Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo dead?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 8:09 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yea, -dev gets lively when someone steps on the toes of another dev but isn't that true about anywhere?  Gentoo is somewhat of a niche distro.

I've commented on this elsewhere, but I think these two are related.
With more mainstream binary distros a lot of differences of opinion
result in forks.  Gentoo is really the only significant source-based
distro out there, and we're basically minimally viable as it is, so
there isn't much room for forking.  As a result we're just forced to
work these sorts of issues out and come up with ways to coexist.

Look at how many binary distros there are that are nearly identical
except for their default desktop environment, or what they use for
PID1, or some details around their QA/stabilization policy.  A distro
like debian is big enough that if a bunch of people get ticked off
with a decision you can fork it into two distros and they're each 3x
as large as we are.  Do that 47 times and we end up with the situation
we have in the linux world today.

Certainly Gentoo hasn't be completely without forks, but very few have
persisted, because we tend to try to let our users have it their way.
So, if one user wants systemd-everything and another user wants to
stick *systemd* in their INSTALL_MASK they don't have to have two
different sets of devs independently maintaining every single other
package to accomodate that preference.  Sure, not every option is
equally well-supported, but that usually comes down to
interest/manpower and rarely reflects some kind of top-down policy
decision to forbid something.

-- 
Rich