Rich Freeman <rich0 <at> gentoo.org> writes: > Just be practical. From my experience showing up at a LUG and telling 20 > people how something worked well for you gets you a lot further than > handing out free T-shirts and hats at a booth.
Rich, I'll be practical. Gentoo needs an installer program, like most other distros if you want your rank_n_file users to entice new users. I just installed the default opensuse 13.2: BTRFS right out the shoot including the boot partition. Very slick, some would even say 'sexy'. Second, you need something to attract a few local sponsors to have a viable LUG, imho. Something they cannot get elsewhere from other distros. I know, how about a compiled (optimized) cluster including a custom Kernel (been working on that one as you know). It'd be really fantastic if the new installer support something new, something cool (some would say 'sexy' like btrfs in a raid 1 config, right out the box no mdadm/lvm? That'd turn a few heads. Also I can then easily install cephfs so WE would have a cluster technology, completely from sources that avoids HDFS (a really good idea). Now you've got corporations interested in GENTOO. Why they'd even start hiring gentoo expertise and sponsoring gentoo-centric projects...... I see one of our devs just updated openstack:: [1]. What I did not see is the corresponding (probably more important) optimized kernel config and the kernel/system profiling wiki on how to tune servers for clusters. RHEL has these, if you munge through reams of pages. We now have heaptrack [2] and trace-cmd [3] which includes the analysis gui kernelshark [4]. So Gentoo is almost positioned to be quite sexy again (in the business world that means folks are attracted to you and want to include you in there strategic plans. YOU or the other leaders want lots of new members? OK, then fix that pathetic installer (break from the handbook) and give us something 'SEXY'! A new installer that paces with the handbook, is a fools errand. But if folks feel the need for that:: OK But that's not the kind of installer that I'm talking about. I'm talking about an installer, so I can mostly tell jokes, walk around a room or a trade show floor and entertain folks, then spin around to the just completed automated install and WOW look what we have here....Then I'll start a LUG in Tampabay (>3 million folks) where all the LUG are DEAD; because linux is not sexy, unless you consider running *buntu as sexy. My auto-mechanic runs buntu and does not need a LUG to run buntu. Embedded twist:: How about the new installer working on a rasp. pi or some common arm board, right out the shoot so folks can play with a mini_project (also very sexy). You want to 'attract' new blood? Me too. Give me the tools so I can be successful! I use to be a 'monster' sales hack at trade shows:: but only when I had something sexy to sell. So get me something SEXY to sell to new gentoo recruits? So what do you say? Do you really want to put Gentoo atop the distro-watch lists; again? (clustering and embedded are sexy;imho::ymmv). hth, James [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Openstack [2] http://milianw.de/blog/heaptrack-a-heap-memory-profiler-for-linux [3] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/rostedt/trace-cmd.git [4] http://people.redhat.com/srostedt/kernelshark/HTML/
