Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Council nominee 2018/19 questions

[Mart Raudsepp]

Ühel kenal päeval, R, 29.06.2018 kell 08:15, kirjutas Eray Aslan:
> Just a few sentences on the questions below would be nice.
>
> 1/ What do you think of closing gentoo-dev ML to the general public?

It is not closed to the general public, only limited posting. This is
the same as various other mediums have been, except for gentoo-dev this
is a change of status quo.
If I would have been part of council at the time of the votes, I would
have likely voted against closing general public posting, but in
practice serving on the council would have meant more pondering and
serious thinking of it and I might have reached to the same conclusion
of having to do this for the time being, until a better solution
emerges.
I hope we can try a different solution at some point soon, as the
underlying mailing list infrastructure gets upgraded (e.g. to better
support different forms of moderation). I don't think we should change
the current status quo yet again without a potential different solution
to try out for the underlying problem that triggered this change.

> 2/ Where do you think Gentoo stands in the Linux ecosystem?  Who do
> you
> think are its users?

It's for the power users that care what and how exactly they have
installed, administrators that make that decision for many, or those
that want to learn how these things work. Also for people that learned
the ways and are now simply using Gentoo as their home distributions,
while actually not tweaking or configuring it much at all - only when
needed, knowing that power is there. Regarding that, I believe we are
sometimes too much forcing users to make a choice on things, failing to
give the choice of not making a choice themselves (e.g. REQUIRED_USE
setups that often end up requiring configuration choices in
package.use).

In a broader sense it's a meta-distribution for other things to be
based on (ChromeOS, derivatives, etc) - unfortunately I don't think we
cater towards this use case very well ourselves.

We should work towards improving our strengths to regain more of our
standing in the Linux ecosystem, and drive it home with appropriate PR
work. But this needs volunteers to do the work, but I believe leaders
in the community can encourage such volunteers to step up and empower
them to get things done. I believe council members should act as such
leaders.


Mart