Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo World Domination. a 10 step guide

[Brandon Low <lostlogic@gentoo.org>]

As usual, sweeping new policies or procedures WILL NOT FIX THINGS.

Pretty much every commercial enterprize learns this eventually.  New
rules from above don't fix problems, peolpe fix problems from below.
Gentoo has always been about close cooperation between core devs, new
devs and non devs.  I think the best thing that can possibly be done is
to help to foster that kind of connection again.  The bigget problem
that I see facing that effort is that #gentoo is no longer a manageable
place for devs to talk to users.  Remember when every developer could be
found in there?  Remember when #gentoo was _the_ place for gentoo
related discussions, and new ideas could be implemented and handed to
the very users who would be impacted by the changes right in #gentoo?
Remember when committing a big bug into the tree just wasn't that big of
a deal, because it'd get fixed soon, and the people who updated often
enough to care in the meantime would just laugh about it with you in
#gentoo?

What if the problem is too many devs instead of too few?  Slackware
Linux is a comparatively simple to maintain distribution, but ONE person
does it.  How many devs are on Gentoo now?  200? more?  A close knit
group of college students and bored professionals should be able to
maintain this distribution.

The biggest point that I do agree with from the original email is that
projects like stage 4s, the installer and pretty much anything other
than the portage program, the portage tree and the stage[123] live CDs
should not be officially part of the Gentoo project.  That's not Gentoo.
Gentoo was started as a meta-distribution for good reason and it's good
at that, keep it that way.  If people want to wrap an installer and
stage 4s around that meta distribution, more power to them -- they
should name their distro and credit Gentoo, but that is _not_ Gentoo.
The great thing about being a meta distribution and not a full
pretty-installer binary distribution is that some of the quirky one-off
package incompatibilities become not really Gentoo's problem.  They are
now the person who wants to distribute a binary distro that contains
that particular weird set of packages problem.  Hopefully they fix it
and submit a patch upstream to Gentoo, and maybe they request a portage
feature (cuz there aren't enough already) to improve it.

Rant!

Meh, I'm part of the problem, so I should shut up now.

--Brandon

On 2006-10-04 (Wed) at 13:44:01 +0200, Simon Stelling wrote:
> Christian Heim wrote:
> >>- Make every dev a member of at least 1 arch team
> >
> >I think that would solve the understaffing of some of the arch teams (iirc 
> >amd64 and x86 are having enough devs / at's right now)
> 
> No. We don't need more people on our dev lists, because it won't change 
> anything. What we need is more people who do actual testing. If you're 
> forced to be in an arch team you're just a <dev> tag in a project page, 
> not more. This is not going to help at all, in fact it will only hide 
> the problems even more.
> 
> -- 
> Kind Regards,
> 
> Simon Stelling
> Gentoo/AMD64 developer
> -- 
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
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