Re: [gentoo-dev] Thoughts on the whole gentoo future discussion

[Brian Harring]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 10:00:08AM -0800, Matthew Marlowe wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The following are just my opinions/summaries:
>
> 1)  It appears that the most dissatisfied devs are those
> who have been proponents of the "enterprise" aspect
> of gentoo.  When they say that not much has been
> accomplished in the last 2 years, I think you have to
> look at it from the enterprise point of view.  GLEP19
> never got anywhere.  Other than small improvements,
> I'm not sure anything positive has happened.  If anything,
> Gentoo appears to be heading more in the "desktop"
> and "hobbyist" direction.  That might be what they mean
> when they say gentoo is becoming irrelevant.
>
> cool stuff happening in gentoo on the hobbyist and desktop
> side.

Where is the effort to actually make glep19 a reality?  I've sniffed 
around from the portage side of things, and personally I've not seen 
any actual work done towards it.

Same thing with a 'central vision' provided notion of 
parallel-fetching- wasn't implemented till someone who was annoyed 
enough, got off their ass and implemented it.

If it wasn't clear from my badly worded previous email, effectively, 
you want it, get off your butt and get it.  No free lunches unless 
you're lucky enough to have someone willing to do the work for you.  

Not stating that each group is going to do only what ever they deem
(although frankly, some groups seem to operate close to this), but I 
*am* pointing out that all of the issues with ent. gent., I've not 
seen anyone actually work on them.

See my point?  Glep19 went no where because it was a proposal 
(seemingly) without any actual work done on it.

Of course it's going to stall out, proposals do not translate to code 
without resources (manpower) to make it a reality.

> Therefore, I think the devs who favor the desktop stuff
> just really arent understanding how the enterprise devs
> have been disillusioned here.

See above.  I stopped poking about glep19 due to the fact nobody 
seemed to actually be doing anything.

Reiterating it so it's absolutely clear, reality is that those who 
want it have to do the work.  Hell, it's stated in the glep process.

Yes, ent.gent. would be nice, but I'm more inclined to work on portage 
then on specializing the tree/snapshott'ing process for others when 
they haven't even started the basic work required (nor is the proposal 
even particularly finished/fleshed out).  Maybe if the core of glep19 
were actually fleshed out in the glep, and the _basic_ initial work 
was finished I'd have an interest, but right now I (bluntly) don't 
care enough about a special interest to jump in and effectively spear 
head their own proposal.

Note also that I'm picking at glep19 here; I'm not picking at efforts 
to stabilize the tree nor introduction of ent. features into gentoo.

Merely pointing out the core of ent. gent. must be glep19, yet 
those who want it aren't doing anything to achieve it.


> 2) Although the "future discussion" doesnt seem to be bringing
> devs any closer together, I saw at least a few decent suggestions
> that we should follow up on.
>
>    -  Have a planned annual developers conference
>            I think this is critical, I would be willing to help with the implementation
>            if it gets the green light.
>
>     -  Consider the possibility of eventually redefining gentoo entirely as a metadistribution
>        and have devs more formerly broken up into different teams of enterprise, desktop, etc
>        devs where the eventual product might be seperate trees or release media for each
>        team.
See my previous email about what 'redefinitions' and 'refocusing' and 
'specialization of interests' will actually accomplish.

People organize on their own, sometimes badly, sometimes better then 
any management overhead could achieve.  Either way, the possibility 
you state doesn't provide any backing for a reason to do so, thus I 
wonder what it actually would accomplish :)

~harring