Is Gentoo in crisis? 199
TheCoop1984 writes "A recent article on distrowatch, and an extended thread on the gentoo forums, have pointed out that gentoo is not what it used to be. Daniel Robbins came back and went again after only a few days, developer turnover is as high as ever, personal attacks on the mailing lists are common, and people are generally not happy about the current state of affairs. Is gentoo rotting from the inside, and can anything be done about it?"
No way! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope gentoo doesn't pass away as it's a clever idea and a good system but really who was it appealing to? Even as a geek is wasn't really interested in compiling my own packages because there is so little to be gained by it. Probably the best solution is to have a system where you can compile your own easily when you want to but generally take the precompiled offering - basically what Debian does. The performance that Gentoo claimed never really appeared AFAIK and I think that would be the only reason for the system.
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Insightful)
Back to the appeal question, our lab will soon be deploying Gentoo on a PXE booted HPC cluster with over 256 cores, and this is on the low end of the scale where Gentoo clusters come in (I know of people responsible for its deployment on 512+ node, 2K-core clusters). I won't even begin to list other places where Gentoo comes in as a first choice because of its flexibility.
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A More Pertinent Question (Score:1, Insightful)
Days 1-3, install.
Day */3 - Recompile $pkg for security vulnerability or new version. Re-edit this pkg's config file because options have changed. Some renamed, some deprecated, some added, some removed. Re-attempt to get your server back into the state it was two weeks ago without having to revert to a vulnerable package.
Day 365 - suicide.
Now, compare this to debian:
Minutes 1-10, install.
Days */10, apt-get upgrade (assuming a cron of apt-get update).
Day 365? At the beach, not even thinking about your servers.
Repeat after me: Gentoo is not a server OS.
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Insightful)
Running Gentoo since 2002... (Score:5, Insightful)
I admit that I'd stick with Gentoo even if, from my perspective as a user, it was going through a hard time, but on my (KDE desktop) system, which is the main system I use for just about everything, if I didn't read these articles, I would have no idea that anything was going wrong.
I have spent less time maintaining, fixing, or otherwise bringing my system up to date in the last few months than I have in years.
As for interpersonal politics, lack of diplomacy, and immoderate language, I don't think that's anything unique to Gentoo. It may well be that there are some cultural issues which need addressing - not for me to say - and perhaps the departure of key developers may, in the future, affect the user's experience, but for me, this has not yet been the case.
I like Gentoo a lot - in fact, I wound up running it sort of by mistake. As a newcomer to Linux, I'd read (in late 2001) that the Gentoo install was some kind of baptism of fire. I had problems understanding some of the fundamentals of how Linux systems are set up and at the time my Mandrake install was not helping me learn. I installed Gentoo as a lark, with the idea that I might learn some things about Linux that I could apply to Mandrake (which I was running because everyone said, at the time, that it was a great distribution for beginners).
Having gotten it installed on the first try, without any problems whatsoever, I ran it for a little while. Then I fell in love with portage which was - at the time - more reliable than Mandrake's package manager. After a few weeks, I couldn't find a reason to go back to Mandrake. This was just a few months in, after years of being a Windows user (which is why I also take issue with the popular assertion that Gentoo isn't for beginners, because it was ideal for me).
In the time since, I've tried several distributions and use Debian on my router and my file server, because they're old, crotchety machines that I was too lazy to install Gentoo on. But I've yet to find anything which so closely matches my expectation of how my system should work, than Gentoo. Which is why I'd stick with it (that and 5 years of momentum, of course).
For me, Gentoo is about ease of use, and specifically *not* having to spend a lot of time keeping my system up to date. In no way am I suggesting that the assertions of others that "Gentoo is too much work" are invalid, but they certainly have nothing to do with my experience, or that of many other Gentoo users. As for compiling software (for instance), this is a process I run, background, and forget about. Every few months, something a little more involved might require an hour or so of my attention (a major GCC upgrade, for instance) but overall, maintaining my system is simply not a time sink, at all.
And no, I'm not a developer. A computer hobbyist and fan of computers, but hardly some kind of guru. There may be good reasons not to use Gentoo, but I'd hate for anyone to think that these political spats somehow define the distribution or have much to do with the user's experience.
At least, it doesn't, so far, have anything to do with *me*. I still recommend Gentoo wholeheartedly. I have a lot of affection for it. I can and have used other distributions and I could learn to live with just about any distribution if I had to, but I doubt it would be the complete pleasure that Gentoo has been. I don't have hatred for any of the distributions I've tried out (Debian, OpenSuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, Kubuntu, and FreeBSD as well), bu
It's all about the packages... (Score:4, Insightful)
I originally switched to Gentoo because I had given up on using Slackware's package system and was keeping a large library of software current by hand.... Gentoo scratched my itch perfectly.
I really do hope it doesn't die from the inside. There are still a lot of people doing a lot of good work... and a _lot_ of people still benefiting from it. The way I see it, these type of squabbles are just a by product of becoming popular. As your dev team grows you're inevitably going to have personality conflicts... you just hope that over time you find a way to work them out and it doesn't bring the project down in the mean time.
Friedmud
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right, but Gentoo makes it easy. It has the best package management system ever done -even better than apt-get IMHO and surely at least on par with it.
Having the easiness of a great package manager with included ability to fine tune your packages is the strength of Gentoo.
Re:Hope it doesn't pass away (Score:3, Insightful)
The program will hiccup and complain that X is not installed... but really it is. If there was an option to 'emulate' a package, I think that would be a terrific system. However, some distro's like to put things in different places, and you would have to explicitly compile a package to conform to where your distro likes to put things. EG: In Gentoo the portmap config is in
Re:A More Pertinent Question (Score:2, Insightful)
Post vs Comments (Score:3, Insightful)
The article is about internal problems, and not about how one's computer runs absolutely flawlessly, or not.
Re:What's the big idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
able to compile all your packages from source and combine your system however you
want and do it all from source really shines.
Good & bad (Score:3, Insightful)
What got better:
- modular X
- good integration of gentoo kernel and driver packages
-
- cleaned up USE flags
What got worse:
- dropping of packages for just political reasons e.g. xmms and the lie that's technical
- complexity
- useless dependencies (like not being able to install postfix and ssmtp at the same time)
Can be fixed - no panik.
Re:Gentoo definitely is in crisis. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, sometimes the complaints are definitely far over the top. Some a******s forget too easily that Gentoo and similar projects are mainly run by volunteers. However, complaining that many make demands, but only very few are willing to help, isn't correct and helpful either. The time where Linux had much more developers than mere users are long gone. Fortunately.