> There have been some really interesting points brought up recently > about "where is Gentoo going?"
It feels like this topic comes up every year :) > I have been wondering that myself. > Some people seem to think that Gentoo has the potential to be an > enterprise player. Maybe, maybe not ... but I don't see why we couldn't do a little bit more to make it easier for others to use us as a base. Isn't that what *we're* about - being a metadistribution? > I think that attempting to take Gentoo in the "enterprise" direction > is a mistake. I think that we are a hobbyist distribution. This > doesn't mean that we should not strive to meet some of the enterprise > goals. Those things can be important to hobbyists too. But I don't > think we should be aiming for corporate America. We have groups focusing in other directions. If there's a group of people who want to make Gentoo enterprise-friendly, why not let them do so? > I don't even understand why that goal appeals to people. An enterprise-friendly Gentoo appeals to me personally because I find those problems interesting. They're problems that I enjoy learning about, and trying to solve. I have enterprise experience both technical and managerial, and I find the whole domain fascinating. > Let other distros go there! If you mean let other distros go to the place with suits and support contracts and backporting, I agree. I want to see an enterprise-friendly Gentoo, but I want to see the corporate risks and costs taken on by third-parties outside the project. > I want Gentoo to run in people's homes, in student > dorm rooms, etc. Well, yes, to a point, but (without intending to offend anyone) you can learn a lot more by learning to setup a web server cluster than you can running a web server in your bedroom. F.ex, in the bedroom, /home/httpd seems as good a place as any to put your website. It's only when you learn how to build larger systems that you can understand the merits of moving to /var/www/<FQDN> or better still the /srv tree. Part of my motivation is educational. I believe that Gentoo can play an important educational role in people's lives. I want a Gentoo distribution that can grow with a user's experience and needs, not one that the ultimately have to move away from because someone decided for those of us who are interested that we're not going there. And I think Gentoo can play an equally important educational role in developers' lives too. > Places where people want a fun distribution that > they can tailor and work on easily. Amen. I never want us to lose any of those points. > I'd like Gentoo to be a place where neat things are developed. Aren't we really a place where neat things are packaged up? > Also I find it amusing when people say that Gentoo exists for the > users. I think that is wrong. Gentoo exists for the *developers*. > It's our playground, and it's the reason we use a live tree rather > than switching to an actually sane approach. The users are cool > because they point out bugs, help solve problems on bugzilla, suggest > enhancements, provide patches, and notify us of package updates. > Sometimes they become developers. But the truth is that Gentoo sees > improvement and maintenance in the areas that appeal to the > developers. And that is why Gentoo exists for the developers first, > the users second. I agree that it's our developers who drive Gentoo, and not really our users - simply because it's the developers who volunteer their time to work on the things that interest them. But I'm personally not comfortable with "it's our playground" being the accepted approach to *everything*. I've been away from Gentoo for awhile, and on coming back, I've been shocked and disgusted with what seems to pass as acceptable treatment of users these days. I think Gentoo needs a little more "it's about the users" than we have right now just to keep us from collectively going off the rails. Best regards, Stu -- Stuart Herbert [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Developer http://www.gentoo.org/ http://stu.gnqs.org/diary/ GnuGP key id# F9AFC57C available from http://pgp.mit.edu Key fingerprint = 31FB 50D4 1F88 E227 F319 C549 0C2F 80BA F9AF C57C --
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