Re: [gentoo-project] Fw: Your temporary 2 week suspension on interacting on the Gentoo Github page

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 7:16 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It frustrates me to see Gentoo go through the same issues over and over again with nothing changing.

If you want to fix problems you need to identify their root causes.
I'm not convinced this is really being done.

Issue: not enough people are contributing to project xyz on Gentoo.

That seems to be the crux of the matter here.  Some say it is because
contributors are scared away by email chains, and that might be
possibly true.  Some say it is because contributors are being turned
away because they are disliked, and that might even be somewhat true.
However, I think there are a bunch of other potential causes, and I
don't think we really can tell how much they all contribute:

First, "not enough people are working on xyz" is a completely
subjective statement.  It is saying that Gentoo does not meet the
expectations of the person making the statement.  There is no
objective standard that says that a distro must do this much of A and
that much of B.  Every distro has projects that have more and less
support.  A project that one person considers critical might be
considered superfluous by another.  The example in this thread was
Java and it is a good example of this.  I see people with fairly
divided opinions on Java everywhere.  Some deem it an enterprise
technology that is widespread and indefensible, and their arguments
are fairly valid.  Others call it a memory hog and a pain to
administer and they usually raise good arguments as well.  A lot of
Gentoo devs don't care about the enterprise, and some do, but probably
don't use Java there.  Also, half the point of Java is
write-once-run-everywhere which doesn't entirely mesh well with a
source-based distro.  I'm not saying that you can't build Java from
source - just that you don't necessarily get the same benefits from
doing so that you might with C.

Then if you want to compare Gentoo with other distros you need to keep
in mind that we are very much a niche.  Many examples can be cited of:
* Binary distros that are release based.
* Binary distros that are rolling release.
* Binary distros that target the enterprise.
* Binary distros that target the desktop.  (ironically the biggest is
a Gentoo derivative)
* Binary distros that are focused around Gnome 3.
* Binary distros that are focused around Gnome 2.
* Binary distros that are focused around KDE/Plasma.
* I wouldn't be shocked if there are several focused around KDE 3/4.
* Binary distros that operate principally from LiveDVDs.
* Binary distros focused on routers.
* Binary distros that are very systemd-oriented.
* Binary distros that use systemd but in more of a legacy/LSB-oriented manner.
* Binary distros that avoid systemd.
* Binary distros that exist mainly to run containers (ironically the
biggest is a Gentoo derivative)
* Binary distros that exist to run on phones.
* Binary distros that semi-containerize every package.

If you want to talk about source-based distros there is basically just
Gentoo and a few derivatives.  In the binary world they have such
manpower available that they can fork themselves in 500 different
directions.  In the source-based world we have so little manpower that
we struggle to maintain a viable distro under one big tent.
Maintaining a source-based distro is also fairly manpower-intensive.
We need build scripts that work for everybody in all kinds of exotic
configurations.  A binary distro just needs to be able to reliably get
a scripted build to work in a very controlled environment.

I think Gentoo is great, but a lot of people don't feel that they need
it to meet their needs, and a lot of binary distros are a lot easier
to maintain.  I run OpenWRT on my router, not Gentoo.  I run Android
on my phone, not Gentoo.  There are advantages to having
niche-oriented distros and the binary world has a TON of them.

The binary distros have also tended to improve over time.  Back when
emerge was mainly competing against Debian/Redhat it was a different
world than the world post-Ubuntu.  Arch is also fairly similar to
Gentoo in principle and thus will tend to split the contributor base.

So, even if we had an environment where every Gentoo contributor was
completely happy, and every offered PR made it into the tree in a
quality-controlled manner in a day, we probably would still struggle
with some of these issues.  That is frustrating, but I think it goes
with the territory.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle the interpersonal
stuff, and we may be able to improve there.  I just wouldn't count on
it turning into a high-commit-volume paradise without some bigger
changes.  A lot of these changes are going to be difficult to make.
Our PR workflow is certainly an improvement, but as we see with Java
it still suffers when nobody with commit access wants to deal with the
PRs, and there is probably a lot of room for improvement in other
ways.

-- 
Rich