Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC - apache start page.

[John Nilsson]

On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 15:22, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 08:47, foser wrote:
> > Actually it is. This is a perfect example of such a stupid flag that
> > 99.9% of the people don't care about. Branding in Gentoo is not
> > intrusive and minimal, especially in comparison to most other larger
> > distros.
> >
> > And most interesting part -brought up in earlier discussions about this
> > same triviality- is that no-one ever complained about the branding of
> > grub which has been there for an eternity. Or what about the cursor pack
> > coming with X (they're not on by default, but do take up space). Noone
> > cared. Hell if zul had just added this to apache without notification I
> > doubt it would've ever been discussed.
> >
> > Yeah we want to choice ad infinitum. I rather rip the 'branding' out
> > than adding a USE flag for such a non-issue.
>
> I tend to agree.  It isn't like we're removing choice.  It really is
> quite simple to edit a line or two and change the theme for gdm or to
> change the splash in gnome.  I simply don't get it.  I find branding
> rather nice, since there has been a large amount of work done on some of
> the Gentoo artwork out there.  In fact, I would like to see more of
> it... not to the point of being annoying or intrusive, but a couple
> little logos in a few more places.
>
> You guys act like we're taking away your right to "rm" the artwork.  It
> seems that things are starting to get to a point with Gentoo to where no
> matter what us devs do, you have somebody out there who is going to
> ridicule our every move.  Quite honestly, we don't *want* those people.
> We want people who are really out to help others, that is why we choose
> to employ some sanity in what we allow in portage.  If we listened to
> everything that everyone said, we would have portage written in
> python/perl/C/C++/java and it would have a
> mysql/postgres/firebird/berkdb back-end, there would be 100,000 USE
> flags, all with conflicting uses on different packages, there would be
> thousands of broken ebuilds submitted by users and having no maintainers
> to speak of, there would be hundreds of -cvs ebuilds, which would break
> at any given moment when the upstream developers commited something to
> their CVS tree, and there would be no management to keep things in line.
>
> Yeah, that's the Gentoo "of the users" that I want to be a part of...
> :rolleyes:
>
> Normally, I leave this stuff alone, but it is just getting really old to
> hear the same busted arguments over and over and over again, and I
> haven't even been with Gentoo as a developer for a year.
>
> I can understand the frustrations that users sometimes get due to the
> appearance of lack of movement of the Gentoo development team, but I
> honestly think that most people simply don't realize just how much work
> can go into development.  Not to mention the fact that every last one of
> us do this as volunteers.  This is not our job.  We do not get paid.

Can it be because Gentoo is changing?

In the beginning gentoo just provided a document describing the guts an
said "If it ain't working for ya, follow the manual and learn!"
But somewhere along the ride this idea of protecting the users from them
self was born, and here we are.

I'm not saying that this is wrong, just that it's new for many users.
When I started with gentoo it was a distro for developers, giving me the
chance to control every last bit of my OS with minimal fuss. Gentoo has
grown into a deployment distro though and the QA demands have exploded.

Also in the beginning the system was changing fast, which created the
impression that anyone with a voice was part of the team. This together
with the feeling of being in control of the system (a side effect of how
easy portage is to use) lead to the fast expansion and popularity of
gentoo. The gentoo community we're so famous for. And as you remember
the community has always had problems with the elite, (rember the
gentoo-core issue?).

I think what we see now are the effects of schizophrenia. The result
from trying to keep the heritage of "meta-"distribution for educated
users(read developers) and to be a full blown deployment distribution
for not so educated users(read clueless admins).

The term "meta-distribution" sort of implies that it ain't ready for
user. Protecting the users might take power away from the distributor.

-John