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

[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/60124
>
> Even if I tend to Michael's side, I don't say Rich is wrong. To me the
> truth is in the middle, always.

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say as anything other than my opinion which at this point is woefully out
of date about Gentoo I'm sure.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.

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.

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.

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.

Mark