Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Questions for Candidates (was: Questioning/Interviewing council nominees)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 3:08 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 08:37:57PM +0200, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn wrote:
>> hasufell schrieb:
>> >> They can each have their own ebuild in portage. I do not think that overlays
>> >> are the solution here.
>> >
>> > That idea is so bad I hope we will never see it happen.
>>
>> That's what GLEP 39 explictly allows.
>
> I have to agree on this point. glep 39 allows, and should allow
> competing projects.

GLEP 39 ALLOWS me to make a competing apache ebuild, or a competing
amd64 arch.  It doesn't FORCE me to do so.

If all I want to do is introduce some optional feature distro-wide
that doesn't impact anybody who doesn't want to use it (aside from
trivial numbers of inodes), then I shouldn't HAVE to fork every
package in the tree to do it.

This isn't about taking away the freedom of people to fork things,
this is about taking away the freedom of Maintainers to force people
to fork things.

>> > I think we will not improve as a distro if we do not redefine our
>> > priorities.
>> > I have the feeling that our work is not user-centered anymore, but
>> > developer-centered and that concept is simply wrong and no sane business
>> > manager would ever disagree.
>
> We are a group of volunteers, not a business, so I'm not sure how much
> the business model can apply to us.

Sure, but why would anybody volunteer to work on an unusable distro?
Just what is Gentoo's purpose?  If all I wanted was a set of packages
that only could be reliably used in some particular configuration I
could take my pick of binary distros.

I'm a developer because I'm also a user.  Nobody pays me to work on
ebuilds - I'm scratching my itch.  Nobody is asking maintainers to
scratch somebody else's itch - they just have to stay out of the way
when somebody else chooses to do so.

> By the nature of being a source based distribution, we can offer a
> uniform user experience without being a poor copy of any binary
> distribution, and that uniform user experience could be far more
> flexable than any binary distribution.

Absolutely, but that flexibility depends on a certain amount of
standardization.  If every package maintainer was free to make up
their own arch keywords there would be chaos (x86_64 vs amd64
anyone?).  No problem - just fork every package in the tree and users
can try to guess whether apache or apache-fixed is the one that will
work better with their choice of php or php-improved.  Don't like
USE=X?  Just make your package have IUSE=x - somebody can fork it if
they don't like it.

If all you want is a bunch of clean upstream tarballs, go download
them from upstream and roll your own LFS.  If we want to offer choices
to users or ourselves in any kind of usable way, then we need to
cooperate in their implementation.  That means listening to everybody,
but ultimately arriving at a decision.

Rich