Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:31:57 -0700 "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky"
<znmeb@×××××××.net> wrote:
> 1. As far as I'm concerned, the one thing that absolutely positively
> should have happened now but hasn't is some scheme where you have
> something like Red Hat/Fedora's "green checkmark/red bang" indicator
> on your desk, indicating whether your system is up to date, and a
> classification of the available updates into security, bug fixes and
> enhancements. I don't ever remember how long Red Hat has had that,
> and I know Debian and the other apt-based package managers have
> something similar, even if it's just a command-line level. On Gentoo,
> even with the latest Portage, I do "emerge --sync; emerge -puvDN
> world" and just get a list. There's no way to tell which of those are
> must-haves for security without reading changelogs.

paludis has a --report that wouldn't be tooooo hard to copy or adapt
for a graphical environment. The tree doesn't carry information about
whether an upgrade is important or not, however (security aside), so
one of the following would have to happen for non-security critical
updates:

* Affected versions would have to be package.masked

* A GLEP 42 news item would have to be released

* GLSAs would have to be extended to do non-security things.

Personally I'd find the second option most useful, and it wouldn't be
hard to deliver...

> 2. Just last year, the organization that is developing the LSB (Linux
> Standard Base) standards got around to forming a working group on
> package management. Bluntly put, everybody's package management sucks
> in some way or another, and there are three major Linux package
> management systems (RPM, apt and Portage) in addition to Perl,
> Python, Ruby, PHP and R all having their own package management
> systems. But ... the Red Hat/RPM/yum folks were there ... the
> Debian/Ubuntu/apt folks were there ... and I think the Perl and
> Python people were there ... Gentoo wasn't!

The LSB sucks even more than not having a standard at all. This one's
been discussed at length previously.

> > * Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a
> > lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code
> > than a mere package manager.
> >
> The tree, like an ordinary tree, is a complex adaptive system,
> including code, developers and users. I obviously don't have the same
> insight as a developer, but I think it's in pretty good shape. As
> near as I can tell, it's second only to Debian in terms of its size.
> There may be more RPMs world-wide than there are .debs or ebuilds,
> but they *aren't* all together in one place.

The tree is in better shape than Portage, yes. If you think it's ideal,
you're probably not asking yourself the right questions...

> > * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user
> > base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small
> > number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't
> > even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique
> > wields huge amounts of influence.
>
> You may not know what the user base is, but you can probably get a
> pretty good idea of how *large* it is relative to Fedora, Ubuntu,
> Debian and openSuSE by doing some simple web page hit statistics
> research using publicly-available tools and data. And I think you'll
> be amazed at how small that base is. Distrowatch was right about that
> part -- Gentoo "share of mind" is dropping and dropping rapidly,
> although I don't think it's because of misbehavior in the community.
> I think it's because:
>
> a. Daniel Robbins left and went to Microsoft, leaving no "Mr.
> Gentoo", and

Eh, that's not really relevant. You're assuming that Daniel was hugely
influential right up until he left. That isn't the case.

> b. No effort to seek corporate support, at least none that I'm aware of.

Gentoo can't deliver anything amazingly useful to corporations with
Portage the way it is. If Gentoo had a package manager that could
handle managing large numbers of non-identical systems with ease it
would have a major selling point.

Gentoo doesn't have lots of users because it has nothing to offer most
people over the competition. What was unique five years ago is now
largely irrlevant due to improvements in the competition. By not
keeping up, Gentoo is getting Red Queened.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail                                : ciaranm at ciaranm.org
Web                                 : http://ciaranm.org/
Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/