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Is Gentoo in crisis?

Posted by Hemos on from the well-yeah-probably dept.

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?"

6 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. flameeyes / Diego by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The post linked to is much more amusing with context.

  2. Re:Hope it doesn't pass away by Billy+the+Impaler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...probably get more work done if they didn't spend so much time compiling and tweaking
    Not that all the compiling and tweaking is necessarily a bad thing. Many people like to fiddle with computers in that was as a hobby. They don't see it as a distraction from more useful endeavors, rather, they see it as something interesting to do.

    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).

  3. Gentoo definitely is in crisis. by Tanuki64 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Gentoo definitely is in crisis. by darkwhite · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Your sentiment is valid. Your points are not.

      The first thing to do is to stop emerging world. Emerge things when you know you want them, otherwise just run glsa-check (really "glsa-check|grep '\[N\]'") to scan for vulnerabilities. And if you do upgrade a big package, run revdep-rebuild.

      Gentoo is not well-suited for the beginner desktop user or beginner corporate sysadmin. Its features do impart the drawbacks you describe: the config syntax changes would only be encountered by someone upgrading to the next release of a traditonal distro, where they are expected. In general, traditional distros don't have to deal with nearly the same amount of QA testing that Gentoo does. So really, regular desktop users are better off with ubuntu and friends, junior sysadmins are better off with RHEL and friends. It's when you need the flexibility Gentoo can provide that you want to use it.

      I don't personally care for the XMMS issue, but since XMMS needed GTK1 and had vulnerabilities that needed fixing because its upstream dev team disbanded, it's really predicated on those two issues (you do realize that it's irresponsible for a dev to keep a package with known vulnerabilities in the tree, right?). You can still install it from an overlay, you can install a modern XMMS clone, and as far as I'm concerned, any package that doesn't support utf8 should get off the face of the earth ASAP.

      Gentoo does need new QA tools to deal with the combinatorial explosion of package versioning and configuration possibilities. That, and a bit more immunity to drama on part of the devs (e.g. the ability to tell ciaranm to fuck off), is necessary for Gentoo not to stagnate.

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    2. Re:Gentoo definitely is in crisis. by Tanuki64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The first thing to do is to stop emerging world. Emerge things when you know you want them, otherwise just run glsa-check (really "glsa-check|grep '\[N\]'") to scan for vulnerabilities. And if you do upgrade a big package, run revdep-rebuild.
      I really don't think this is a good advice. Superficially it sounds good, but Gentoo isn't stable enough for such a procedure. As I said, I once installed Gentoo for friends. Unfortunately one of my friends lives quite a distance from me and I have no remote access. So at one time we had a distance of more than one and a half year between two updates. It was hell. The portage package was totally out of date, his old profile did not even exist anymore in portage, which caused some trouble until I found out how to solve this problem. Before that many updates failed with strange error messages . After I solved this problem even seemingly simple updates resulted in a huge amount dependencies. One of them, of course, the upgrade to the new modular X. And of course more than one package failed and I had to search the forum for a fix. This was the most extreme case, but not the only one. Therefore I dropped Gentoo support for other people. When I visit friends I have better things to do than work the whole time on their Gentoo. I especially hated it when they saw me working for hours and then conclude from it that Linux is still not for general use and I had to explain that this is a problem of only this special distribution.

      You surely get away with your method of only updating vulnerable packages for quite some time, but sooner or later it bites. I have much better experiences with weekly world updates + revdep-rebuild each time. But this is a crutch and as long as something like this is necessary, something is definitely wrong with Gentoo.
  4. Re:Hope it doesn't pass away by Curtman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You are right, but Gentoo makes it easy.

    I second that. Very easy. I was never able to master the art of creating .deb's effortlessly in Debian/Ubuntu. In Gentoo I can whip up a 10 line ebuild that will fetch the source, patch it with whatever fixes for annoying things I care to (Such as making the preferences window resizeable again in Gaim - Damn you HIG nazi's), compile it, and install it in a minute or two. And I didn't need to browse a million tutorials with a million different ways of creating packages to do it. It just works.