Re: [gentoo-project] Some focus for Gentoo

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 10:43 PM, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@g.o> wrote:
> Wanted to share my thoughts on where I think Gentoo should go, in terms
> of direction. Would love to hear your thoughts.

So, I think that remaining viable doesn't necessarily require focusing
on some goals to the exclusion of all others.

I certainly agree that Gentoo is a great choice for users who need
extreme flexibility.  However, isn't that just "blathering" about
Gentoo being about choice?  The very thing that makes Gentoo so
suitable for people who want to depart from the beaten path is that we
DON'T try to focus on any one thing.

I may or may not be a "typical" Gentoo user, but I think the thing
that really keeps me around here is that I'm a tinkerer, and Gentoo
seems to be full of tinkerers.  This fits into your "people who want
to learn how Linux works" and "people who need extreme flexibility"
categories, but I think it goes well beyond that.  If I wanted to run
a specific configuration in a production setting there is almost
certainly some other distro more tailored to it than Gentoo.  However,
if I want to dabble in this for a few months, and that for a few
months, and generally dabble in those things before it is popular to
do so, then there is a pretty good chance that somebody is already
doing it with Gentoo, and if not chances are that if I am the first
others will be interested in using my contributions.

Sure, having a working toolchain is very helpful when you're blazing
ground, but if all I wanted to do is build abc I could easily set up a
container/VM/whatever following the guidelines of the folks who work
on abc (whether that is a project/language/platform/whatever).  Linux
makes it pretty easy to run things in specialized environments when
you need to, and without worrying about dumping garbage in /usr when
every language wants to bundle its own package manager.

I guess I just have trouble envisioning what a "more focused Gentoo"
looks like other than what it looks like right now.  I guess we can
start saying no to stuff that is outside our area of focus, but is
that what we really want to be?  This isn't really a zero-sum game -
we don't have to exclude contributions for the sake of being focused.

I'd certainly value the perspective of those who have been
contributing longer.  For most of my early years I didn't really
follow -dev all that closely, so I don't really have a sense for how
Gentoo's focus at that time made it more successful.  I couldn't
really tell you what Gentoo's focus was back when I first started
using it.  I just was interested in trying out a source-based distro.

I would love to see more bleeding-edge work in Gentoo, but to be fair
we do actually get a fair bit of that.  We had systemd available very
early on, we are probably the only distro that ever supported X32, our
prefix capabilities are fairly unparalleled (other than on OSX, and
I'm not sure how well the alternatives there actually compare), and
even though my sense is that Gentoo hardened isn't quite as active I
think we provide a lot of unique capabilities there as well.  It is
pretty rare that somebody who wants to do something new is unable to
do it.  Sure, there can be resistance, but I think we manage it when
it happens as long as there is perseverance.

From my observation the only thing Gentoo really needs to make a
certain use case work is continued advocacy.  Typically a few devs
form a project to support some use case, and they advocate for it, do
work to get packages to support it, educate other maintainers as to
how to best help them out, and so on.  Not every Gentoo dev is going
to join up on it, but most will at the very least stay out of their
way, and most are going to do what they can to facilitate things.

I apologize for this being a bit disorganized/random.  I just want to
get my thoughts out there.  This isn't an area I feel particularly
strongly about.  However, I do want to make sure that we don't declare
some kinds of innovation as unwelcome.

-- 
Rich