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 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.'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

Huh?

The emerge of the upgraded management package failed? Did you remember to set the right USE flags?

Easy solution

$ emerge leadership

His post said

that he wants an answer in 7 days. There's no way that your $emerge leadership package will compile and install by then.

Re:Easy solution

$sudo emerge -av leadership
password:

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild U ] vitural/leadership-3.0_rc2 [1.0_rc1] USE="developers minimal intelligent paludis -emerge -designers " 50 kB

Total: 1 package (1 upgrade), Size of downloads: 50 kB

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]
Y

Robbins has my respect.

Not too many folks could pen such an offer with out tossing in the phrase "tail between your legs" somewhere.

Re:Robbins has my respect.

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.

What is the crisis?

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

Re:What is the crisis?

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.

Re:What is the crisis?

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).

Re:What is the crisis?

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.

Re:What is the crisis?

Hopefully someone else can clarify further.

There's at least one response on Planet Gentoo [gentoo.org] so far. Maybe it [tsunam.org] will help.

Trouble

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)

Same here

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.

Re:Trouble

I don't use gentoo much anymore, but I did not too long ago.

1. Package system becoming VERY VERY slow because of the amount db size.

Robins claims there was also a bug in a recent portage version that slowed things down quite a bit.

4. No automatic way to uninstall a package and have the system automatically remove the unused ones.

Like:

$ emerge -C [packagename] && emerge --depclean

or do you mean something else?

5. Very very slow upgrade cycle for major packages (KDE is a good example)

Do you mean slow time to see updated ebuilds or that it takes a long time to compile? 3.58 is in the repos & there is a 4.0 overlay. Think there are even cvs ebuilds floating around.

So far it's looking good for him

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 [gentoo.org]

Gentoo needs drobbins

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.
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 ... though I fear that might happen once again.

Great news

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.

Re:good!

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.

Re:good!

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.

Re:good!

Gentoo is subject to the same problem in reverse - except it's far more annoying and time consuming.

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 .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.

It's a lot of fun.

Re:good!

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.

Re:good!

As has been discussed before [playingwithwire.com], Gentoo isn't an enterprise production OS... in fact, it's not totally ideal for even a single server in a small shop.

The thing about gentoo is that it gives you super-fine grained control over your packages. You want ldap support? want to not support jpeg, but to support png? do you want the package installed, but omit all the X11 bullshit? Or how about keeping a specific version of a package from upgrading when you upgrade your system? That's the power of gentoo's package management system.

Gentoo also offers insight into the innerworkings of the linux OS. You get to build your own kernel and pick EXACTLY what gets installed.

Since Gentoo is frequently on the bleeding edge, it's great for testing out new versions of applications. One of the downsides of CentOS that I've encountered was the fact that subversion isn't quite up to date, and it took several months before vim7 was in the yum repository. Of course, you could add new repositories to yum, or download an RPM specificly of what you want, but that sometimes involves waiting for someone to make the RPM or finding the repository that has what you need.

Another downside of Gentoo, especially in a production environment, is that since it's bleeding edge, many things in the system are changing and usually with a frequency that defies belief. I've been running Gentoo on my own two personal servers (hosting my websites and mysql and DNS and stuff) for nearly 5 years. The sheer number of times that I've booted the machine after doing an 'emerge -u world' and gotten "this configuration file's syntax is depricated, please use this new syntax instead" messages has been infuriating. Routine upgrades aren't routine. You can spend hours picking through config files and manually inspecting the diffs between versions. You don't want Gentoo on your server unless you enjoy spending a day doing an upgrade.

Gentoo is ideal for embedded projects and systems that aren't going to change. The OS lends itself well to projects such as DVRs and controller OSs for robotics. It's small and runs on a lot of different hardwares.

I'm always amazed at how much hate people have for gentoo because you have to build it yourself, but you don't hear people getting mad about the .tar.gz source files they download from sourceforge. You don't hear people bitching about Linux from scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]. The nice thing about Gentoo over LSF is that it automates a lot of the process for you and allows you to set up your system by itself, without the aide of another machine to get the system bootstrapped and initially configured. Sure, some gentoo users are cocky; but they're cocky in the same way that a guy who built his own Camarro acts around their buddy who just bought his new, shiny Saturn.

Gentoo is an exercise in academia. For a user new to Linux who wants to get a feel for the ins and outs and get used to the commandline really fast, gentoo is for them.

Re:good!

Gentoo isn't an enterprise production OS... in fact, it's not totally ideal for even a single server in a small shop.

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....

Re:Should we care?

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.

Re:Should we care?

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.