Slashdot Mirror
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?"
The post linked to is much more amusing with context.
It seems to me that a project like this has to be driven by a "Big Idea".
The big idea doesn't have to be a valid one -- although it helps. What it has to do is attract and retain contributors. It has to keep them working together despite their differences. Differences between people who are working toward the same goal can be a good thing, if their commitment is strong enough that they eventually try to to see the other side. If not, then they end up standing in the way of progress until they decide to leave.
Each successful distro has a big idea.
Fedora: bring the most up to date technology to Linux, both for users and others who want to make specialized distros.
Debian: create the freest possible operating system.
Ubuntu: promote a free operating system like Debian, but with more frequent releases so that users have the benefits of newer technology.
Slack: place the highest value on design simplicity; assume the user knows what he is doing and stay out of his way.
CENTOS: provide a completely free operating system that will also allow any user to run enterprise software (e.g. Oracle) without paying any unnecessary license fees.
Knoppix: make it possible for everybody to try a free operating system without the hassles or issues of a hard disk installation.
and so forth. Each of these ideas not only has merit, it has contributor appeal.
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. The idea has both its merits and problems. But the real question is whether it has enough appeal to motivate people to overcome their normal differences. Time will tell, but I have my doubts.
For one thing, the Gentoo goal is achievable and has been achieved. In many other distros, the big idea is like the horizon; it keeps receding as you move towards it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I actually see this more with Windows users than Linux users, though. Somehow some guys get interested in speeding up their computers or protecting it from slowdowns via things like malware and it blossoms from there. Soon enough the guy's running adaware scans three times a day and he's made dozens of registry edits to free up resources (resources which, IMO, were probably being used for a reason).
Currently I still use it myself, since I can handle most of the problems myself and has the flexibility I like. But I stopped installing it for friends and relatives. And I strongly discourage its use in my company. It is just too unstable. It is fine if you are a geek (I am) and have too much time (I don't). For my friends it is kubuntu now.
Gentoo was and somewhat is great, but there hardly is a world update anymore, which goes smoothly. Sometimes things even break silently, so you cannot even be sure when something broke. Constantly the need to learn new configuration syntaxes because the old configuration stops working after an update is very tiring. Uprade/downgrade ping-pong also stops being funny quickly. I could complain because of seemingly egomaniacal decisions of the maintainers to remove widely used packages like xmms, but this would not be fair. If they have not enough manpower to maintain those packages, better remove them, but it still stings to be forced to search for alternatives.
I would not say there is no quality control in the Gentoo development, if I find 10 bugs, there might have been 100 others, which had been caught before release, but it simply isn't enough. I think it is fair to say that the Gentoo project has outgrown the current staff. They simply cannot handle it adequately anymore.
If anyone from the Gentoo staff should read this lines: It really isn't meant as an insult. You did great, but reached a point where your current methods are not sufficient anymore.
I second that. Very easy. I was never able to master the art of creating
I've run Gentoo for about 3 years, give or take. Despite comments that the performance gains of compiling from source aren't worth it, try having a PIII-733 Laptop with 256Mb of RAM (hard limit on that machine) that you want to actually USE as a Linux box. Painful with anything except a well optimized Gentoo installation. I ran that for over a year before I took a trip with that rock-solid little laptop. It was a pleasure to use every day of my trip... the laptop was tiny and therefore was easy to throw in my backpack (I was motorcycling across the UK) when traveling, was light and simple. With Fedora the poor beastie just crawled... and Ubuntu I just couldn't get working reliably on that hardware (ironic, I know!)
:)
I've still got that little laptop, and periodically boot her up to do an "emerge --sync; emerge -u world", maybe compile a new kernel. I don't use it as a daily laptop any more since I bought a Mac last year... but it's still a rock solid little machine that I might take with me this year when I repeat my trip in October.
But old hardware isn't just what Gentoo is good at. I use it frequently; in virtual environments. The host... well that can be Windows, Linux... or ESX... take your pick. However, when I need a slick, fast booting and "built to order" Linux box as a guest then there's nothing better than a Gentoo installation that boots the kernel, the VMWare Tools and then the application the guest is hosting! Fast boot, application isolation and simple package management (I usually set up a centralized Portage tree on the host machine). Believe me, the ability to reboot your web server in less than 10 seconds makes management sit up and take notice, especially when the other groups are using IIS boxes that take five minutes to come back from a hard failure.
But Gentoo isn't for everyone, and isn't for every implementation. I wouldn't call it "granny-friendly", and I would only use in a production environment where isolation is possible and rollback is simple (like in my aforementioned virtual environment... snapshots are a thing of beauty). Having said that, I recently built out a new home server and it got Gentoo almost by default. I thought about Fedora... but the flexibility of Gentoo really got to the geek in me
As an old-school Windows tweaker, I can say there are a ton of on-by-default services that will never used by the 'typical' desktop user. It only takes me around 1 hour to get everything setup from scratch. Its finding the changes that make a difference that takes a long time. Once you have it, there's no need to tweak endlessly. Now the only thing I don't worry about is video card tweaks. Many of the third party tweaking tools makes that quite a large job.
As for Linux, I used to tweak around quite a bit with GNOME back in the 1.x days. When they bumped it up to 2.0 series, I found that there just wasn't anything annoying enough to worry about (Except for window roll-ups earlier on).
I think one of the reasons is that Windows throws most of its things in without asking, making the user hunt out things they don't need. Most distros give options as to what they want installed from the get-go so if I don't want something, I can just choose not to install it.
Bye!
You're right on target with the biggest problem currently. There is an idea of creating PortageSQL and keep it all in a DB instead. Until then there are solutions such as this: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-401647.html (which is what I'm currently using).
I have one machine generating a squashfs file from the latest release and a ramdrive which holds the changes. It works really well and keeps the portage database to ~40MB instead of 600. Then I just wget that file onto my other machines.
I ran Gentoo for a couple years. I'm now running a mix of Ubuntu and OSX, mostly because to get all the software options I wanted, I couldn't pare down the libraries enough that my system was substantially different at the end from Ubuntu. I'd be sad to see Gentoo go downhill, though. There's a lot of value for the Linux community in people hammering on bleeding edge software. Where else would you have seen so much interest in applying genetic algorithms to find the best gcc optimization flags for compiling software?