Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo part II.

[splite]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 11:06:09AM +0200, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
Content-Description: signed data
> On Tuesday 15 July 2003 07:29, splite wrote:
> >
> > I hope not, otherwise you'll see it forking into "Fun Gentoo" and
> > "Structured Gentoo".  Guess where the hackers will go.
>
> Guess where the users will go.

When they see people voting instead of doing, they'll go elsewhere.  I did.

> Although I don't like politics, they are unavoidable. There are now like 150

There's politics, then there's Politics.  Constitutions, voting, RRO, all
belong under the capital-P version.

> developers for gentoo. Having a single "boss", and a "lieutenant" with no
> structure at all is not going to work. Especially as the amount of
> developers grows.

Works for the Linux kernel.  Why do you need more developers?  Does every
package in the universe have to end up in the portage tree, with its own
developer?  I'm quite serious.  Just because someone cobbles up an ebuild
for whatever obscure package, does it have to go in?

> We need structure.

You have structure now.  Why make it a full-blown bureaucracy?

> Part of that structure is a place where things are documented, like
> responsibilities.

You already have a place for documentation.

> The problem is that with 30 developers you could easilly ask something you
> didn't know. Now the problem is that you can still ask, but you don't know
> who to ask. Documenting procedure and formalizing a bit should help.

What's wrong with giving a shout-out to gentoo-dev?  I'd rather see someone
documenting Portage better (say, "how SLOTs work"), than documenting
procedures for asking questions.

> There are also many people and organizations that want gentoo to run on their
> servers. Those people have one thing they REALLY REALLY hate, and that is
> comming to office in the morning and finding out that the nightly world
> update fucked up their setup, and it will take at least until the end of the

Then those people shouldn't be idiots.  Seriously, who in their right mind
runs automated nightly updates on production systems?  Run them on a test
machine, then if things look okay afterward, push it out to the production
boxes.  That's common sense.

> morning fixing things up. Normally such thing will mean a great loss of
> productivity.

Then they should be paying Red Hat or SuSE for support.  Folks, you're
not responsible for someone being dumb enough to let their systems be
borked nightly.  In fact, if you start acting like you are, you may
well find someone trying to hold you to it in court.

> Since we believe that the gentoo technology is better than the competition,

Gentoo tech is quite nice, but it doesn't have to be all things to all people.

> even for servers we want to offer what they want while keeping what we have.

If they want a system that's flexible and easy to fix and customize, Gentoo's
great.  If they want guaranteed uptime, they should buy a commercial distro
and a service contract.

> For offering what is needed for servers we do need more quality assurance.

I hate to keep bringing up Debian, but it's a perfect example.  Their
desire for QA has brought the project to a virtual standstill.  Even given
the huge number of Debian Developers, they can't validate all 10,000+
packages on the 11 architectures they support in any timely fashion.
That's why they're taking years between releases now.

As long as Gentoo keeps being "good enough", it will have users.  As long
as its developers take pride and derive enjoyment from working on it,
Gentoo will be good enough.  You don't need Quality Assurance committees
drawing up charts and setting milestones.  If you want to set a release
date, just pick one, Bach's birthday, whatever.  Ship whatever you have
on that date; it's still bound to be better than Debian or Red Hat, even
with all their QA aparatus.

> With QA and the growth of the project comes a management structure. That

Any "project" has a management structure, by definition.  If the present
structure can't keep up with growth, another possibility is to check the
growth.

> structure is inevitable. John made a proposal on how to arange parts of that
> structure. While we will put every effort in it not to create a new debian,
> we need to be more organized than before.

That's appreciated, but I and a few others think he went over the top.
Debian is not the model to emulate.  I wouldn't even try to make a "fixed"
version.  Maybe Gentoo should stick to its founding spirit and come up
with something different.

> So please all discuss the merrits of his proposals. I believe that the
> problems they try to address are there and are well accepted.

I don't think the actual problems have really been discussed, at least
not here.  As I asked before, whose needs aren't being met here?  Simply
stating "we need structure" like it's axiomatic isn't an argument.  If the
developers are having fun, and the users are getting something useful (and
for free), why isn't that sufficient?

--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list