Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

[Andrey Gerasimenko]

On Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:27:20 +0300, Hemmann, Volker Armin  
<volker.armin.hemmann@××××××××××××.de> wrote:

> On Monday 18 December 2006 15:47, Grant wrote:
>> I've caught a whiff or two lately that Gentoo is declining in
>> popularity amongst users and developers.  Is it all in my head?  I
>> personally still love Gentoo.
>
> there are always several phases in the life of a distri.
>
> Beginning, when it becomes 'cool' and a sudden surge in users, some time
> of
> high popularity, a decline, and at the end, only the users who are
> really 'the right ones' for that kind of distri are left.
>

Not only 'the right ones'. There will always be some number of users who  
are evaluating the distro.

> So the 'always using the cool thing' users are gone and the 'we are
> using what
> the cool guys were using' crowd is leaving now. So what? Are they
> important?
> No. At some point ubuntu will suffer the same. And then the next cool
> distro
> de jour.
>
> Some decline in user interest is normal - and a healthy process. Because
> it
> removes the 'I use it because it is cool' and 'I use it because everybody
> else uses it' type of users.

Where can I get data on the number of Gentoo users and how it changes with  
time? Are the sync servers reporting the number of portage trees? Are the  
numbers of subscribers to Gentoo mailing lists available? Can the number  
of Gentoo developers and the number of developers per package be made  
known (there is a report somewhere in the thread that the number of  
developers increased from 60 to 300 in 3 days, but a finer time scale is  
of interest)?

As far as I understand, software developers normally provide tarballs and  
distro developers create packages. Do some developers provide packages  
themselves? If yes, what distros do they choose and how often do they  
choose Gentoo? It may be interesting to compare these numbers with the  
number of users.



-- 
Andrei Gerasimenko
-- 
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