Re: [gentoo-server] Portage Maintenance

[Andrew Gaffney]

Mark Rudholm wrote:
> On Monday 06 September 2004 21:29, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
>
>>Mark Rudholm wrote:
>>
>>>Is it just me, or is Portage getting out of date in a lot of areas.
>>>I keep finding that it is months out of date on software that I use.
>>>For example, OpenVPN's latest stable release, v1.6.0 came out on May 9,
>>>yet portage is still at 1.5.0-r1 (masked or not).  The 2.0_beta releases
>>>are nowhere to be found.  KDE 3.3 is also not masked.  Postfix 2.1 took a
>>>while to show up in Portage...
>>>
>>>I also noticed that the GWN wasn't posted to the Gentoo website last week
>>>(or this).
>>>
>>>Should I be concerned?
>>
>>Nope, not at all. Just remember that all of the Gentoo developers are
>>volunteers. They work on this stuff in their spare time. If you want a
>>newer version of a particular program in the portage tree, write an ebuild
>>yourself and submit it via bugs.gentoo.org.
>
> OK, well, we can skip the OSS primer, I think we all know what the community
> is about and how it works.  What I'm concerned about is that Portage seems to
> be slipping, and that not enough people/developers are contributing new
> ebuilds.  To draw an analogy, I can vote, but that doesn't really solve the
> problem of low voter turnout.  FreeBSD's Ports is also user-maintained and it
> seems far more current.  Has something changed?  It didn't seem to be so out
> of date before.

The size of the portage tree is growing faster than the number of devs that are 
around to maintain it. When I first started using Gentoo in February 2003, there 
were only ~30,000 files in the Portage tree. Currently, there are 80,000+ files. 
I could be wrong, but I don't believe there has been a 3x jump in developers to 
go along with that. Volunteer your own time and become a developer.

-- 
Andrew Gaffney
Network Administrator
Skyline Aeronautics, LLC.
636-357-1548