Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo's problems

[Alec Warner]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>
> * 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.

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.

>
> 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.

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.

> * 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.
>

I agree with that statement.

> * Low QA expectations. Gentoo's QA isn't any worse than it was two
> years ago. However, expectations are much higher due to improvements in
> other distributions, and the increase in tree complexity makes
> mistakes much more severe.
>
> Mistakes can be classified as those that can be detected automatically
> (things are improving in this area -- for one example, adjutrix is being
> used to detect forced downgrades), and those that can't. Reducing the
> latter involves education and ensuring that developers are aware of
> expectations -- developers shouldn't be relying upon the QA team to do
> QA.
>
> Unfortunately, some developers simply won't fix QA mistakes. When
> something like this happens:
>
> 11:16:24 <@genstef> hansmi: bah fix your qa stuff yourself if you think
> I am wrong. I wont do something I dont agree with
>
> something has to be done to prevent the developer in question from
> continuing to hurt the users.
>

I can agree with parts of your statement.  Particularly the expectations
are not set out anywhere (not even by the QA team).  There are no
metrics, no data; it does not surprise me when QA is lax.  There is QA
policy of course (devmanual and devrel docs) but most of that relies on
common sense (when is breaking the rules ok, when is it not, etc...)  I
said the same thing when Halcy0n led QA; if all the devs can't agree on
the expectations of Quality Assurance within Gentoo there is no point in
enforcing much of anything (aside from what I would term; black/white QA
violations; ie no one in their right mind would think it wasn't a
violation).  However many violations are in a gray area in between and
thus enforcement as well is...gray and  not well executed.

I would like to also point out that your quoted irc snippet is very weak
as there is no explanation to what the issue is nor why genstef is being
bothered about it.  I realize you most likely meant it as an example of
something that often happens (ie dev A does something, dev B calls him
on it, dev A and dev B disagree on what proper course of action is; one
dev must then have the bigger balls to either revert/fix or back down),
however it may be good to use a made up instance in the future; lest
your statement be misconstrued.


> * 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.

> * The repeated abuse of silly phrases like "Gentoo is about choice",
> "Gentoo is about the community" and "Gentoo should be about fun" to
> attempt to rationalise insane policy decisions. Choice, community and
> fun are all very well, but without a quality distribution they're
> worthless. The primary goal should be a good distribution, with the
> rest as things that come about as a result.
>

See I tend to disagree somewhat here.  Quality is good, I don't think
anyone will argue against that (I mean how could you!).  However I don't
think quality comes from frustrated developers.  I believe that keeping
developers happy and sane (ergo having fun) has a positive affect on
quality.  I also think that our community (both users and devs) is
probably our best asset.  I think sacrificing that great community for
quality is a mistake.  Luckily quality and community generally aren't at
odds most of the time.

> * Finally, of course, the widespread refusal to accept what the real
> problems are, when it's much easier to blame everything upon a few
> people or groups. It might be nice and easy to think that Saddam has
> weapons of mass destruction and is secretly harbouring Bin Laden,
> particularly when a few disreputable news channels are going around
> saying it's true, but we all know how acting upon such delusions works
> out...
>

I could have a counterargument and say that you refuse to accept what
the real problem is and instead blame the portage developers and the set
of developers with poor QA habits; aka I think this is a bad argument
because one would have to agree on the problems to acknowledge them.

I think many people believe your involvement is a big problem and that
is unfortunate; however the fact that you seem to continue in the same
mannerisms without acknowledging that maybe you actually have negative
social impact here...I think that is a bit hypocritical.  If projects
within Gentoo can make an attempt to evaluate themselves and their
affects on this mess; I think one person can do the same.

-Alec
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