On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 8:56 AM, James <wirel...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote: > 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.
Somehow we got you to use it. :) If somebody wants a distro like most other distros, they should just use one of those other distros. I don't get paid by the Gentoo install. I want people to use Gentoo because it is the right solution for them, not because it makes me look more important. But, as has been pointed out there is already an installer project, and anybody is welcome to create as many different installers for Gentoo as they like. > 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 attend a LUG monthly and the only sponsorship it gets is the building space it meets in - and it doesn't have trouble finding them. And LUG stands for "Linux User Group" not "Gentoo User Group." I wasn't suggesting that we should be going out and creating LUGs (though if an area lacks one that would probably be a good idea), but rather just talking about Gentoo at whatever LUG you would otherwise attend. I talk about Gentoo all the time. I'll probably be co-presenting with an Arch developer at a future one, and a few attendees have used Gentoo. Most have favorable impressions of Gentoo, though many don't really think it is for them, and that is fine. I'm certain to point out that the Chromebooks in the room are based on Gentoo, and I've seen presenters at the LUG point out the same even when they don't use Gentoo themselves. That's the difference between education and propaganda - people who work in such circles tend to recognize the value of the former. At local conferences RedHat can hand out bottle opener USB sticks and people smile and appreciate them, but it isn't like they go wipe their systems and install Fedora on them when they leave. And plenty in the group do use RHEL/CentOS/Fedora - and appreciate when it is and isn't the right tool for the job. > 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. Well, go write one. :) It doesn't make sense for us to tell the guy updating openstack that he isn't allowed to do it unless he also updates the wiki and provides configurations for tuning clusters. It also doesn't make sense to forbid somebody from authoring an article on tuning clusters unless they commit to update it the day any openstack update is done. So, people are free to work on some things and not others, and if you want to see the other things happen you need to step up and offer to do it. > > YOU or the other leaders want lots of new members? If you're waiting for somebody else to make Gentoo into what you want it to be, you may be waiting for a long time. Gentoo is what it is because of people who stepped up and contributed, and did more than post on lists. By all means offer suggestions, but taking an aggressive tone with those who are contributing is one of the reasons that few of the developers actually read this list, which is a pretty sorry state of affairs. However, people who contribute aren't obligated to read your complaints, and I'm certainly not going to be the one to change that. Gentoo is what YOU make of it. That's how it got to where it is today. That's what makes it so great. It isn't shaped by some corporate vision. There isn't some guy with lots of money in the BDFL role. If nobody in the community wants a feature there is no paid developer team who is going to ram it down your throats anyway. The things that make Gentoo what it is are there because somebody in the community cared to create them, and maintain them. The role of the leadership is to foster that environment. It is to create an organization where contributions are welcome. It is to create an atmosphere where the value of contributions is recognized even if we don't personally find them useful. It is to create a place where with different priorities and preferences can still collaborate without creating undue burden on anybody to support something they don't care for. And that is why if you create an installer, or a website promoting easy ways to do things with Gentoo using an installer, I'll be happy to be the first to thank you for it. Personally I'd rather see you work on an easy-to-follow guide for setting up and managing Gentoo systemd nspawn containers using Ansible, but who am I to tell you what you ought to be spending your volunteer time working on? That's basically the Gentoo way. Write code, not drama. But, if you'd rather do other things for Gentoo than write code then do that, not drama. :) > > 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). > Heh, if Gentoo cared about distrowatch we'd probably stick Gentoo somewhere in our user agent strings for all our browsers. I look at it maybe once a year at most, and when I do it doesn't count as a Gentoo visitor. Most of the browser maintainers don't do that for the same reason that we don't go changing default search engines or spamming referrer IDs into all your GET/POSTs. Distrowatch rankings just tell you what user agent strings are sent to them when people visit the site. That is about as useful a metric as asking who is paying the domain parking services to advertise their webserver. -- Rich
