Markos Chandras wrote:
I am sure that you know them. But those problems are the reasons why more and more developers are demotivated and leaving Gentoo. 'Fixing' those problems should be a N1 priority on every gentoo council meeting until they are gone. There is absolutely no point in trying to introduce new features and stuff when we are so understaffed. First we need to bring more people on Gentoo and keep the current manpower motivated. When we are done with that, we can focus on features :\
While I see where you are coming from, I can't agree with the approach of halting all forward movement until all current issues are resolved. The problem is that we're a volunteer-driven organization, so we can't simply tell people "close STABLEREQ bugs first, work on fun stuff later". We can certainly encourage people to do this, but there will ALWAYS be more maintenance items and I think we'll do better to keep Gentoo exciting and dynamic and try to attract more help, and then there will be more bodies around to take care of the grind of bugs.
Essentially features are what keeps a significant portion of the current manpower motivated.
Now, there are lots of people around who actually like doing maintenance and caring for specific packages, and we should certainly try to find more people like this. However, those who would rather be implementing new EAPIs in Portage/Paludis/Pkgcore/whatever won't necessarily work on arch bugs just because there is a need for this.
I think the best we can do is try to highlight the issues so that those who are interested are aware of them and can sign up to help.
I'd also love to see the council and trustees actively looking for solutions to these problems, but it can't be the only issue on the agenda.
I've never been big on the whole "Gentoo is dying" meme. All people and organizations are dying - we're all born dying. Death is just the natural state of the universe in the absence of life. Even if Gentoo were perfect and full of activity we would have people leaving for various reasons - the key is to have people coming in to replace and even surpass those who leave. Gentoo has a LOT to offer the linux community - and if anything I'd say the level of innovation in Gentoo (and related projects) has been trending upwards in recent months.
