Gentoo in crisis (?)

[dexter11]

In the commentary of this week's DistroWatch Weekly, you can read about the crisis in Gentoo Linux development. The developers don't want to change the status quo and spend too much of their time with personal attacks according to the article. Because of these attacks, Daniel Robbins has left Gentoo again.

 

It also worth reading the comments.

[SoulSe]

I think that a project as close to its community as Gentoo is can never really be in trouble. I understand the concern that right now Gentoo seems to be hovering without much direction from a development perspective, but I doubt this will be a long term problem.

 

Gentoo is not a profit-driven company and Gentoo itself is open source. Even if the entire dev team quit it would just get picked up by someone else and a new group would form around it. In fact, perhaps it would be best as the group of developers currently on the job seem to have lost the plot. Well, that's if we believe Robbins anyway - and there is the possibility that the problem lies with him and not the other developers (I haven't been privvy to the 'attacks' made on him, so I wouldn't know).

 

As for the disparity in development strategies, this is obviously a good thing. It shows that there is a caring community of developers out there who are sticking to their guns. It shows that someone cares.

 

I wouldn't worry too much about the future of the distribution, it is still my favourite. From a dev perspective something like Arch is more with-it, but the problems at Gentoo currently are not permanent, I'm sure ;)

[iphitus]

"Article" is a load of sensationalist trash.

 

For a start, it quotes a known troll as a reference. Ciaran. The article loses all credibility on this alone. Seriously... that's like quoting a porn film as a scholarly reference in a theology assignment.

 

Then read comment 2, even if you ignore the fact that it's by a Gentoo developer, it's a sound response.

 

Third, the loss of one developer, doesn't neccesarily indicate the project is in 'crisis'. Within any organisation, disagreements happen, and arguments do escalate. Sometimes this turns personal, it shouldn't but it happens. To take the moralistic high ground that any such developer should be removed, is utterly impractical. In the end, it's more beneficial for the project that they *stay*.

 

For example, if Arch lost developer Y, who has an important role in maintaining the kernel and KDE, the rest of us would be stretched to cover these, and not all of us have the experience and expertise that he has.

 

James

[arctic]

Gentoo in crisis... well, the same was said about fedora, debian, Slackware, SUSE and other distros in the past. And they are still there. In two weeks, hardly anyone will remember the discrepancies among some developers, in three weeks nobody will talk about D. Robbins quitting on Gentoo.

[mystified]

I poked around the Gentoo forums a bit and it seems there are problems amongst the developers about which direction to take with Gentoo. Some want to make it more user friendly to appeal to the masses and others want to leave it a "geek" distro. But the veterans on the board are confident that there will be a solution and that gentoo is not in any sort of trouble and will be around a long time.

[tyme]

IMHO, it's typical distro growing pains. Somehow Gentoo mostly avoided them early in the game (surprising considering it's quick rise) but now that it's gotten "older", things start to change. It's kinda like puberty, only not.