Gentoo fork???!

ebrostig · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 8:53 pm Post subject:

IWBCMAN: I feel that you have summed up the issue pretty well.

It seems to be related to money and money will always create these types of issues. Zach and bevein wants to make Gentoo into a profit center and use the work already done by the Gentoo developers in order to do in addition to changes they make in order for Gentoo run on embedded devices among other things. This is fine and best of luck to them, but I can't see why it is important to start dissecting the whole development process of Gentoo.

The developers are difficult??? Geezzz.. How many of you read the Linux Kernel Development mailinglist on a daily basis? If you do, you will realize that Linux himself is not exactly the easiest person to deal with. Does that make him unsuitable for the postition he has? Nope. He *is* Mr. Linux, no more needs to be said. When it comes to Gentoo, I feel the D. Robbins *is* Mr. Gentoo. It's his baby, and it is his relentless efforts that has brought gentoo where it is today. Is Gentoo perfect? Of course not, far from it. Is it a great distro? You bet it is!

Starting to attack all of our developers and claiming they have a bad attitude is not going to bring Gentoo anywhere. Granted, you will find people among our developers who have less than desirable social skill, but does that make them less of a good developer? Nope, their job is to develop, not deal with all the characters on these boards. That is my and my mod and admin collegues job. I personally would prefer to see the developers here in the forums as little as possible, that (I would hope) means they work on developing rather than shooting the breeze here

karl11, lin_matt and others ahve done a good job putting together ebuilds for Gnome 2.3.3 which is highly development releases and not sutiable for inclusion into even the unstable Portage tree. If they feel hurt because of this and end up in a verbal fight with foser, the maintainer and developer of Gnome ebuilds, so be it. It is not symptomatic for gentoo development and is a pure add-on for those who can not wait until a pre-release of the next version of Gnome or to the actual release. Fine, that is what PORTDIR_OVERLAY is meant to handle. I personally find the solution with breakmygentoo.org and user contributed ebuilds to work fine. This way people who don't mind spending hours upon hours of time trying to get this stuff compiled and hunting down bugs, can get to the goodies and have fun. But don't expect this to be included in even the unstable Portage tree.

Erik
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avenj · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 8:57 pm Post subject:

hanta · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 9:01 pm Post subject:

charlieg · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 9:26 pm Post subject:

pygoscelis · Guru Joined: 07 Jun 2003 Posts: 402

davisjs · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 9:40 pm Post subject:

I have looked upon this entire thread with great interest. The developers who left either had in Welch's case business motives that he assumed that drobbins understood...apparently he did not. The other developer example, seemed to take the "I am going to take my toys and go homr " approach.

Speaking of the overall situation, all this is is management growing pains played out in the open to some degree. From personal observation, starting and growing a business is quite difficult and involves a lot of personalities. In addition, and I admit I do not know the developers so I could be wrong, but I would be willing to say most of the head developers did not graduate from college with a degree in business administraton nor have a lot of prior management experience. With gentoo growing like it is, these are just growing pains that every business goes through. Personalities clash, people get pissed and leave..some are even selfish and have their own monetary interest. Regardless of it all, gentoo will still continue to grow, will continue to flourish, and will continue to have one of the greatest communities in the history of Unix. I say chalk up the rest of this to growing pains, and I would suggest that egos be laid aside for the good of the company so to speak.

Just my two cents....

mmealman · Guru Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 348 Location: Florida

Yeah, I never really understood the want/need to port Portage to C++. C++ isn't going to download the tarballs any faster or make gcc compile more quickly.

I suppose Portage in C might be less breakable, ie if Python goes down your packaging system wouldn't. But I'll take that risk for Python's readability/hackability/less bugs/ease of use any day of the week.

avenj · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 9:43 pm Post subject:

djk29a · n00b Joined: 30 Mar 2003 Posts: 11

I consider Gentoo and its technologies as more of a set of ideas rather than a distribution. As someone interested in embedded systems development, I'm inclined to support anyone who wishes to develop in the field. But that's just a sidenote.

If he claims to have invested a lot in Gentoo, then he's taking a gamble by forking off Gentoo and continuing his efforts. If he was just a mud-slinger, he'd probably just stomp off with some angry words. This developer has inspiration and some ideas, and I welcome any such person to try their hand at a distro (yes, there's a lot now, but diversity shouldn't hurt much especially since Gentoo's userbase is quite large now). A good distro will do well in its target audience and a poor one will just flop - simple as that.

Forget the politics for now - we have a new distro in the works. Cheer up folks.

lurid · Guru Joined: 12 Mar 2003 Posts: 595 Location: Florida

cult hero · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 10:36 pm Post subject:

The thing that gets to me the most in all of this... am I the only one that things that someone who starts/founds/gets something off the ground as the head of it all gets a couple privilages of rank? Daniel Robbins got the ball rolling. What's it they say in History of the World? "It's good to be the king."

I don't care IF he runs things like a dictator because, as Zach has shown in the world of GPL anyone can give any draconion dictator the finger and take the code they invested in (or didn't invest in) and take it in the direction they like. Competition will either weed out a loser or, in the case of something like KDE and Gnome, give us a few extra choices and more than one very nice project to play with and use.

So even if a few people got pissed off at Daniel Robbins for this and that, big deal. Let'm do their own thing. I'm happy for them. However... the nature of the beast is this, if he's as bad as some of these guys make him out to be then MOST of the team would be leaving, not a few egomaniacs and Gentoo would fall apart. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Gentoo is still running and running nicely. When it stops... the users and the developers will jump ship. End of line.

I've found this amusing, especially to see how a lot of ill informed individuals who really don't know anything about this are all over the place trashing Gentoo and Daniel Robbins. They don't seem to get it that the market takes care of itself. And lemme say something else... Gentoo has bread A LOT of jealousy out there. A whole lot. All you gotta do is check Slashdot any time they mention Gentoo.

And don't mind me, I'm in a surly mood and just had to beat down a bunch of self righteous "Debian is the ONLY distro" asshats.
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scott_ell · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 1:30 am Post subject:

I think the interesting situation with Gentoo is that many of the users are developers themselves. So what I find completely unacceptable is for the Gentoo developers to "pull rank" on the users. That is, to 1) keep users out of the decision making process, 2) ignore user input, or 3) treat users in a condescending fashion.

I feel like the distinction between user and developer is narrower in the Gentoo community than most anywhere else. Anyone who has installed Gentoo as of now is on there way to and should be given some respect.

What this situation has shown me is that there are almost no barriers to competition with this distribution. Someone can set up a website with phpBB and bugzilla, start an rsync and source server, grab a current snapshot of the Gentoo OS, and start a fork. That means that the only difference between Gentoo and Zynot is the support of its user community.
Community is the important word. Without the community there is no Gentoo (in my opinion).

That being said, I don't see very much wrong in Gentoo, except maybe a few bad decisions made by inexperienced management. I am happy to hear avenj say that the core Gentoo organization will become nonprofit (Good Idea!). Keep the core open and transparent and make your business in the peripherals (i.e. Gentoo Games).

scott_ell · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 1:30 am Post subject:

dupe #1. moderator please delete.

scott_ell · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 1:31 am Post subject:

dupe #2. moderator please delete.

scott_ell · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 1:31 am Post subject:

dupe #3. moderator please delete.

tecknojunky · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 1:54 am Post subject:

Roy · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2002 Posts: 55 Location: Australia

I personally do not think forks are that good. They divide communities, resources, and dilute branding (which is so important to a successful product). However, sometimes there just is no other choice.

I believe a fork only ever occurs when there is something very wrong in the way a project is managed. If this was just one disgruntled developer then he could go off, announce a fork, but why would any other developers change to the new fork?

I do not think this fork has occured because Gentoo is run like a dictatorship. If you look at the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds IS the man in charge. Nothing gets put into the kernel without his say, and yet I never hear about any major forks of the kernel. The reason being that Linus is very good at politics. He can manage people well, and must be willing to make compromises. I remember reading an article that had Linus saying he didn't believe a preemptive kernel was necessary, and yet now 2.5.x has preemption as part of the main tree. Maybe Daniel doesn't have those skills.

It all comes down to attitude I think. I have read the article from Zach Welch
, and I have read the response from Daniel Robbins. I have to say Zach comes across as the more mature person here. He clearly stated his reasons for what he is doing, and while it may be tainted by his own feelings he fairly honest about everything. Unfortunatly I thought Daniel's response was fairly immature and childish. I read it and immediatly thought of a 6 year old kid having an argument with someone and having no other comback than to scream "YEAH? Well ... You're A LIAR!" I would really like to hear both sides of the story, and I think it's important that it happens as this is probably one of the worst things that can happen to any project.
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avenj · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 5:57 am Post subject:

Roy · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2002 Posts: 55 Location: Australia

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

Rewriting portage in C++ won't really make it much faster; however - splitting into a ebuild server and client will. The server (say, ebuildd) caches all the ebuilds in memory, and can do the chores of handling dependencies and syncing the tree; the client (portage) merely asks "What is the status of <package> and dependencies?" and proceeds to do as they please with that information - compile, package, print. Of course, this may make ebuild debugging a little harder since you'll have to force a refresh of the cached ebuild after editing.

The smaller the project, the better the chances of fork survival. Gentoo is a huge project. A fork will not work well - it is a very complex system that needs to be fully understood. Similiarly for the XFree86 fork, but at least there is solid documentation about X11 protocols and APIs.

avenj · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 6:49 am Post subject:

Woland · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 7:13 am Post subject:

I just feel I need to out in my $0.02 in because I am so well respected here in these here fora, and I know many of you just would not get a decent night's sleep if I did not fully expound my half-baked opinions.

I am sorry that Robbins made anyone cry. Bad, bad Robbins.

Of course the lachrymose individual in question made himself sound like a grade A whiner. "I put in sweat equity, I am not just a volunteer." :cry:

Phttht!

When I hack together my crappy e-builds, I sweat plenty, (don't belive me? Do you really want proof?) and without feeling entitled. Oh, yes, I also did contribute financially, and my only regret is that I did not specify distinctly that the mony I give must go for beer. And not mass produced swill water masquerading as beer at that.

Now, belive you me, I am not shocked that more than one person thought that one or more of the developers was a bastard. I always kind of figgured they were---after all they live in places like California. But hell, they put out some damn good work so maybe they can be a bit arrogant. I must say that I feel that I have a far better shot at getting my voice heard by my distro in Gentoo than I ever had when I was using Redhat. Debian too, for that matter. But some random hurling of insults is probaly good for the devels. Keeps them humble. Lets them know that we appreciate their work.

As to what language Portage should be written in, there is only one logical choice---Lisp. My own fork will come when I get a lot of free time, I will re-implement the entire distro in Lisp---from the install to qpkg. Maybe I will add a Lisp kernel as well. Then you better beleive I'll get arrogant.

In closing, I would just like to add that I spent my first significant length of time on IRC in nine years on #gentoo last night trying to penetrate to "sectret kabal" that runs the distro from there. One of the "fearless leaders" mentioned in the "whine-o-gram" was even there.

Seemant told me to go away, but did not kick me off. Which was nice enough considering the nuisance I was making of myself, and the fact that after nine years of avoiding IRC I kept forgetting to type / before commands.

Sargon · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 23 Jan 2003 Posts: 90