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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 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.'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.'"
The emerge of the upgraded management package failed? Did you remember to set the right USE flags?
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)
$ emerge leadership
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
There's a sticky post in the gentoo forums dealing with this. So far Daniel got a pretty positive response and frankly... as a user that has seen gentoo slowly falling apart over the past few years, I'm glad he's motivated to bring it back on track: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-644321.html
Everytime you kill a kitten, god masturbates.
It's strange how people think Gentooers are into Gentoo for the '--fomg-optimize' thing...
... 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.
.deb of the new Firefox Beta 3. Anyone willing to point me to one?
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
For example, I still didn't find any place that offers a
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...
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!
TFA refers to a previous blog entry, which mostly explains things. To summarize: the people who are supposed to be in charge have mostly resigned or are MIA. The remaining leadership isn't doing things like updating the website, etc - the weekly newsletter hasn't been published in months. The real crises is that they didn't file routine paperwork with the state, which puts the legal status of the gentoo foundation in jeopardy. No one explained why to the community, or said much of anything. So, he's going to get the legal matters cleared up and find new people to be in charge.
that he wants an answer in 7 days. There's no way that your $emerge leadership package will compile and install by then.
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)
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.
Hopefully someone else can clarify further.
The same blog can.
"I am still upset that the Foundation has not been run properly over the last three years, and that many trustees apparently decided to take extended vacations from the project shortly after becoming a trustee, leaving the work to be done by very few - and often a single individual, which defeats the whole purpose of having multiple trustees to do the work rather than a single leader. I am also, like many of you, not happy at all with the way Gentoo has been going from a development and community perspective."
You might also infer what was wrong by looking at what would be different.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I'm sorry, but that is total crap. I have been using Gentoo on production servers which I *do* keep current using stable (not bleeding-edge) packages. This is a large shop with many servers. I have never looked back since switching to Gentoo. Everyone who moans about emerges failing and having to run revdep-rebuild often must be doing something wrong. I've had to run revdep-rebuild once when I upgraded libexpat. So what? It took like 2 minutes.
Don't make sweeping statements if you don't know what you are doing. I run Gentoo on my servers and I run Gentoo on my personal desktop and and laptop and have *NO* problems with it. The next time you feel like bashing it, try it first and this time RTFM. Sheesh....
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).
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