[gentoo-dev] Re: GLEP 19: Gentoo Stable Portage Tree -- ideas

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Chris Bainbridge posted <623652d50601060100w2bd03634i@mail.gmail.com>,
excerpted below,  on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 09:00:59 +0000:

> The problems being:
> 
> 1)  Manpower. There are already 10,000 open bugs in bugzilla (and
> growing) without adding more.
> 2)  Lack of interest. Most developers aren't interested in supporting
> "old" packages.
> 3)  The enterprise. Both of the above problems would be fixed if
> enterprises were contributing developers and/or money. However, they
> aren't, so why is that? The truth is most enterprises want to go to a
> big company to buy their software. They want one homogeneous binary
> system, not a flexible way of building packages from source, and they
> want someone else to do it and be responsible for it.

> The only way I can see to solve these problems is more automation. []
> For QA gentoo really needs a compile farm with automated compile,
> install and test (from those ebuilds that support it).  Make the system
> smarter, instead of throwing more people at the problem.

You didn't say it, but it should be self-evident.  The automation solution
is tied to money, which, ultimately, comes back to #3.

I know it's been said before, but really, Gentoo doesn't seem to fit the
enterprise  mold well enough to get the enterprise money.  There are
better fitting organizations out there, that require less direct
modificatiion to get them into the enterprise mold, so /they/ get the
enterprise money.  I know some disagree with this and think Gentoo should
be specifically targeting the enterprise, but IMO, that's not Gentoo's
niche and never will be.

OTOH, it's entirely possible a Gentoo /based/ enterprise distribution may
emerge at some point.  IMO, however, there's enough conflict with what
makes Gentoo great at what it does today, that such efforts should be
separate from Gentoo itself.

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
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