Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

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On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 15:03 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> > Lance mentioned something about what he sees is a niche where Gentoo
> > does quite well.  "Produce the best software distribution, ever" sounds
> > a bit vague to me.  That's why I agree with Lance for now.  Maybe after
> > a little research, trial and error period it turns out to be better to
> > keep the target vague.
> 
> Yeah, if we're content to being a hobbyist distro, then that mission
> statement will work. But, the technology behind Gentoo has far broader
> benefits for various things. Especially with the recent work of the alt
> related subprojects, embedded, etc ... its changing. Like for me, I
> would love to use the portage technology to build packages for solaris
> machines I maintain at work.
While I do agree with you here there's still the problem that each and
every one of us has his (or her or its) own idea what "we" should do.

Some want the ricer flags and tweakability.
Others want to see one package manager to rule them all.
Then there's the "because we can" group.
The enterprise-oriented persons.

I wonder ... can we have one precise mission statement without
alienating a big part of our user base? 


>  We have a build system currently, but its
> nothing like portage. Gentoo is more than just Linux now and we should
> have goals that fit that.
I guess some people would like to disagree there. (Not me, I like that
whole "metadistribution thingy, it's the way to world domination)
>  When I say "we have a niche we're perfect at",
> I'm mainly referring to the source-based nature of our OS. There isn't
> another distro out there that does it as well as us and we should
> improve on that fact. Let the other distros get better at being
> binary-based.
Why would one prevent the other from happening? 
Maybe someone finds an elegant way for "Binary Gentoo" ... should we
stop that person because it conflicts with a weird mission statement?

-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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