Lance Albertson wrote: [Mon Jan 02 2006, 12:14:05PM CST] > Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now. > Looking back at the last two years, what are the major > changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has > been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder > about any ground breaking enhancements.
Assuming that we can ever get GLEP 42 out the door, I think that will constitute ground-breaking. There has actually been a considerable amount of progress on the Portage front, as well, although not all of the new stuff is out yet. Similarly, the slowly-rolling website redesign is truly on the verge of being released. We also have had excellent modular X11 support for some time now, and it appears that gcc-4.x support is doing quite well, too. Oh, and we've also retired an amazing number of no-longer-active devs, so I don't know if it's actually true that we've added numbers. > I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating > lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we > could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're > at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I > think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be > better than distroA or distroB. Okay, so you're not happy with Gentoo's direction, but what are you actively doing to change it? (Other than starting this discussion, that is?) I don't mean that question as an attack, although it may well appear that way. It's also not directed at you, since others have made similar comments. Instead, I'm suggesting that the reason that Gentoo lacks a leadership position right now is that, at least where Gentoo is concerned, effective leadership generally means an individual who is putting in a _lot_ of hard work writing code and implementing changes. That's one of the reasons that drobbins could be effective--he had the time to extend portage, work on the website to fit his vision, and make sweeping changes to the tree. In that respect, I would argue that Gentoo's most leader-like person right now is vapier, because he's a dev who actively enacts wide-ranging changes. Similarly, flameeyes, ciaranm, and the portage team all deserve credit for having a significant impact on where Gentoo has been going recently. (Yes, I also realize that people may not agree with some of what those devs have been doing, but they have been out there getting their hands dirty, and it makes a huge difference.) *Shrug* My feeling is that Gentoo is not advancing all that quickly right now, but that it's being maintained fairly well. More importantly, we still ensure that people _can_ make sweeping changes, if they want to put in the work to do so. I'm actually fairly confident about Gentoo having a decent future. -g2boojum- -- Grant Goodyear Gentoo Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76
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