Gentoo in Crisis, Robbins Offers Solution 259
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 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.'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.'"
What is the crisis? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:good! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What is the crisis? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Should we care? (Score:2, Interesting)
And that 'but it confuses the newbies' argument just doesn't cut it anymore. For the complete boons, there's Ubuntu and probably SuSE. For everyone else, there's choice. I like choice. Right now I chose Debian, but that has changed in the past and will probably change in the future.
Gentoo as a learning aid (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:good! (Score:5, Interesting)
When you have experienced this, come back and comment.
Why is the foundation required? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Should we care? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Robbins has my respect. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:good! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Robbins has my respect. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Same here (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Gentoo (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love to welcome Daniel Robbins back and and I wish there was a way to allow community vote.
Re:good! (Score:3, Interesting)
On my server most of the time i find that etc-update takes care of most of the config file updates. If you have config files you want to protect from minor updates use CONFIG_PROTECT in make.conf to protect specific files. Then the majority of config updates flagged with etc-update are ones which you don't need to read over like tweaks to init scripts or such like. I find my config updates are usually over in a few minutes.
The thing i don't like about gentoo is that after a few years of repeatedly upgrading my system using emerge and building new kernels around new hardware and stuff i have started to feel really isolated from any sense of community or identity gentoo may have. I'm not the kinda guy who hangs out on IRC all the time but with other distros i've used in the past i've really had a sense of direction of where the distro is headed in the future and the grand goal of the project. Gentoo just seems to be like that lazy teenager whos just bumming away his life with no plans for the future.
overall though i think its one of the best distros i've used from a low resources server perspective. It still works after 4 without having to scrap it and start again so i'm not going to switch no matter how lethargic its attitude may feel.
Re:What is the crisis? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:good! (Score:2, Interesting)
www.gobolinux.org
Reasons for leaving Gentoo seem exaggerated... (Score:3, Interesting)
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:What is the crisis? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 up with the RPM-based distros I had been stuck with until then. Never really got around to trying Debian, but I may soon make the switch, if these troubles really get out of hand.