Re: [gentoo-user] Daniel Robbins' come back ?

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

* Dale <dalek1967@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> I have been using Gentoo for about 4 or 5 years now.  I to think Gentoo
> has well, lost its way.  It seems like a bunch of teenagers is running
> it sometimes.  They decide something then go back a few steps when they
> don't like the results.  

ACK. I also have this bad feeling :(
Even w/o looking deeper into the system, just as an "normal user's"
view, it became worse in recent years. Lots of conflicts, breaks,
feature deps/conflicts, etc. The amount of necessary hand-work 
and the need to overlay really increased at my site in recent years.

Part of the problmem might be too many quick+dirty hacks, another
part's the philosophy of taking evrything as it comes from the 
upstream. It's not trivial to get out of this ;-o

One little step out could be the OSS-QM project (http://oss-qm.metux.de/)
It collects fixes for a lot packages and makes them accessible in 100% 
automated ways. So in a way it can be seen as an kind of overlay against 
the upstream. Most of the patches are things that upstream's tend to forget 
but importand for fully automated builds (eg. proper relocation, clean 
feature switching, fixing buildfiles, pkg-config, etc) - they do NOT harm 
the core functionality. So exactly what the vast majority of distro's 
patches do, but in generic (distro agnostic) ways.

In recent years, I've announced this several times, but nobody really
interested in it. Maybe now the right time had come ? ;-o

> Users seems to be the last thing on the higher ups mind.  

Yes, I also had such feelings when I was around @ -dev:
It seemed I was disliked, since I was questioning some common dev
practices and no being an official dev by myself, and I never would
be allowed to become one, since I was disliked ;-O
(So I left -dev and focused on my own overlay - not caring about 
the devs anymore).

> I love my Gentoo but I would like to see someone step up and get some
> things done and some decisions made, even those we may never know about.

Actually, I don't think it's just some "strong leader" missing, but
an lack of discusion culture between devs and "plain users".
I'd see the role of Gentoo leaders more in an diplomatic mission than
actual decision making.


cu
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