Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-08-09

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 5:27 PM, James Le Cuirot <chewi@g.o> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Aug 2015 06:52:23 -0400
> Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 5:07 PM, James Le Cuirot <chewi@g.o>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > Sorry for the lateness of this but monsieurp and I would like to
>> > have a discussion on the state of Java. This is perhaps less
>> > technical than the average council meeting discussion but we feel
>> > that this precarious situation threatens Gentoo as a whole and
>> > needs to at least be acknowledged, if not addressed.
>>
>> What else do you need to see acknowledged?  What proposal do you have
>> for addressing these problems that requires council approval?
>
> I don't have any obvious answer besides the suggestion of one infamous
> former developer that the recruiters should be more proactive in their
> approach instead of just waiting for people to show up at the door.
> That worked in the past but Gentoo isn't so popular now.

I think part of the problem is the title "recruiters."  They aren't
really recruiters so much as a new developer orientation/processing
team.  Their job is of course absolutely essential all the same.

That said, if there are some in the community who are interested in
actually doing this kind of proactive recruitment they should feel
free to do so.

>
> My main intention though, was merely to warn the council that if
> monsieurp and I were to throw in the towel, the Java packages would
> stagnate very quickly, and users would soon notice, especially now that
> Java vulnerabilities are publicised rather widely.

Consider us warned (or certainly me).  However, I think the real
message needs to go out to those who are counting on Java support in
Gentoo.

> We've even had one user asking us to fix Tomcat
> because he's using it on real planes flying real people.

Is he interested in contributing to Gentoo?

Ultimately the only thing that is going to fix your problem is people
interested in Java on Gentoo stepping up to make it happen.

>
> If we can't satisfy these users then this will reflect badly on Gentoo
> as a whole at a time when we really can't take our user base for
> granted. I honestly fear for the future.
>

So, I guess one way of looking at this is, who is our user base?  What
sort of person would find it useful to run Java on Gentoo?  What
advantages does somebody obtain by running their Java application on
Gentoo, instead of on top of some other distro like Debian or CentOS?
How can we leverage these strengths, instead of just trying to be
another Debian?

I don't think that Java benefits as much from some of the dynamic
linking flexibility or build-time configuration flexibility that
packages written in other languages like C tend to benefit from.
Maybe one of the benefits is from the surrounding environment -
running Tomcat on Gentoo on a plane isn't so much about what it does
for Java/Tomcat as much as what it does for the rest of the OS,
perhaps.

And then what can we do to encourage others to contribute?

You certainly have my appreciation for what you're doing, and I
suspect that the rest of the council would echo that.  However, in the
end that isn't really going to fix the problem that you're working
really hard and you don't have enough help to get things where you
want to see them.

-- 
Rich