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?"

Comments

Gentoo definitely is in crisis.

[Tanuki64]

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.

Re:Gentoo definitely is in crisis.

[darkwhite]

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.

Re:Hope it doesn't pass away

[Curtman]

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.