Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lares Moreau]

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:14 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now.
> Looking back at the last two years, what are the major
> changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has
> been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder
> about any ground breaking enhancements.
>
> Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd
> like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006
> and beyond. You don't need to come up with goals by this meeting if you
> haven't had time, but at least by the February meeting. Each group can
> have their own goals, but we lack any overall binding goals or
> direction. We've brought on numerous devs in the past year, and I have
> yet to see a huge improvement in QA or anything else. Numbers aren't
> everything. If anything, it makes it harder to maintain good QA.
>
> There's a lot of people out there frustrated with Gentoo because of the
> lack of QA and direction. Package foo changes a bunch of config
> locations, package bar gets upgraded and causes a bunch of QA
> nightmares. At least from an admin point of view, Gentoo has gotten
> harder to maintain. Granted, thats a question for Gentoo itself. Who
> exactly are we catering to? Power users? New users? We can't satisfy
> everyone out there and need to draw a line of how much we'll devote to
> keeping the new user from destroying their system, etc.
>
> I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating
> lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we
> could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're
> at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I
> think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be
> better than distroA or distroB.
>
> Ok, thats all my ranting for today. Hopefully I didn't start off the
> next world flamewar :-)
>
> Cheers-

I have been involved with many Volunteer organisations over the last
couple years. Not all computer related.  Something Gentoo is notably
missing is a Mission Statement. IMO a Mission statement acts as a beacon
on the horizon, allowing us to have a gauge against which to measure our
progress. In the process of discussing and generating this statement the
issues mentioned above, can be ironed out and/or flamed about.

-Lares

-- 
Lares Moreau <lares.moreau@×××××.com>  | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org
lares/irc.freenode.net                 |
Gentoo x86 Arch Tester                 |               ::0 Alberta, Canada
Public Key: 0D46BB6E @ subkeys.pgp.net |          Encrypted Mail Preferred
Key fingerprint = 0CA3 E40D F897 7709 3628  C5D4 7D94 483E 0D46 BB6E