Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:41:10 -0700 Alec Warner <antarus@g.o>
wrote:
> Portage is being incrementally improved.  I'm not trying to rag on the
> former or the current portage crew; certainly it moves slowly.  Much
> of it needs rewriting; my preference is to have more tests so that
> when stuff gets rewritten people aren't completly ruining the existing
> system, so my focus has been on tests and docs.  Occasionally I work
> on features (glep 42 was one of those).  People are free to submit
> patches and I think the portage team^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Zac does a decent
> job of integrating them.  The only recent one that didn't get applied
> was the parallelization one; and I think zmedico has some plans for
> how he wants to accomplish that.

You're avoiding my point. The improvements that are being made are, by
and large, insignificant. Portage doesn't need a few little tweaks now
and again. It has to start delivering a whole load of major new
features (there's no one killer feature), and quickly.

GLEP 42 shouldn't be a major undertaking. It should be a day's work.
That it isn't is a sign of how seriously screwed up things are.

As for submitting patches to Portage... Heh, you know as well as I do
that that's a lost cause. If people who've been working on the code for
years can't deliver, what hope does anyone else have?

> > It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to
> > say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going
> > anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a
> > big deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is
> > indicative of how low people's expectations really are.
>
> The portage team has always been hesitant to break backwards
> compatibility; the advantage of competing programs such as your own
> (paludis) and pkgcore is that you don't have the whole of Gentoo's
> user-base and you can remain much more agile in that type of space.

Largely irrelevant. What you mean there is, "there's no way of changing
Portage in such a way that we can be sure it won't explode horribly,
because we have no static checking, no design consistency and far too
few test cases".

> I also think either you are ignoring the changes or you are just
> unaware of things that the portage team (aka Zac for the most
> part ;)) has been working on.  Many of these things are internal
> behind the scenes changes and they don't require any user-level
> modification.

That's just it. Portage needs to deliver major visible improvements at
the user level for Gentoo to get anywhere. Managing a Gentoo system is
much harder now than it was a few years ago, but the tools are largely
the same.

> > * 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.
>
> I was certain that Gentoo's direction was influenced by the people
> working on Gentoo; not ricers.  Do you have any examples of when the
> ricers changed the direction of things in Gentoo.

Sunrise is the canonical example. Also consider the way the forums are
being run (like it or not, the forums are taken by many to be
representative of Gentoo's user base)...

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