On Sat, 2002-12-21 at 23:01, Arthur Britto wrote:
> You've just highlighted one of the biggest problems with Gentoo: manual
> problem discovery and resolution.  When a package breaks, someone must
> (1) manually discover it, (2) search mailing lists for Gentoo and the
> application, (3) search the forums for Gentoo and the application, (4)
> attempt reasonable diagnostics to insure the problem is not just with
> their system, (5) if they are competent they might try to solve the
> problem, and (6) share their problem with the community.

We are taking significant steps to "fix" this, starting with better
handling of our bugs (and more accountability of how they are handled)
on bugs.gentoo.org. Several developers including myself are now fully
caught up on bugs -- unresolved bugs get checked daily for new comments,
etc.

One of the major things that has caused this "manual discovery" problem
is our extremely rapid growth, which resulted in many developers getting
overwhelmed with bugs. Once a developer has more than 50 bugs on his
plate, it becomes a bit overwhelming to keep tabs on all of them. If
they don't get addressed quickly, then they can linger for longer than
is acceptable. Our dev team is growing every week to address our rapidly
growing user-base. (See our Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, bottom, for devs
who were added in the last week.)

Just wanted to chime in and say "we're workin' on it!" :)

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins
Chief Architect, Gentoo Linux
http://www.gentoo.org