Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: udev and /usr

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 09:59, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> This will be a big challenge for a smaller distro like Gentoo.  Obviously we
>> can't just go write our own Wayland replacement, even if we did essentially
>> make our own "systemd" of sorts.
>
> you're aware the ChromeOS is built on top of / with Gentoo right ?

Sure - I'm typing this on my CR-48.  :)

However, I can't seem to find a chromeos-meta package in portage, and
the fact that my chromeos laptop has some feature does me little good
in getting my Gentoo desktop to do the same.  At best ChromeOS is a
fork of Gentoo, and the work that is done to highly integrate it
doesn't really trickle back upstream.  To be honest, I'm not sure it
would be easy for them to do so.

I think that the issue is that big companies are moving away from
The-Unix-Way(TM), to some extent.  Rather than having a bunch of
modular components that you can mix and match, everybody is looking to
vertically integrate.  That often starts with existing components but
then leads to various changes such that the components are no longer
replaceable.

Suppose you're a big integrator like Canonical.  You employ 1000 linux
devs, all paid to work 40 hours per week and who regularly meet and
are competently managed/etc (let's assume for the sake of argument
that this makes them more productive).  You want to add feature X to
your product.  However, to accomplish this you need to get module A
and module B to talk to each other in some way not allowed by their
APIs.  Module A is maintained by 3 volunteers, and module B is
maintained by 100 people but they have a huge NIH chip on their
shoulder and half of them work for competitors and they don't take
module A seriously.  You can spend hundreds of hours getting them to
try them to play nicely with each other, or you can just fork A and B
and patch them to do what you want them to do.  Sure, that is a
long-term maintenance burden, but your 1000 devs can surely handle
that.  Repeat this 100 times and you end up with a chromium tarball
that consists of 90% redistributed 3rd-party libraries with subtle
tweaks.  However, can you really argue with Google's success with this
approach.

The FOSS world tends to be messy - lots of strong personalities and
nobody really has a financial interest in doing much of anything that
doesn't scratch a personal itch.  There are alliances of convenience.
Big companies are finding it less expensive to just do an end-run
around the whole thing.

I think there will be a balance, since fundamentally there are
advantages to compatibility.  However, I fear that the future will
look more and more like a world where you pick one ecosystem and end
up with first-rate apps that work nicely and 3rd-rate apps that don't.
 If you pick KDE, then you had better like amarok or whatever else
comes with it, or be prepared to quit and restart the app anytime your
laptop switches from your car's bluetooth stereo to internal speakers.

Rich