Re: [gentoo-project] Some focus for Gentoo

[Donnie Berkholz]

On 17:38 Wed 14 Jan     , Daniel Campbell wrote:
> I'm not a developer, but I am interested in becoming one. That said, I
> don't understand why relevance or focus are important. Is Gentoo not a
> distribution made by people who feel that Gentoo meets their needs and
> (for those who contribute) want to improve it? One of the core values
> of Gentoo is the concept of choice. Without choice, none of the three
> things you listed on the blog post are possible.

Daniel,

Thanks for your comments. Gentoo has been about choice where it makes 
sense and is pragmatic — not about choice for the sake of choice. This 
subtlety is often lost through the mists of time. But it drives other 
key tenets of Gentoo like packaging proprietary software, and all the 
weird restrictions that enable you to package things that can't be 
mirrored, etc.

Here's one way to think of my proposal. Imagine a REST API. The provider 
of that API might also have a few SDKs for some popular languages or 
frameworks, along with documentation to make it really easy for them. 
But *the REST API is still there*, usable by anyone in any language. It 
just takes a bit more work. For Gentoo, this would work in much the same 
way — it essentially requires the existence of an underlying platform, 
but the focus would be on the use cases.

There are two major problems that drive this. One is that Gentoo's 
popularity has greatly declined in the past decade. While you could 
argue that fewer users isn't necessarily a problem in its own right, 
it's creating severe difficulties for us in recruiting new developers. 
That is a problem, and it's an existential one. We need to change, 
because doing what we're doing will just keep us on the same road.

Second, and this is one thing I've learned from my professional life, is 
that platforms are too ephemeral of a concept in isolation. Platforms 
(or metadistributions) succeed when it becomes crystal clear exactly how 
to use them, typically through creation of sample applications, early 
public customers, or something along those lines.

> Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it seems like "focus" is referring
> to actively marketing or advertising Gentoo to garner more interest.

Focus includes but goes far beyond marketing. Here are some examples of 
what this kind of focus would imply:

- The council would base its decision-making on these use cases
- The QA project would help test that these use cases worked well
- PMS enhancements would be driven in part by these use cases
- Releng goals could be to provide image/package types to support them
- Individual developers would make ebuild-level decisions based on them
- We could use them as a rallying cry to unite Gentoo devs
- And yes, the website would tell these stories to draw in new users

> The real problem, based on what I've read here on gentoo-dev,
> gentoo-project, and so on, is a lack of manpower.

This is kind of a problem that isn't a problem. We've supposedly had a 
lack of manpower ever since Gentoo's founding, because there are more 
things that we could be doing but aren't.

> The current issues I think Gentoo faces are more related to manpower
> than relevance, focus, or usefulness. Maybe some new blood (to assist
> the older, knowledgeable blood) is needed to help Gentoo move forward
> faster.

And where will that new blood come from?

There's a limited number of ways to improve the conversion rate through 
our recruitment funnel. You can either lower the barriers along the way 
or pour more into the top of it. And while lowering the barriers would 
certainly get people their commit rights faster, I very rarely see 
people who give up halfway through because it's too frustrating. 
(Granted I haven't checked lately but I've been an on-and-off 
recruiter.)

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Council Member / Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux <http://dberkholz.com>
Analyst, RedMonk <http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/>