Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:30:37 +0100 Alexandre Buisse
> <nattfodd@g.o> wrote:
>
>> I quite agree with the Patriot act comparison, and I would be
>> interested to know what you think our real problems are.
>>
>
> Not a complete list, but probably a good starting point:
>
> * Portage. Gentoo hasn't delivered anything useful or cool for two
> years or so. Things like layman are merely workarounds for severe
> Portage limitations (not a criticism of layman). Delivery to end users
> is based around what's possible with Portage, not what people want or
> need. In the mean time, managing a Gentoo system has become much more
> complicated due to the increased number of packages on a typical system
> and the increased requirements for the average user. Combined with
> serious improvements in the competition, Gentoo's benefits are rapidly
> diminishing. Until there's a general admission that Portage is severely
> holding Gentoo back, anything delivered by Gentoo will be far below
> what could really be done.
>
> 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.
>
> I don't claim to know everything that users want from the package
> manager. I know that everything in [1] has been described by at least
> one user as a major advantage for not using Portage. Unfortunately,
> most of these aren't things that can be delivered easily with the
> current codebase.
>
> (Incidentally, since someone will probably try this argument: I held
> these beliefs long before I started work on a Portage alternative.)
>
Well, I assume most everyone on this list has read the blog post about 
Gentoo being unsuitable for servers. If not, I can hunt it down, but 
it's a starting point for discussions about Portage and package 
managers. I'll just throw out a couple of my own comments:

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.

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! 
There doesn't seem to be any Gentoo representation on the Linux 
Standards Base at all! So a "standard Linux" will end up being some 
usable compromise between Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, Novell/SuSE, 
Perl/CPAN, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Python and PHP.
> * 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 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
b. No effort to seek corporate support, at least none that I'm aware of.

In short, I'm not sure there is any future for *any* "pure community 
distro". Somehow Gentoo needs to at least find a marketable defendable 
niche and some kind of corporate sponsorship. Maybe embedded will turn 
out to be that niche -- I'd love to have even 1/4 of Portage on 
something like a Zaurus or "iPhone".

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.

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