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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?"
Honestly... It's just a teenage tantrum. Just ground them for a while, that should do it.
Waits for audience applause... not a sausage.
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.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
The post linked to is much more amusing with context.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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"
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.
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?
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.