Re: [gentoo-project] Questions for Gentoo Council nominees: Gentoo as hobbyist distro

["Andreas K. Huettel" <dilfridge@gentoo.org>]

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Am Sonntag, 16. Juni 2019, 20:09:38 CEST schrieb Michał Górny:
> 
> Some developers were recently complaining that we're turning Gentoo into
> a hobbyist distro and that's apparently bad.
> 
> Do you think Gentoo should allow for experimental and unstable features,
> and possibly breaking changes that make Gentoo more interesting for
> hobbyists?  Or should we block breaking changes and become more
> conservative for users who prefer stable distribution with minimal
> maintenance burden?

We're torn between extremes here, and I think nothing we do will make 
*everyone* happy. That said, we do have the duality stable/~arch, and that 
should already answer a large part of that question. In an ideal world, stable 
should be rock-solid and production worthy, and ~arch should be bleeding edge 
with occasional bugs and compile failures that come with that.

Where that doesnt work (say, profiles) ...

Let's start with the following assumption: Our main objective should be that 
Gentoo has a vivid, productive, and growing developer community. (If you think 
that doesnt sound right, you can try replacing "developer" with "productive 
contributor".)

Developers exist in two overlapping types, broadly speaking:
1) hobbyists who do something because it's interesting and cool
2) employees who are paid to do something because it's useful

So, we need to find a compromise between these two, with weight on the group 
that contributes to Gentoo most.

Right now my personal feeling is that we're trying to set long deprecation 
times when something is going away, and that nevertheless migration to, say, a 
new profile tends to only *start* when we threaten that the deprecation time 
will be over soon and the old one will go away.

We can't be stuck at the same level forever. Occasionally we will have to 
change something that requires manual intervention. Hey, if you have a big 
server farm, that's what all these horrible automation tools (puppet, rex, 
...) are good for. I think. Let's do it carefully, announce it, announce 
deprecation times, and give people time to do it. And then move on.


-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer
(council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)

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