Re: [gentoo-user] Number of open Bugzilla bugs

[Marc Joliet]

Well, to steal a German phrase, here's my own mustard in the mix:

Am Freitag, 14. Februar 2020, 23:52:32 CET schrieb Mark Knecht:
> On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 12:21 PM Kai Peter <kp@×××××××××××××××.org> wrote:
> > On 2020-02-11 00:06, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > >> Nevertheless, thank you for discussing it with me
> > >
> > > You're welcome.  You're hardly the first person to disagree with me.
> > >
> > > :)
> > >
> > > I'm also not in any particular position of power when it comes to how
> > > bugs are handled.  You can always make a proposal to automatically
> > > close old bugs.  I'd probably start with the Bug Wranglers, though you
> > > could always bring an issue to the Council if you don't feel you're
> > > getting the desired response there.  They've certainly been known to
> > > disagree with me at times too.  :)
> >
> > Interesting discussion. To bad that it's over. Not so much from the
> > technical site, but the different POV's. Michael tries to improve
> > things, make things better. Rich stays with the common 'it is like it is
>
> > and it is good'. An example to the big view:
> https://web.archive.org/web/20080331092730/http://www.linux.com/articles/601
> 24
> > Even if I tend to Michael's side, I don't say Rich is wrong. To me the
> > truth is in the middle, always.

Personally, for me all those open bugs seem like a symptom of bad bug hygiene.
Maybe it's not really, and those are just bugs that were left behind in
turbulence, so-to-say (e.g., devs retiring, packages becoming obsolete,
whatever), but personally, I care about closing bugs that are done with or
can't be acted upon.  Perhaps its a matter of workflow, because I treat bugs
as a sort of TODO list, but that's my take on it.  I honestly think it would
be best to close bugs that are just not applicable anymore, e.g., for ebuilds
or versions of packages that have not been in the tree for a looong time,
like, say, HAL: https://bugs.gentoo.org/401257.

But like I say below: that's *work*, even closing bugs that are 10 years old
might clean up stuff that's more of a task than an actual bug (i.e., something
somebody wants to work on at some point), so you'd have to go over them, at
least superficially.  Also: Rich does have a point in the bugs being open not
necessarily mattering much in practice.  But for me, I *do* occasionally look
at all bugs assigned to or authored by me in case I forgot about something,
and having ancient open bugs would be infuriating to me, so I wonder what
workflow projects like "freedesktop" have that it's not a problem for them (or
maybe it's a defunct project and nobody is even looking).

> Well, ok, a view from the very distant other side. Don't take anything I
> say as anything other than my opinion which at this point is woefully out
> of date about Gentoo I'm sure.
>
> 1) I started running Gentoo mid-2001, or possibly 2002. I had been running
> Redhat, a friend who was a real sys admin type vs me, nothin' but a 'user',
> said it was great and I should check it out. It wasn't overly difficult to
> get started but I certainly had my issues, like one time removing my C
> compiler. Real newbie stuff. However once I got my first machine up and
> running I was really happy with both the machine and most of all this
> community which is second to none. In those days getting my first machine
> really buttoned down was like a 2-3 week event.
>
> 2) For many years my machines ran really well and admin wasn't a big deal.
> Yes, hours upon hours upon hours of building programs - the Gentoo way -
> but they usually built. I was always a 'mostly stable' guy, only adding
> ~arch when I had to. There wasn't a lot of that, at least in the beginning.
> I remember this being how I ran until about 2016. There were some difficult
> months, but devs got things fixed pretty fast and I could, for the most
> part depend that if I had to install an ~arch package that within a month I
> could probably get back to stable.

Ah, I still run my machines that way: packages where I want new versions
because of a bug fix or feature that's important to me will get unmasked, and
I'll try to keep track of if/when they go stable.  However...

> 3) From my perspective this lasted until 2015/16/17-ish. However somewhere
> in there I consistently found two things:
>    1) Getting an arch package back to stable in a timely manner pretty much
> didn't work anymore. I suspect this is really the other thread here about
> long term bugs not getting fixed. Why? I don't know. I suspected devs were
> leaving the distro, but I had no info.
>    2) This is just my opinion but I came to think there was no real
> __interest__ from the devs still here in purely stable anymore. I remember
> trying to set up  a Virtualbox VM running Gentoo and it almost didn't work.
> I had to add so many use flags. At that point it just wasn't fun anymore.
> Throw in that I had 3 machines to deal with at home and it was too much for
> user type who wasn't having fun.

... I totally see this, too.  When I started with Gentoo (2007ish) I based my
install on Sabayon, but quickly reverted to vanilla Gentoo for simplicity's
sake.  The Sabayon install set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64", but I was able to
change that to "amd64", downgrade various packages, and unmask whatever had to
stay at ~arch (e.g., glibc) and wait until it upgraded to stable.  That took
about 2-3 months, as I recall.  The vast majority was done within 1-2 months.
Today I've been living with most of my current unmask entries for months or
years.  Although, half of those are in overlays or games (which are "banned"
from stable), but the other half are packages with either really old stable
version or none at all (they upgrade, but then older versions are removed
instead of being stabilized).

However, two points here:

1.) Lots of important software *does* receive regular stable upgrades (e.g.,
KDE, all core system packages such as gentoo-sources and glibc, Gnome).
AFAICT, for me it's pretty much only "niche" software that doesn't get stable
versions.

2.) I understand that there just isn't enough man power to go around, so I
don't see any point in complaining and just try to manage as best I can.  If
Gentoo manages to recover from its lack of manpower (and I hope it does), I
expect that the set of packages receiving stabilizations will grow again.

> 4) I tried out a few other distros and pretty quickly focused in on
> Kubuntu. I've been running it for a couple of years now. Frankly, I can
> hardly tell the difference from Gentoo when I'm just using the machine.
> It's fast, it's KDE, it's all I need. I don't know much more than a couple
> of apt commands to install packages. No update in the 2-3 years I've been
> using Kubuntu hasn't booted. I don't have any trouble installing the
> packages I need that in the Gentoo world would have caused me ~arch
> problems. (Mixbus32C, makemkv, handbrake and other pro-audio type packages)
> Updates to my machines are on the order of LITERALLY minutes per week, and
> distribution upgrades, once a year-ish, are on the order of an hour. The
> machines all seem fast. It's simple.

My laptop has openSUSE Tumbleweed, because, well, I want a rolling release
distro and for some reason didn't want to try Arch Linux (although I probably
will at some point).  Oh, and I just felt like trying something different,
hence why I didn't stick with Gentoo [0] (my desktop and two home servers
remain on Gentoo, though).  Although, now that I think about it, openSUSE has
one leg up against Arch: it's the only mainstream distro that supports BTRFS,
my main file system of choice (SUSE even employs several of its developers).

> I love this list and the people on it. For the most part everyone here has
> been really great to me over the years and there's no place I'd rather go
> looking for technical answers. Stack Overflow does tend to be the Ubuntu
> way these days so lots of little things I need to know I find there. I
> suspect many Gentoo-ers do also.
>
> Anyway, it's just an opinion of one guy not representing what state the
> distribution is in today.

FWIW, I'm not so sure about the community *overall*, especially when it comes
to the typical inflammatory topics (e.g., systemd, pulseaudio); that is, when
things heat up, they can get *really* hot.  Though perhaps its just a few bad
experiences that manage to color my overall perception, or I'm just seeing
things overly negative right now, because there are certainly also plenty of
good people here, and I'm with you in that I prefer to ask technical questions
(even not directly relating to Gentoo) in this community as well (although my
first step is always to research things myself, meaning I almost never have to
ask for help here in the first place).

> Mark

[0] A VM doesn't cut it for me in this case, I feel one needs to use a system
in everyday practice to really get a feel for it.  I already get that for
Ubuntu at work and University, and can confidently say it's not for me.

Greetings
--
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup