From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from lists.gentoo.org ([140.105.134.102] helo=robin.gentoo.org) by nuthatch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1I60JY-000207-8X for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:34:20 +0000 Received: from robin.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.14.0/8.14.0) with SMTP id l648WUcL011248; Wed, 4 Jul 2007 08:32:30 GMT Received: from telos.xk7.net (telos.xk7.net [80.68.91.117]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.14.0/8.14.0) with ESMTP id l648R5VW005030 for ; Wed, 4 Jul 2007 08:27:05 GMT Received: by telos.xk7.net (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 1B6D7603A9; Wed, 4 Jul 2007 09:27:04 +0100 (BST) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 09:27:05 +0100 From: Paul Waring To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo Healthy? (The Return) Message-ID: <20070704082704.GB849@telos.xk7.net> References: <49bf44f10707030907jaa9f524maef27beb2a7c9df@mail.gmail.com> Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <49bf44f10707030907jaa9f524maef27beb2a7c9df@mail.gmail.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) X-Archives-Salt: 80886650-60f4-4072-8844-be714276b7e6 X-Archives-Hash: fef867f22e95cf70c8daaed781b2deea On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 09:07:24AM -0700, Grant wrote: > In December 2006 I started a thread titled "Is Gentoo Healthy?" in > which I was roundly put down for raising the possibility that the > decline in the number of Gentoo users could possibly affect the > remaining Gentoo users in a negative way. My personal feeling is that Gentoo has dropped off the radar a bit, and is no longer being talked about that much beyond its own community, which probably means that it won't see much growth. Ubuntu is the distribution everyone is talking about at the moment, and no doubt that will suffer the same fate in a year or so. > Is everyone still toeing that line? The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter > hasn't been published in almost two months. The problem with that, as far as I am aware, is a lack of volunteers, although I don't remember GWNs being absent for this long before. Apparently it is coming back in July, so hopefully its absense isn't permanent. > Is Gentoo destined to be > just another distro starved for contributors and struggling to stay up > to date? If so, I really misjudged it. The meta approach of Gentoo > is superior to any other in my mind, and I think it's growth and > potential are being stunted by the "we don't need them" attitude which > perpetuates Gentoo's lack of usability features for beginners. I don't think Gentoo is starved for contributors, at least not judging by the number of developers listed on the website (I've no idea how many of those are active though). In terms of usability features, if you want a nice easy distro that does more or less everything for you, you go for Ubuntu (or perhaps Fedora 7), not Gentoo. They're not really aimed at the same type of user - even though I run both, it's for different purposes (Gentoo for development and breaking things, Ubuntu because sometimes I just want multimedia to work without having to mess around with USE flags and trying to track down which packages I should emerge to get the right codecs for a particular format). > Gentoo needs as many users as possible to reach its potential. It's a > short-sighted mistake to think that non-contributing users do Gentoo > no good. Non-contributing users become contributors as time passes. > Car mechanics all start as car drivers. To be fair, I think Gentoo has one of the better programmes for getting active users to become developers. There's plenty of documentation on the website, plus the developer manual, although I'd personally like to see a bit more emphasis on non-coding developers (e.g. website updates, press work etc.) for those people who want to get involved but don't like fiddling with bash scripts. Paul -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list