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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?"
When people with strong personalities leave an organization it becomes more attractive for people that would rather not deal with them. I expect Gentoo will see a trickle in of new developers.
I hope gentoo doesn't pass away as it's a clever idea and a good system but really who was it appealing to? Even as a geek is wasn't really interested in compiling my own packages because there is so little to be gained by it. Probably the best solution is to have a system where you can compile your own easily when you want to but generally take the precompiled offering - basically what Debian does. The performance that Gentoo claimed never really appeared AFAIK and I think that would be the only reason for the system.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
That's why most people use gentoo. It looks good, ostensibly. People never stop to consider the long-term. Consider this: A timeline of 365 days of gentoo.
Days 1-3, install.
Day */3 - Recompile $pkg for security vulnerability or new version. Re-edit this pkg's config file because options have changed. Some renamed, some deprecated, some added, some removed. Re-attempt to get your server back into the state it was two weeks ago without having to revert to a vulnerable package.
Day 365 - suicide.
Now, compare this to debian:
Minutes 1-10, install.
Days */10, apt-get upgrade (assuming a cron of apt-get update).
Day 365? At the beach, not even thinking about your servers.
Repeat after me: Gentoo is not a server OS.
You know, I've read several articles online in the last few months which suggest serious problems with Gentoo. But I think it's important to consider the fact that, from my personal perspective and in my own experience, I have had less issues in the last 6 months with Gentoo (except for a hardware failure on one of my main hard drive), than I have had in all the time I've used Gentoo. My system right now is also running more unstable packages than I've ever run, and this is all in amd64.
I admit that I'd stick with Gentoo even if, from my perspective as a user, it was going through a hard time, but on my (KDE desktop) system, which is the main system I use for just about everything, if I didn't read these articles, I would have no idea that anything was going wrong.
I have spent less time maintaining, fixing, or otherwise bringing my system up to date in the last few months than I have in years.
As for interpersonal politics, lack of diplomacy, and immoderate language, I don't think that's anything unique to Gentoo. It may well be that there are some cultural issues which need addressing - not for me to say - and perhaps the departure of key developers may, in the future, affect the user's experience, but for me, this has not yet been the case.
I like Gentoo a lot - in fact, I wound up running it sort of by mistake. As a newcomer to Linux, I'd read (in late 2001) that the Gentoo install was some kind of baptism of fire. I had problems understanding some of the fundamentals of how Linux systems are set up and at the time my Mandrake install was not helping me learn. I installed Gentoo as a lark, with the idea that I might learn some things about Linux that I could apply to Mandrake (which I was running because everyone said, at the time, that it was a great distribution for beginners).
Having gotten it installed on the first try, without any problems whatsoever, I ran it for a little while. Then I fell in love with portage which was - at the time - more reliable than Mandrake's package manager. After a few weeks, I couldn't find a reason to go back to Mandrake. This was just a few months in, after years of being a Windows user (which is why I also take issue with the popular assertion that Gentoo isn't for beginners, because it was ideal for me).
In the time since, I've tried several distributions and use Debian on my router and my file server, because they're old, crotchety machines that I was too lazy to install Gentoo on. But I've yet to find anything which so closely matches my expectation of how my system should work, than Gentoo. Which is why I'd stick with it (that and 5 years of momentum, of course).
For me, Gentoo is about ease of use, and specifically *not* having to spend a lot of time keeping my system up to date. In no way am I suggesting that the assertions of others that "Gentoo is too much work" are invalid, but they certainly have nothing to do with my experience, or that of many other Gentoo users. As for compiling software (for instance), this is a process I run, background, and forget about. Every few months, something a little more involved might require an hour or so of my attention (a major GCC upgrade, for instance) but overall, maintaining my system is simply not a time sink, at all.
And no, I'm not a developer. A computer hobbyist and fan of computers, but hardly some kind of guru. There may be good reasons not to use Gentoo, but I'd hate for anyone to think that these political spats somehow define the distribution or have much to do with the user's experience.
At least, it doesn't, so far, have anything to do with *me*. I still recommend Gentoo wholeheartedly. I have a lot of affection for it. I can and have used other distributions and I could learn to live with just about any distribution if I had to, but I doubt it would be the complete pleasure that Gentoo has been. I don't have hatred for any of the distributions I've tried out (Debian, OpenSuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, Kubuntu, and FreeBSD as well), bu
For me, as a Computer Scientist, it's all about the packages. I _love_ the bleeding edge and the obscure. No other distro out there offers the depth and breadth of packages that Gentoo does. Using anything else is just downright painful as I end up compiling a lot of my own programs _anyway_ by hand (and not managed).
I originally switched to Gentoo because I had given up on using Slackware's package system and was keeping a large library of software current by hand.... Gentoo scratched my itch perfectly.
I really do hope it doesn't die from the inside. There are still a lot of people doing a lot of good work... and a _lot_ of people still benefiting from it. The way I see it, these type of squabbles are just a by product of becoming popular. As your dev team grows you're inevitably going to have personality conflicts... you just hope that over time you find a way to work them out and it doesn't bring the project down in the mean time.
Friedmud
You do unattended package upgrades without testing on a server? Do you also want to be on the beach on day 365, unemployed?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Quite funny that almost everytime when "Gentoo" is the topic, all the talks and comments evolve around (pseudo-)speed, source-distribution and things like that.
The article is about internal problems, and not about how one's computer runs absolutely flawlessly, or not.
My Blog: "sum it up - News, emotions and science"
I think Gentoo should focus on it's embedded offering. The benifits of being
able to compile all your packages from source and combine your system however you
want and do it all from source really shines.
Money is the root of all evil?
Well I think gentoo got better over the years. Maybe the developers have to reorder and have some manifest they stick too when arguments/problems come up.
/etc/portage settings
What got better:
- modular X
- good integration of gentoo kernel and driver packages
-
- cleaned up USE flags
What got worse:
- dropping of packages for just political reasons e.g. xmms and the lie that's technical
- complexity
- useless dependencies (like not being able to install postfix and ssmtp at the same time)
Can be fixed - no panik.
Sorry, sometimes the complaints are definitely far over the top. Some a******s forget too easily that Gentoo and similar projects are mainly run by volunteers. However, complaining that many make demands, but only very few are willing to help, isn't correct and helpful either. The time where Linux had much more developers than mere users are long gone. Fortunately.