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

[Lance Albertson]

Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Lance Albertson wrote: [Mon Jan 02 2006, 12:14:05PM CST]
>
>>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.
>
>
> Assuming that we can ever get GLEP 42 out the door, I think that will
> constitute ground-breaking.  There has actually been a considerable
> amount of progress on the Portage front, as well, although not all of
> the new stuff is out yet.  Similarly, the slowly-rolling website
> redesign is truly on the verge of being released.  We also have had
> excellent modular X11 support for some time now, and it appears that
> gcc-4.x support is doing quite well, too.
>
> Oh, and we've also retired an amazing number of no-longer-active devs,
> so I don't know if it's actually true that we've added numbers.

All of those of course are true. I guess I'm thinking more in the large
picture of things. Retiring non-active devs isn't something I'd exactly
call 'ground breaking' :-). I know there are things being worked on now
that will probably be in that category. I was mainly looking at the long
term flow of ground breaking progress we've made. Sure, we've made lots
of great improvements, but I'm concerned that we have too many
subprojects all working in their little world and no one really looking
over the whole project making sure things flow together well. There's no
one out there who's responsibility is to track all these subprojects and
make sure things are flowing right.

>>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.
>
>
> Okay, so you're not happy with Gentoo's direction, but what are you
> actively doing to change it?  (Other than starting this discussion, that
> is?)  I don't mean that question as an attack, although it may well
> appear that way.  It's also not directed at you, since others have
> made similar comments.  Instead, I'm suggesting that the reason that Gentoo
> lacks a leadership position right now is that, at least where Gentoo is
> concerned, effective leadership generally means an individual who is
> putting in a _lot_ of hard work writing code and implementing changes.
> That's one of the reasons that drobbins could be effective--he had the
> time to extend portage, work on the website to fit his vision, and make
> sweeping changes to the tree.  In that respect, I would argue that
> Gentoo's most leader-like person right now is vapier, because he's a dev who
> actively enacts wide-ranging changes.  Similarly, flameeyes, ciaranm,
> and the portage team all deserve credit for having a significant impact
> on where Gentoo has been going recently.  (Yes, I also realize that
> people may not agree with some of what those devs have been
> doing, but they have been out there getting their hands dirty, and it
> makes a huge difference.)

Sigh, I get the impression that you think I wrote this email just to
start another long drawn out debate. I know what you're talking about
above and I somewhat agree on what you're saying there. We all have our
limited amount of time and energy to work on things. There are days I
wish I could just devote 100% of my time to Gentoo to improve those
areas I want to. But sadly, I cannot do that so this is my one attempt
at getting a feel for our group to see where they see us going. If I had
more time and energy, I would try to do more active things.

> *Shrug*  My feeling is that Gentoo is not advancing all that quickly
> right now, but that it's being maintained fairly well.  More
> importantly, we still ensure that people _can_ make sweeping changes, if
> they want to put in the work to do so.  I'm actually fairly confident
> about Gentoo having a decent future.

I have no worries about people actually getting things done. What I'm
concerned about is that there's no true direction of where things will
go. Everyone has their own way of doing something, without any kind of
proper overall plan. I know the GLEP system is designed to help with
that (which is it). I'm looking at more of overall direction in Gentoo,
not specific things. We all have different opinions on how things should
be done and nothing ever seems to be totally decided on. Sure we have
the council, but I really haven't seen any direction from them on where
Gentoo should go. We have debates on the mailing lists that seem to
never go anywhere. Is everything that's debated on there needing to go
through a GLEP, or how do such things get decided with a final say?

I dunno, I just get the impression that people fear having a goal to
work on and would rather just let things work out in a random way (like
they have been for a while now). I'm not wanting to take the fun out of
this, but I feel more structure and less redtape would help make us move
forward faster and better.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@g.o>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

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