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Gentoo in Crisis, Robbins Offers Solution
mrbadbar writes "Gentoo Linux founder Daniel Robbins says Gentoo's leadership is in crisis. 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.' Robbins offers a solution: his return as President of the Gentoo Foundation. According to Robbins: 'If I return as President, I will preserve the not-for-profit aspect of Gentoo. Beyond this, you can expect everything to be very, very different than how things are today.'"
Not too many folks could pen such an offer with out tossing in the phrase "tail between your legs" somewhere.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
I left gentoo some time ago due to severe problems. Let me sum up the most problematic ones: 1. Package system becoming VERY VERY slow because of the amount db size. 2. No sane way to upgrade properly without doing several rounds of breaking and fixing library dependencies 3. USE flags change all the time and often leave the apps crippled if you don't set it up "just" right (try PHP) 4. No automatic way to uninstall a package and have the system automatically remove the unused ones. 5. Very very slow upgrade cycle for major packages (KDE is a good example)
Except that Gentoo happens to be one of the best. Maybe if one of the dozens of Red Hat clones using the same crappy RPM system died, nobody would miss it, but... Gentoo is too important. Even the non-Gentoo users I know rely on the Gentoo forums and wiki and documentation for help.
Reality is fluffy!
Of course Gentoo or Slackware or the like will work fine, but in these days of fast processors and cheap memory, why not just use a Debian based Linux like Ubuntu WITH a GUI, and let some one else compile the thing.
Slackware is package based, although I will admit that the packages do not perform checks for required packages. I only know one person that re-compiles Slackware by hand, but he is a bit eccentric. Most of us only compile packages when they are not included in the distro, when they are not compiled with the options we want, or when we re-compile the kernel.
It seems odd to lump Slackware and Gentoo together since most of the people that I know who use Slackware are more server centric than desktop centric and prefer stable software that does not change. Most Gentoo users I know are desktop centric and want the latest greatest untested software. This is reflected in the different methodology of the two distros.
I would also like to point out that Slackware has been around longer than Debian and Slackware produces stable releases faster than one every two to three years. Although Debian is a decent distro, there are other decent distros as well. I could argue that a Torx screw is better than a roofing nail, but it really depends on the job at hand.
The reason for this offer from Daniel is imho not as important as it is that he is offering to step up back as the leader of this project and take his job down to part time so that he again can put some energy into the role as leader of Gentoo Linux. ... though I fear that might happen once again.
Gentoo badly needs some leadership right now, Daniel has done it well before and had Gentoo thriving while he still was at the helm, so let's get him back there and get this ship back on course.
I really hope that the council will accept this offer for the best of Gentoo and not let their personal agendas stand in the way of the good of Gentoo
Gentoo is subject to the same problem in reverse - except it's far more annoying and time consuming.
.so rev bump. Now you need to use revdep-rebuild to track down every package that links against openssl (i.e. anything important) and recompile them. If any of these packages are more than a minor revision or two behind what's currently in portage the only way to rebuild them is to pull the ebuild from /var/db/pkg and copy it into the portage tree manually, then rebuild the digest and hope to god that portage can track down all of the source files or that they're still sitting in /usr/portage/distfiles. In the meantime you'd better hope that you're either on a dev box (luxury!) or nobody sneezes, since everything that needs the package that was so bumped is now running off cached filesystem data.
This scenario has happened to me multiple times on production systems:
Updates get pushed out, glsa-check notifies you of some critical patch to openssl or whatever, you go to do the upgrade only to discover that the new version has a
It's a lot of fun.
I left Gentoo for FreeBSD due to these reasons and also due to waiting for certain packages for too long, then receiving buggy packages and finally, having the base config change several times in 6 months, mainly for apache2, php, etc. After spending a week with FreeBSD I don't think I'll be back to Gentoo for any reason.
I've been using Gentoo on production servers (and my desktop) since the first year it was out. It used to be a very solid project. It still has much better documentation than, say, Ubuntu. Originally the speed of the custom-compiled stuff was important to me, because of lower-end hardware of the time I had in use - which it did well on (once compiled, of course). The other main virtue, compared to Red Hat or Debian or Slackware of the time, was that it was easier to keep an up-to-date server running without having to do a fresh OS install every year or two.
But over the last year especially Gentoo has gone into steep decline. Upgrades of major stuff come with "upgrade guides" that leave out major things that commonly get broken. The Gentoo bugzilla is manned by kids who compete to close bugs while insulting the intelligence of anyone who'd dare file them. Older libraries which take little space and conflict with nothing are removed without choice or warning when newer packages are installed, and it's just tough if your production server has stuff installed doing useful work that depends on those libraries. Meanwhile the Ubuntu project has worked very hard to become the most-safely-upgradeable Linux (I'd imagine Red Hat must have improved too; but I hate rpms too much to want to try it again). And hardware is so fast now that for standard server stuff there's much less to gain from customized compilation.
For those who say that Gentoo is fine if you just keep a spare system to test upgrades on first, that's bull. Stuff will break on nearly-identical servers that are just slightly different in their versions - that is, going from 1.17 to 1.19 on a app may break, while going from 1.17 to 1.18 to 1.19 works fine. And the breakage can show up tangentially, not just where you'd most expect it. So you'd have to keep a test server for each production server, and very carefully keep it just one step ahead in sync. Plus you'd need to keep it under some sort of dummy load, since some breakage only becomes apparent in production, not in idle use. The real solution there would be for Gentoo to start being responsive to its bugzilla reports again, immediately fixing any breakage caused by new packages so that instead of letting hundreds or thousands of people trip over the same stone, the paths are kept free and clear.
If Robbins comes back, Gentoo could shine again. If he doesn't, it's about over.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton