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Gentoo in Crisis, Robbins Offers Solution

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the back-in-the-saddle-again dept.

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 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.'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.'"

8 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. What is the crisis? by Kristoph · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I RTFA but I have no idea what the problem actually is that he is going to solve. Could someone explain?

    1. Re:What is the crisis? by Rich0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think that one big problem is that much of the gentoo leadership is technical. If a debate opens up over how some aspect of the project is managed, the usual rallying cry to bring everybody together is for all the project leads to talk about what positive things are going on with various technical aspects of the distro.

      Now, that is very good in one sense - since we do need to remember the big picture. However, stuff like having a newsletter and all that isn't entirely unimportant. Not having a functional board of directors is a big problem. However, I've been reading the -dev group for months (and on and off for years) and I had just assumed (probably like many others) that this part of gentoo was just going along fine.

      To the 20-year-old coder who just wants to create some nifty installer or bootup routine having a board of directors may seem a bit silly. However, if some domain squatter grabs gentoo.org because it didn't get renewed and you can't sue for it back because you don't have any legal standing in any court worldwide then there is a problem. I think that gentoo just tends not to appeal to the sorts of people who like taking care of this stuff - largely because it emphasizes pragmatism and technical achievement - while other distros like debian have an appeal to the kinds of folks who love to read licenses since they make a big deal about that kind of stuff.

      I think that the criticality of this "crisis" is a bit overblown. Yes, its a problem and it really does need to be taken care of - expeditiously. However, the world isn't about to end. I'd probably call for rapid trustee elections to fill slots (I'm sure lots of people with half-decent qualifications would be willing to step up), and then have the trustees take action. Since legally gentoo is in quasi-existence it might be possible to not have as much process around all of that - since you can't violate bylaws that aren't binding and all that. But I'm not a lawyer (and the trustees would do well to talk to one).

  2. Re:good! by Mantaar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's strange how people think Gentooers are into Gentoo for the '--fomg-optimize' thing...

    I had to leave Gentoo a few weeks ago because my Laptop couldn't take the massive compiles anymore - my desks are all FreeBSD btw. What I enjoyed about Gentoo was the ports-like package manager and the ability to carefully choose your dependencies via USE-flags. Here I am, back on Debian, and I think it's actually faster... but I don't really care about speed since I exclusively use XMonad and the console - no need for speed improvements on a 1.6 GHz machine with that.

    But what I hate is that I don't have overlays anymore. You could dynamically replace any part of your package repository with something you found on the net. Like the proaudio overlay. Or the Haskell overlay. With Debian, this is much harder, as you have to find someone on the Net that will offer his repo of binaries ... people are much less likely to offer that since writing an ebuild is easy, but compiling that stuff for different archs is actually not that easy.

    For example, I still didn't find any place that offers a .deb of the new Firefox Beta 3. Anyone willing to point me to one?

    The speed is only a minor advantage of Gentoo and manifests itself in the much shorter start up times and the ability to easily switch to baselayout2 or einit to even improve that one. But since the average uptime of my laptop is about 2-3 weeks, I don't really care if Debian takes 20 seconds longer to boot up.

    --
    I'm an infovore...
  3. Gentoo as a learning aid by dmneoblade · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Gentoo was my way of learning a lot about linux sysadmining in a short time. In a couple weeks, I learned how to compile packages, manage partition issues, compile kernels, deal with numerous config files, and many other skills. I later switched to Ubuntu, but I still appreciate my time spent with gentoo as a great learning aid. Just enough help to make it not as hard as LFS, but hard enough to be challenging.

    --
    Warning, knife is sharp. Please keep out of children.
  4. Re:good! by segedunum · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I never liked the condescending attitude of those Gentoo users that think compiling everything was always so superior to Yum or apt-get.
    If you've ever had to hunt around for a package repository because your distribution does not provide, or no longer provides, updates for particular packages and you have no upgrade path - necessitating downloading the source and compiling yourself or completely upgrading your distribution to the latest and greatest - you'll know why the condescending attitude of binary repository developers that everything should be in a repository, and their derision of using source code as a solution, pisses a lot of people off. On top of this, try multiplying this up for different platforms,

    When you have experienced this, come back and comment.
  5. Re:Should we care? by jd · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The problem lies not with the number of distributions but with what the different distributions offer. Needs, and therefore "ideal" solutions, tend to be specialized. General-purpose distributions have to be generalized. This means that general-purpose distributions will meet most of most needs, but can never really be ideal for any of them.

    Gentoo's approach of configuring and compiling at point of install should - in theory - solve this problem. You can adjust what gets compiled with what options and can therefore tailor the solution exactly to what you need. This is great for some of the more complicated packages, where there are many optional components, some of which may be mutually exclusive. This is also great when you have packages that - if you compile in everything - the package become unwieldy and sluggish.

    In practice, the maze of options and the staggering number of potential compiler flags for tuning things -- it's simply too complicated for the majority of users and even for a very large number of software engineers. A better solution, in my opinion, is to have users describe a basic distribution and the platform on which it is to run, and then have a central cluster use herustics to grind out a way to achieve it.

    Personally, I'd do this by compiling a mini distro locally that used a very standard package manager and didn't invalidate assumptions by mainstream distributions also using that package manager. Then the user could use existing repositories to add the stuff that's not critical to them but they still want. Alternatively, the cluster could spit out all of the necessary scripts, databases and configuration files for a Gentoo-style distro to build that perfect foundation.

    However, ultimately, I do believe this to be the area virtually all distros get it wrong. The foundation components are the most critical, but they are also the least reusable. Correct that and you correct 99% of the (few) problems people have with Linux.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  6. Re:Robbins has my respect. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was pretty impressed when he actually helped out a guy who had a colo at our datacenter. Nobody with any fame or cred, just some guy who was having gentoo problems that nobody in the community seemed able or interested in helping him out with. Most of us seem to get burned out of helping even relatives pretty early in the game, so doing support for people on the street out of the goodness of your heart is pretty amazing. Even if it is your distro.

  7. Gentoo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've was using Gentoo since pre version 1.0, I've submitted ebuilds that got accepted in portage and was a contributer at heart. I noticed a big change when Daniel Robbins stepped down, a big enough change to get me to drop the use of Gentoo.

    I would love to welcome Daniel Robbins back and and I wish there was a way to allow community vote.