient configuration for your servers or that somehow debian automagically removes the need to edit config files when changes in their format/content appear once in a while and you have (gasp) new options to consider?
No? Ok, then please take your ubuntu superiority myths (I don't believe for a second that you're running vanilla debian) and stuff'em where the sun don't shine. Why the heck were you doing updating a production server just to get a new version on day three after deployment anyway?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Nope. That was my point, the new interface has moderation buttons that disapear after use. The only way that I could find to undo moderation was to post a comment.
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I love these sorts of comments.
When Daniel was around, Gentoo also only had about 80 developers and less than 30,000 files in the tree. The package count was less than 1/4 what it is now. The bugs were still less than 25,000. There were horrible cliques within the distribution... tons of infighting. Daniel stopped doing Gentoo development long before he actually left the distribution. People seem to have this starry-eyed memory of when Daniel was around. Trust me, It wasn't a cake walk by any stretch of the imagination. While admittedly things have gotten worse of late, Daniel's presence had little to do with it. I think we would be in a similar situation had he not left. Remember that one of the reasons for his leaving was he got burnt out due to his inability to continue to manage the ever-growing distribution by himself. When he left the first time, it had already been a good year or so without much input from Daniel on anything regarding the direction of the distribution. Daniel's leaving the project didn't coincide with his reduced contributions, at all.
The biggest problem with the distribution is we are going through massive growing pains. Until recently, the leaders of the distribution were afraid to do much, for fear of upsetting developers. We've now started to realize that it's OK to upset a developer or two every now and then and that we need to work towards making the distribution better as a whole. We have been throwing around some ideas for some time and are working towards implementing them. These things take some time. Until then, we'll probably see a bit more of this sort of drivel being posted by all sorts of people. We need to get back to doing what we do best, making a kick ass distribution of Linux.