On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:30:37 +0100 Alexandre Buisse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I quite agree with the Patriot act comparison, and I would be > interested to know what you think our real problems are.
Not a complete list, but probably a good starting point: * Portage. Gentoo hasn't delivered anything useful or cool for two years or so. Things like layman are merely workarounds for severe Portage limitations (not a criticism of layman). Delivery to end users is based around what's possible with Portage, not what people want or need. In the mean time, managing a Gentoo system has become much more complicated due to the increased number of packages on a typical system and the increased requirements for the average user. Combined with serious improvements in the competition, Gentoo's benefits are rapidly diminishing. Until there's a general admission that Portage is severely holding Gentoo back, anything delivered by Gentoo will be far below what could really be done. It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a big deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is indicative of how low people's expectations really are. I don't claim to know everything that users want from the package manager. I know that everything in [1] has been described by at least one user as a major advantage for not using Portage. Unfortunately, most of these aren't things that can be delivered easily with the current codebase. (Incidentally, since someone will probably try this argument: I held these beliefs long before I started work on a Portage alternative.) * Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code than a mere package manager. * Low QA expectations. Gentoo's QA isn't any worse than it was two years ago. However, expectations are much higher due to improvements in other distributions, and the increase in tree complexity makes mistakes much more severe. Mistakes can be classified as those that can be detected automatically (things are improving in this area -- for one example, adjutrix is being used to detect forced downgrades), and those that can't. Reducing the latter involves education and ensuring that developers are aware of expectations -- developers shouldn't be relying upon the QA team to do QA. Unfortunately, some developers simply won't fix QA mistakes. When something like this happens: 11:16:24 <@genstef> hansmi: bah fix your qa stuff yourself if you think I am wrong. I wont do something I dont agree with something has to be done to prevent the developer in question from continuing to hurt the users. * The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge amounts of influence. * The repeated abuse of silly phrases like "Gentoo is about choice", "Gentoo is about the community" and "Gentoo should be about fun" to attempt to rationalise insane policy decisions. Choice, community and fun are all very well, but without a quality distribution they're worthless. The primary goal should be a good distribution, with the rest as things that come about as a result. * Finally, of course, the widespread refusal to accept what the real problems are, when it's much easier to blame everything upon a few people or groups. It might be nice and easy to think that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and is secretly harbouring Bin Laden, particularly when a few disreputable news channels are going around saying it's true, but we all know how acting upon such delusions works out... [1]: http://ciaranm.org/show_post/95 -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail : ciaranm at ciaranm.org Web : http://ciaranm.org/ Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/
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