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 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.'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

[jd]

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

Re:Huh?

[Solra Bizna]

Why were you compiling with MAKEOPTS="-j32768"? What did you really expect to happen?

-:sigma.SB

Re:

[sinclair44]

-j32768 is indeed quite pointless. I don't specify that, just -fomit-instructions... my Gentoo install take up almost no disk space since I've turned it on! However, apparently it tends to mess up your bootloader; I've been unable to start Gentoo and simply haven't had the time yet to look into it.

Easy solution

[Anonymous Coward]

$ emerge leadership

His post said

[joeflies]

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

[Jessta]

$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

Re:

[arth1]

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

You're touching one of the core problems there. Which needs the following solution:

mkdir -p /etc/portage/profile && \
touch /etc/portage/profile/use.mask && \
echo paludis >>/etc/portage/profile/use.mask

Honestly, when something is this controversial, like paludis is, it needs to either die for the greater good ("kill your babies" as t

Re:

[arth1]

I tolerate the idea -- thus the word fork in my post.

Robbins has my respect.

[GeneralEmergency]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

He used to run Linux support for IBM. Still Google-able, his answers got me going at work. Smart dude.

What is the crisis?

[Kristoph]

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

Re:

[raptor386]

I believe the issue is that the legal entity no longer exists, so he's going to step up, renew the charter, and get Gentoo Foundation recognized as a legal non-profit organization again. Though I understand that this is the issue, I don't understand WHY it's an issue. Hopefully someone else can clarify further.

Re:What is the crisis?

[foobsr]

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?

[Curtman]

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.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It looks to be a bunch of internal politics. There's a lot of information that is missing, like why the charter was revoked. Another question is why this guy thinks that he's going to get this power if he's going to replace the people that need to approve him.

The basic information is apparently on a mailing list, which I don't feel like reading.

Re:What is the crisis?

[jmdc]

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:

[arth1]

The problem with them being unresponsive and MIA is why I fear this offer will fail too -- he wants an answer within a week, but the procrastinators and AWOL people won't give him an answer within a week -- they haven't managed to answer anything else in a timely matter, so why would they suddenly do so now?

Re:What is the crisis?

[Rich0]

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).

How non-tech people can help

[Endymion]

Your post reminds me of some of the (very) old slashdot stories asking the question of how non-technical/non-programmers can help the F/OSS movements. The response usually came in the for of "there's lots of stuff like documentation (real writing, not tech writing), art, etc, that are also needed."

This was and is true, but I think another big category was forgotten: management. That for a good project to succeed, the techies should keep doing techie stuff, and be shielded from politics and dull aspects of b

Re:

[dido]

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.

So you're saying that Gentoo has more of the Linus Torvalds mindset, whereas Debian has more of the Richard Stallman mindset? Interesting point. I moved to Gentoo largely because I was fed

Re:

[wellingj]

Yea really, in this day and age do we actually need a 'leader' or is it not better do let things form up however they may.
I think we know what ESR would propose...

Re:

[ImaLamer]

He's worried that the Gentoo product will move to a pay system, where you've GOT TO FREAKING PAY TO COMPILE SOFTWARE YOURSELF!!

How could the product change, by losing its non-profit status, as the summary says? Does someone think I'd like to pay to do all the work on my machine? Just rename the project Ubuntu, that seems to be pretty popular.

(All this is just a joke, god i need to refill my coffee)

Re:

[/ASCII]

Not for profit does not imply charging money for the downloads, it refers to not turning the Gentoo foundation into a for profit company, like Mozilla, Red Hat and Ubuntu have all done (or rather, have always been). All those project still ship their software free of charge (and are even willing to pay the shipping costs to send you a CD in the case of Ubuntu), but they all have some form plan to turn a profit, like providing for-pay support or living of add revenues.

Trouble

[Frekko]

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)

Re:

[Frekko]

Let me add a few more:
6. You are forced to update VERY frequently. More than a month and you are CERTAIN to get issues while compiling.
7. Actually getting a usable desktop (with udev, automounting etc.) working is a hell of a lot of work

Re:

[ozmanjusri]

7. Actually getting a usable desktop (with udev, automounting etc.) working is a hell of a lot of work

1. Download Sabayon.
2. Boot from the LiveCD
3. Run the installer if you like it.
4. ???
5. Profit

Re:

[marcansoft]

PLEASE don't recommend Sabayon for HDD installs. Sabayon is to Gentoo what Knoppix is to Debian. Sure, it works nicely as a live CD, but I hope you don't mind never upgrading if you do decide to install it. emerge -uav world on Sabayon tends to break the entire system.

Re:

[misleb]

But at least all the copy-pasting of commands from the Gentoo forums makes you feel like you're learning a lot about how Linux works, right? ;o)

Ha! That's exactly what I thought when I first installed Gentoo from stage1. I was just following the howto, line for line. Great guide, but I can't really say I learned anything. If they're just going to provide step by step instructions to do everything anyway, why not just make the system easier to install/use in the first place?

Re:

[Teppic_52]

If they're just going to provide step by step instructions to do everything anyway, why not just make the system easier to install/use in the first place?

You have clearly missed the point, it's not made to be 'difficult', that is just the way it is.
Plenty of people find the annoying idiosyncrasies of Gentoo worth the effort, their reasoning for this is their own and probably unique. If you gain no benefit use something else, if it's too hard for you use something else.

The only prerequisite for being able to install Gentoo instead of any other distro is the ability to read IMHO, and the 8 or so hours I spent 4 years ago installing my 1st system was well w

Same here

[theurge14]

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:

[Zarhan]

That's funny, I left FreeBSD for Gentoo for exactly the same reasons (this was around time of FreeBSD 5.0, so I probably had the worst possible FreeBSD experience). And Linux kernel had better hardware support, especially for laptops.

With FreeBSD, packages tended to break with almost every upgrade. With Gentoo, they still break after every upgrade, but at least there is revdep-rebuild to fix things. Portupgrade -L didn't really work...

Re:

[rainer_d]

FreeBSD is not without problems, but I still don't see a replacement on the horizon any time soon.
And FreeBSD does have a leadership.
If the ports-system would work 105% on (Open)Solaris, I'd change ship for most bigger servers. As it stands, a lot of stuff that doesn't involve a complicated software-stack is going to make this switch in the mid term here. Provided, I can streamline the installation enough and we get the patching process under control.
But anything with weird PHP dependencies (and that includ

Re:Trouble

[Noksagt]

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.

Re:

[Sancho]

Stability is a pretty important thing. Look at Debian, for example. Tracking stable on Debian means that you'll be using versions of software that are years old, with only security issues causing updates (and even then, the issue is usually patched against the original source, rather than requiring an upgrade that likely introduces new features and possibly new bugs.) Stable means stable, and it should be very explicit.

If you want the newest and greatest, run the the unstable branch.

Re:

[ultranova]

Stability is a pretty important thing. Look at Debian, for example.

Mind you, Debian isn't without some weird issues either. For example, VNCServer doesn't depend on any font packages, despite not being able to start without them, with the official explanation being that the user could be running a font server somewhere in their network.

Re:

[turbidostato]

"Debian isn't without some weird issues either"

Of course not. That doesn't mean that anything you take our your a** is an issue.

"VNCServer doesn't depend on any font packages"

Of course not, since it doesn't really need any local font package installed. What else would you expect?

"despite not being able to start without them, with the official explanation being that the user could be running a font server somewhere in their network."

Isn't it a valid explanation? Wouldn't vncserver start using a network fon

Choose one: fast or stable

[DrJimbo]

I've been using Gentoo for years and I love it. In the great FOSS tradition, Gentoo is all about choice (read: control). In the early years the stable branch was not very stable and the forums were filled with emerge problems in the stable branch. In the last few years those problems have almost all gone away. My system is mostly from the stable branch and I almost never run into a problem when I do updates. This is a very good thing[TM] IMO. I'm very glad the devs keep packages out of stable until t

Re:

[cryptoluddite]

That's all true, but hardly severe except for the VERY VERY slow package system. What really kills me is that it's only slow because there are 200k files scattered everywhere. All it really needs is to put these in a .zip (yes, zip) file. An uncompressed zip can still be sent as a delta with rsync, even a compressed one can with a little work on the adding/removing/updating code. But most importantly it can be randomly accessed unlike a .tar.gz file, and it's easy to access in python.

Just making this on

gentoo

[johnm1019]

I think gentoo has some incredible flexibility and it'd be a shame to see the project go by the wayside.

So far it's looking good for him

[alveraan]

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 as a learning aid

[dmneoblade]

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.

Re:

[matria]

Then you should really appreciate the LFS program...http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ [linuxfromscratch.org]

Re:

[Teppic_52]

Quote from the Gentoo forums

I would have used LFS, but didn't fancy using a notebook as a package manager

Re:

[Sancho]

Package managers USUALLY let you remove dependencies that are no longer required, too.

Gentoo needs drobbins

[Reverse Gear]

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.

Leadership: Gentoo-way

[Dark Coder]

#
# emerge -C gentoo-leaderships
# emerge -uDv gentoo-leaderships
# echo "Deep Leadership Upgrade: Done."

Here's to hoping that its "package" dependencies don't break.

Re:

[ettlz]

Who cares? The GP's script was just three lines of comments, anyway.

no it won't fail silently

[Laebshade]

The first line is redundant, and also by the first line being present, the second line contains an unnecessary command: "u". This is a switch to upgrade the package; since it was unmerged in the first line, it isn't necessary. It should be written as:

emerge -u gentoo-leaderships

- or if you want to see what version and flags will be in use when it's upgraded, try:

emerge -uav gentoo-leaderships

Even the original code won't faily silently; you can view the stdout if it has failed, you know.

Why is the foundation required?

[grahammm]

I have been a user of Gentoo for time and have never seen an explanation of why the foundation is needed or even what it does. Looking at the home page under 'About Gentoo', 'Philosophy' and 'Social Contract', I do not see a foundation mentioned at all. To quote from 'About gentoo'

To advise on and help with Gentoo's global development, a 7-member council is elected on a yearly basis which decides on global issues, policies and advancements in the Gentoo project.

. To my mind the council seems to be sufficient, so why the need for and fuss about a(n almost unmentioned) foundation?

Re:

[Rakishi]

The foundation is from what I can tell the LEGAL entity behind gentoo so the domain belongs to the foundation, for example.

Re:

[nuzak]

Debian seems to do fine with just one elected board. I dare say a lot better than Gentoo, in fact. Possibly because if someone doesn't do their job, they're out.

And Robbins? Isn't he the same guy who returned to Gentoo like MacArthur to the Phillipines, only to leave one day later? I agree that the Gentoo board needs replacement too, but he ain't the guy for it either.

Re:

[grahammm]

They own the IP too, all the Gentoo specific configs have their copyright notice in them.

But all of the IP is licensed under GPL-2, so anyone can use, modify and/or distribute it subject to the GPL-2 rules. I know that where a 'natural' person owns copyrights that if they die then the copyright passes to their heirs. What happens to copyright which is owned by a corporate entity when that entity is dissolved?

Re:

[greenrd]

If someone buys the copyright (remember an entity going bankrupt will sell assets to pay creditors), they get it. If no-one buys it... who's going to sue? It's effectively public domain, right?

Re:

[LingNoi]

Any code changes are licensed under the GPL, your state is welcome to make changes to their GPL'd code and keep it secret, that is if they can find which lines were edited. Otherwise they might be violating someone elses GPL'd code which would mean they lose their right to use that persons GPL code that was included with theirs rendering any of their newly acquired code useless.

Since a lot of upstream projects request that you assign over your copyright to the project's admin, actual code owned by Gentoo co

Re:

[AndrewM1]

Legally, the foundation is a registered nonprofit, which allows them (through the arcane tax code of the United States) some benefit in dealing with donations. Tax receipts, I believe?

The state of Packagage Managers

[Zombie Ryushu]

There is but one Linux. But there are multiple forms of packaging. Mandriva and Fedora/RedHat/CentOS can be lumped into the category of having dependancy resolution problems too rigid. Mandriva specifically suffers a loss of redundacy when a source of RPMs fail. Yum keeps mirror catalogs. urpmi from Mandriva has the added ability of using SSH and Kerberos to "Mass Deploy" applications, and can centralize with LDAP. No other package Manager can do that.

But both urpmi and yum fail at handling source code pack

Re:

[rjames13]

Now, Slackware tends to be problematic, no package dependancy can result in chaos.

Yes and us Slackware users divert that chaos through /dev/random increasing our cryptographic key generation abilities.

Seriously I have used Slackware since before ver 3 and have never seen chaos from dependancy issues. You make it sound like it crashes computers at random. But as someone who actually knows how it works I can tell you this, all a unresolved dependancy issue does is stop a specific program from running until that dependancy is met. If foo needs bar then the system does not crash foo just

Re:

[sydneyfong]

[Disclaimer: I am only a casual tinker of debs, so my information may not be all that accurate.]

When it comes to Debs, I have no idea how to build Debs. Ubuntu and Debian lack the SSH/Kerberos mass deply ability and are even HARDER to recompile than RPMs.

The Debian way to "mass deploy" packages is probably using the apt-get system. You simply add your own package repository to your "sources list", and use apt-get to install/upgrade the packages. They do provide gpg signing, if you want security.

Other posters have mentioned some possible ways of building from source. For me, at least if the source package is from Debian official, it's a matter of `apt-get source

Re:

[MasterOfMagic]

To rebuild a Debian package from a source (as opposed to a binary) repository:
apt-get source <pacakge-name>
cd <pacakge-dir indicated in the output from apt-get source>
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Done. The process will spit out a deb you can install with dpkg. There are a few open source projects (mplayer, vlc, quakeforge) that add the debian directory in their mainline source. After extracting a source tarball from them, you can run this command in the root of their source tree and get .debs.

Re:

[domatic]

I've built several things from Sid on Ubuntu Gutsy by following these instructions from Debian's FAQ:

7.13 How do I install a source package?

Debian source packages can't actually be "installed", they are just unpacked in whatever directory you want to build the binary packages they produce.

Source packages are distributed on most of the same mirrors where you can obtain the binary packages. If you set up your APT's sources.list(5) to include the appropriate "deb-src" lines, you'll be able to easily download a

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I also left long ago

[Apreche]

In college I was big into Gentoo. It had it's problems, sure, but when you got it working, it was terrific. Then after the college days were over, and I started working, I had a lot less free time. I realized that with Gentoo I spend a lot more time working on the computer itself as opposed to using the computer to do other things. I've switched to Ubuntu, and haven't looked back since.

Re:

[Tiger4]

"I've switched to Ubuntu, and haven't looked back since."

That is EXACTLY how it should be. I love the cool techie DIY of computers too. But ultimately it is a tool that is supposed to do something besides occupy my time. It needs to move out of development and into operations and production. The users, the people that can benefit from computer technology, don't want to build a computer or the OS behind it or maintain any of it, they want a magic wand that solves some problem for them. The maintenance

Re:

[r_jensen11]

I realized that with Gentoo I spend a lot more time working on the computer itself as opposed to using the computer to do other things.

Funny, I underwent the same transformation. My solution, though, was to stick to packages listed in Stable instead of ~. The only times I've had problems with my computer in the past 6 months or so have been when I tried adding something cosmetic, like adding a bootsplash. I was able to avoid the problems many people faced when upgrading Gnome from 2.18 to 2.20 (or was it 2.16 to 2.18, whenever expat was changed) by following instructions.

Oh yeah, I've also had problems with getting compiz and the last

Re:

[Sancho]

I wish that I had the mod points for you. That sounds exactly like what I went through. In fact, I sometimes wonder what I might have made of myself if I'd spent all that Gentoo-tinker time in other ways.

Gentoo could be really spiffy, but the execution just isn't there.

I use FreeBSD for servers. It uses something similar to portage (I believe portage was even based upon it), and it's pretty damned stable and easy to administer. I do believe that they could learn something from the improvements that Gent

Great news

[wytcld]

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.

Reasons for leaving Gentoo seem exaggerated...

[Brane2]

I'm long time gentoo user ( I've started around version 1.4) and am more or less stisfied with it. I mean, it definitely has its flaws, but I haven't been able to find substitution that could "scratch my itch".

I have tried Ubuntu as everyone around me were advocating it, but found that while it has much prettier installer and things tend to work out of the box, deep down it's actually inferior to Gentoo.
When things work smoothly in Ubuntu, everyone is quick to point out those maybe few minutes and a CLI command that Ubuntu has spared you, but no one mentions those cases when things don't work.

Each distro has its framework which combines many pieces of open source mosaic, but things get interesting when some piece in mosaic develops a flaw that is not immediately obvious or it affects some portion of users. I don't care for a few seconds spared during installation nearly as much I care for infrastructure support in cases that don't work.

WRT to Gentoo's imminent death:

1. If its going to happen, it won't be soon.

2. All problems of Gentoo can be traced to its origins. At the time, its creator found his pleasure in homebrew approach and wanted to have something that works in some way much rather than trying to get it right first time and also answer many organisational, commercial and law questions.

So now we have Gentoo Organisation, Infrastructure and Distro in the state of Russian Orbital station MIR jsut before its death: there are many interleaving and intervening systems with many semi-documented patches and changes and whole shebang is far from original specs. I mean, evolution is a ni ce thing, but it has its limits. When it reaches its limits, maybe its time to use accumulated knowledge and experience to make something new...

3. WRT to Drobbins, I don't know the guy personally and have nothing against him, but I'm not sure that having him back is a good idea.
He had the chance but has proven unable to make Gentoo his life, so now he's coming back, faced with similar problems ( needing money for RL but being strawn between his hobby and bussiness) and unable to learn from his mistakes and use radically different solution this time.

4. New Gentoo should start from scratch with its policy, organisation and web/distro infrastructure while good old Gentoo I is living on...

Re:good!

[Mantaar]

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:

[Jack Malmostoso]

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 best thing is that it's right on your computer, just a couple of commands away:

$ wget http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0b2/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2
$ mkdir -p debian/DEBIAN
$ mkdir -p debian/opt
$ tar -xjvf firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2 -c debian/opt
$ mv debian/opt/firefox debian/opt/firefox3
$ apt-cache show iceweasel > debian/DEBIAN/contr

Re:good!

[segedunum]

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!

[Dice]

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:

[grahammm]

The alternative in that situation is to 'take the plunge' and upgrade all the dependent packages to the latest (presumably stable, as if you are running ~arch then they would likely not be behind) version in portage. As you are talking about production systems, it makes sense to have testing systems which are kept (reasonably) up-to-date so that you do not get (many) unpleasant surprises when updating the live production systems.

Re:good!

[jimicus]

I'm glad you mentioned that, as it's bitten me more than once in the past.

Gentoo is great to experiment with, and provided you can keep the system bang up to date (and live with occasional breakage), fine. But many of us aren't prepared to make that sacrifice.

On the plus side, maybe as a result of this, it's produced a very helpful community. Much more so than many other distributions.

Re:

[Blackknight]

That's why you don't run Gentoo in production, stick with CentOS or Debian stable.

Re:

[I'm just joshin]

Or you use your dev machine to build binary packages of everything you need and then have your production machines install those packages. Think of Gentoo more as a distribution -builder- instead. I have 1 box building for dozens. -J

Re:good!

[syzler]

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!

[MyDixieWrecked]

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!

[borked]

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:good!

[MyDixieWrecked]

I've had to run revdep-rebuild once or twice; because of expat and one other package, but in the last 5 years, gentoo has changed their config syntax for networks and the way that pam works with ldap logins. I've had to do big jumps in kernel upgrades because of lack of support of features I use in iptables which caused me to have to upgrade to udev from devfs, and I've had several other weekend's worth jobs because of config file and package deprication.

The reason that I say that Gentoo isn't ideal for production is because of these changes that are made. If you want to stay relatively up to date in your packages (for security reasons), it can be a pretty big pain to keep up with config changes. The measures that you can implement to protect your config files aren't always great since sometimes a minor upgrade will incorporate some new configuration option (I've seen this in apache, php and ldap on several occasions).

Rolling your own enterprise-level server management application, I think, would be easiest on gentoo because so much of the system is exposed and it is so straight forward, but my point in my original post is that for production, you'd like a reasonably stable implementation of configuration and some way of keeping my old setup until I'm ready to do a full revamp of my machine.

I didn't bash gentoo. I'm a gentoo user and I like it a lot... I just wouldn't use it for contract jobs or at my real job (sysadmin of around 130 machines); for that, I'd rather use CentOS.

As an aside... although I do enjoy building my own kernel, it can be time consuming and doing large jumps (I've gone from 2.6.4 to 2.6.12 to 2.6.19) can be a real pain in the ass to remember to properly enable all options. I've got an issue right now where the current kernel will not boot my machine and after dozens of attempts, I haven't been able to solve it. I've got several unsolved posts in the gentoo forums about this... the downside is that I'm running gentoo on PPC hardware, so I don't have the largest pool of people to help troubleshoot.

Re:

[MyDixieWrecked]

Why don't you just copy the .config file over to the new kernel?
Kernel migrations aren't a big issue at all imho.

I've tried doing that in the past but have wound up with errors. I believe it's because my servers are both PPC and it seems that features appear and disappear and get renamed between versions, at least between gaps of 5+ versions. Going from 2.6.12 to the latest will not work at all. there are an enormous amount of new features that require enabling.

Re:

[WuphonsReach]

Tried it for 2-3 years (Gentoo on servers), gave up and have switched to CentOS/RedHat.

I loved Gentoo as a way to learn about Linux on the server. But the project has been seemingly adrift for a while, so we're making the move away from it. That, and it's a bit too fiddly on servers for our tastes. (It seems like it should be a no-brainer for servers, but ultimately it's not quite stable enough.)

Re:

[Penguin's Advocate]

Amen to that! We run our servers on gentoo as well

Re:

[color]

it is hard to switch back to a binary distro after gentoo, but the parent has a point in that gentoo gets harder and harder to manage. That's why I started looking for alternatives and found Gobolinux, a distro that makes it really easy for mantainers and admins. It is a fresh air in the unix world.
www.gobolinux.org

Re:

[ttldkns]

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.

On my server most of the time i find that etc-update takes care of most of

Re:

[rbanffy]

"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"

That's a good way to ensure the newbie keeps badmouthing Linux, pointing out the chores required just to keep it working, in front of his fellow Windows users.

A newbie needs a gentle introduction to Linux first. Ubuntu (disclaimer: I use it) is just fine - it's good enough, pretty and mostly works. In fact, many of my gurus prefer Ubuntu or Debian manly because it lets them f

Re:

[garutnivore]

MyDixieWrecked, you present a reasonable picture of what Gentoo is good at. Thank you for that. The problem is that too many Gentoo advocates out there are asses about the choice they made. Here's an all too frequent scenario. You're discussing a problem in Ubuntu or Fedora, trying to help someone get the system running correctly. Then, a Gentoo advocate comes by, screams "Ubuntu (or Fedora) is teh suxx0rs! Gentoo, FTW" and then tries to convince every one and their pets with juvenile arguments that G

Re:Should we care?

[Nyago]

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?

[Jesus_666]

Actually, Gentoo is one of the two distros I see most commonly offered to newbies, the other one being Ubuntu, of course. Those newbies who want an "it just works" distro get Ubuntu while those who have specific needs such as a shell-only test box on old hardware are told to get Gentoo. Even if Portage is getting slow, it's still so much more useful than everything else out there that most advanced users I know tend to gravitate towards it because they are averse to the ridiculous dependency graphs binary -ased package managers tend to generate.

Also, Gentoo is the best-documented distro out there with Gentoo HOWTOs often containing very useful information even for non-Gentoo users. It's pretty much irrelevant what you intend to do on your Linux box, a google for [subject matter] gentoo will usually give yu a detailed description of what you need to do.

Gentoo is much more than the ricer distro many people see in it.

Re:

[Mantaar]

No. I think diversity in Linux is a Good Thing. There are hundreds of distros out there and that's really good to see, because they're all competing with each other, sharing their work with each other, forking one another and then merging back... If a distro dies, ten new ones spawn. That's very good, it contributes to a diversity which makes the Linux community an interesting place to live in.

And that 'but it confuses the newbies' argument just doesn't cut it anymore. For the complete boons, there's Ubun

Re:

[muuh-gnu]

> it seems obvious that there comes a point where diluting the development effort

This nonsense argument about dilluting effort gets repeated over and over. How exactly is it "obvious" that if I do something the way I think is the best, and work independently of the few "majors", I am dilluting the work of somebody else? Its called competition, and, as I least heard about it, it promotes diversity and is rather healthy for a ecosystem of any kind. There is no reason why there shouldnt be extreme diversit

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Only upstream matters

[LingNoi]

Except it isn't a good point at all because all the developers work together anyway regardless of which actual distribution they are working on.

1) Developers of the different distros contribute all their changes back to upstream. It doesn't matter how many developers are working on which distribution because the fixes all end up back in the same place.

2) Not only this but the different distributions are all going in different directions and have different goals. When something is successful they'll borrow f

Re:

[TheLinuxSRC]

Wow... some mod has your number...

Back on topic; I take exception to the example you give. Not only do KDE and Gnome work together [freedesktop.org], but KDE and Gnome both have their respective places. I know Gnome is more popular with most of the big-name distros but that does not change the fact that I cannot stand it :) I have tried to like Gnome many many times however its complete lack of configuration options quickly drives me up a wall.

I cannot stand gterm (or whatever the default terminal in Gnome is) compared to

Re:

[mustafap]

> Wow... some mod has your number...

That's slashdot for you. :o)

It's interesting what you say about KDE & Gnome, thanks.

 

Re:

[ultranova]

As an example, in konsole when you have multiple tabs open switching between tabs is as easy as shift-(right or left arrow); in Gnome's terminal it is some esoteric 3-button key combo.

CTRL-(PageUpor PageDown), actually. Opening a new tab is the three-button combo (SHIFT-CTRL-T).

But, to stay on topic: I've personally found Linux From Scratch extremely helpful in updating and maintaining my RH9-based chimeiresque computer, but Gnome have pretty much given up in getting Gnome work properly; there is just

Re:Should we care?

[jd]

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.

no. Gentoo is different enough

[alizard]

at a technical level that it's worth saving. Someday, distributing apps as binaries may hit a wall in terms of efficiency and matching individual hardware and if that day comes, we'll be glad there's another way to do things out there which has people who understand it.

Re:The solution:

[mrsteveman1]

no no, it'll be ok. slashcode just needs some USE flags.

Re:The solution:

[Lord Ender]

I don't really think it's racism. I mean, race has nothing to do with the topic at hand. My suspicion is that these sorts of trolls only use that word because it is the most taboo of all words. It's one of the only words that can really get a reaction out of people, that can end careers. It is a word so powerful, that if it is used while committing a crime, the crime becomes many times more serious. That word is used because we, as a society, give it a special power.