Hello Christopher,

Thursday, January 9, 2014, 6:12:37 PM, you wrote:


> you motivate your proposal by claiming the Gentoo Project stagnates which you
> relate with its decline in popularity:

>> According to Linux Counter
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20120101000000*/http://linuxcounter.net/distribut
>> ions/stats.html

>> In January 2012, Gentoo distro had 5.32%
>> In January 2012, Gentoo had 4.04%
>> In November 2013, Gentoo had 4,21%

>> And from my experience of Gentoo forums, gentoo.wiki - I vote for Gentoo at
>> least not gaining new users. If in several years the number of users is not
>> increased - we can tell about stagnation.

> But let me ask this question: Is the number of users really that important to
> Gentoo? 

Should be. It looks important for Gentoo and the Gentoo developers.

For Gentoo - the more users Gentoo has the more resources it can deploy 
in development and support. May be the world domination isn't the correct 
word but a steady growth of Gentoo systems globally is a good goal. If Gentoo 
looses 1% annually in 5 years there would be no new developers motivated enough 
to push the project ahead and the old ones would think bad about investing their 
life in what is not gaining popularity and they will not be that enthusiastic, 
getting demoralized. Without fresh blood the crucial people will get old/tired and alas. 
I'm sure you don't need Gentoo only for yourself as nobody else here does. It's a project 
for people, the people get it running and it's the treasure the Gentoo has so why not 
to turn towards users? 

Try build a house, tell friends about the house, unite them in one goal and 
then build it for free and for everybody, then if the house is not working well 
- you have friends no more, next time you're alone in one huge house, 
nobody needs, nobody will help and you can't just support it on your own. 

> Since it does not strive for world domination I think all that matters
> is to keep the current userbase happy.

True. That is the goal.
 
> From your thread I do not understand
> whats wrong on that side:

>> For various reasons many techs were not implemented and now Gentoo is in a 
> kind of stagnation.

> What do you mean by that in particular? 

Gentoo stopped. The work is done but it's not a game changer. The 
ebuilds have approximately the same time to install, the failure rate is about the same, 
emerge is getting slower. The number of users decrease. 
It looks like this is because it's not clear where to go and what to change. What to change 
exactly to bring more users? Not clear. No information.

Apparently the criteria is timing. When you develop a human access interface the most 
reliable thing to check your work against is the time required for an average user to achieve the goal. 

Time is the most important in our lifes and this is the criteria that always works. There 
are a variety of users, with different genetics, different views, education and skills but you 
can find an interface that unites them all and everyone is feeling like it's easy. It's not an
easy task because what looks easy for a developer might look alien for his neighbour. 

If we decrease time required for the users to maintain Gentoo and decrease time for developers 
to push the project - then Gentoo will grow.

> And what is wrong with 
> bugs.gentoo.org? Wouldn't it be better to talk about how attract more 
> developers?  

Good question. 
You can't attract enough supporters not being successful or
without paying them. Supporters are the same users if you're loosing
users the number of supporters are decreasing.

The times are changed. The projects are so complicated nowadays that 
keeping them manually is practically impossible. Why drudgery? There 
are numerous jobs with which robots can do better. Human should focus 
on what machines can't do better. 

> I guess a lot unsolved bugs stem from the fact that there are too
> few that can take care of them.

And from all these bugs only 10% are critical 20% are affecting like 
1% of all users and it's not clear what to fix first. 

It's a self balancing system. How do you plan to attract more developers? 
What to offer them?

-- 
Best regards,
 Igor                            mailto:lanthruster@gmail.com