Re: Gentoo: "I'm not dead yet!"

On Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:40:05 +0000
[email protected] wrote:

> I just read this article(found below), citing the recent changes to
> the Gentoo, as well as some of the challenges it will have to
> overcome in order to compete with the likes Fedora and Ubuntu. I know
> some Gentoo users are on here, so, what do you guys think? Does
> Gentoo have a long way to go, mending it's leg...or will it drag
> until it bleeds to death?
> 
> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7570/2/

I think the high point of Gentoo was back when they had several core
developers of upstream projects on it. Gentoo was the first
distribution with reiserfs, somewhat with reiser4, and the Gentopia
project was a sizable part of the Utopia project responsible for
replacing automount with udev/hal/dbus (founder of udev is still a
Gentoo dev while working for novell). Most big releases for KDE/Gnome
had building scripts the same day or so, provided you told the package
manager you are sure about building it (and you could be guaranteed the
forums had guides for it). Core things like sane build systems and safe
optimizations helped Gentoo users, and so much of Gentoo's help to
upstream projects were very low-level.

http://blog.flameeyes.eu is one developer with a fight against redundant
.la files (they can mess up some toolchain stuff and cause more
interdependencies then necessary for ELF files), restructuring of PAM
in gentoo and has a collection of writings about the internals of
linking in a GNU-userland. 

It shouldn't be underestimated how bad the infighting is. The
maintainer of love-sources, a customized set of patches to the latest
and greatest kernel that was too bleeding edge for gentoo itself,
eventually switched to win2k. And several really important people have
resigned over the years because of everything. It gets brought up
occasionally, but the separation of official gentoo work into separate
overlays (the equivalent of repos) has really taken some of the magic
out of it.

Still, how many other distros don't need ugly hacks to change your init
system, kernel, partitioning scheme, CHOST, or let you use a system out
of the box (well, after some compiling) completely without any program
you'd like. I'm sure there is still a strong reason for people to use
Gentoo, it is just sad that momentum seems to have been taken in
different directions. I just hope the low-level stuff doesn't slow
down too much with people switched to Ubuntu. :(

-- 
Joseph Booker

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