Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: When is Gentoo 1.4 going to be released?

[Matt Beland <matt@rearviewmirror.org>]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 02:21:09PM -0400, 3.2.3 wrote:
> whoa right there. a lot of people are on crack, too. especially where
> concerns a bunch wondering when someone is going to hurry up and give
> them something for free.
 
Wrong. We're not asking for the Gentoo team to hurry up and give us our
free candy. We want the Gentoo team to let us know when they're going to
let us take full advantage of the portage system again. Frankly, I (and
I suspect most others) could care less about the 1.4 release in and of
itself. Sure, a new version of the compiler and so on would be nice, but
I can get that on my own if necessary. The problem is that the portage
tree is frozen waiting for 1.4, and has been for some time.

Do a 'grep freeze /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask' sometime. That's
probably an inaccurate count - on the low side - and I see 14 ebuilds
that are masked waiting for the freeze to be over. How many others are
not even in the tree? I see a number of the "freeze" comments indicating
they were only added to the tree for bugfix testing or because the new
build fixes a major bug.
 
> enough software in this world is tossed over the fence according to a
> schedule. i don't need any more software that was developed to a
> schedule. i've got enought of that at work. i need software that is
> actually ready when it is ready, whenever that is. i'm glad there is
> some. eye on the ball, not some bean counter's stopwatch.

Well, see, here's the thing - that's not what we're asking for. We can't
really participate in the internal development - the bugs are available,
but we don't know what's being done about them. We don't know if our
work would be a duplication of effort, or a wrong track, or not really
useful. So we *can't* help fix the problems. At the same time, we get no
communication on how things are progressing - are we getting close? Is
it months away? Has the entire development team gone on vacation? 

I need software that's "actually ready when it is ready" too. So when
I'm dealing with an Open Source software distribution, I have to wonder
why releases are so far apart and include so little community
communication and involvement.

-- 
Matt Beland
matt@rearviewmirror.org
http://www.rearviewmirror.org