On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 8:09 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yea, -dev gets lively when someone steps on the toes of another dev but isn't > that true about anywhere? Gentoo is somewhat of a niche distro.
I've commented on this elsewhere, but I think these two are related. With more mainstream binary distros a lot of differences of opinion result in forks. Gentoo is really the only significant source-based distro out there, and we're basically minimally viable as it is, so there isn't much room for forking. As a result we're just forced to work these sorts of issues out and come up with ways to coexist. Look at how many binary distros there are that are nearly identical except for their default desktop environment, or what they use for PID1, or some details around their QA/stabilization policy. A distro like debian is big enough that if a bunch of people get ticked off with a decision you can fork it into two distros and they're each 3x as large as we are. Do that 47 times and we end up with the situation we have in the linux world today. Certainly Gentoo hasn't be completely without forks, but very few have persisted, because we tend to try to let our users have it their way. So, if one user wants systemd-everything and another user wants to stick *systemd* in their INSTALL_MASK they don't have to have two different sets of devs independently maintaining every single other package to accomodate that preference. Sure, not every option is equally well-supported, but that usually comes down to interest/manpower and rarely reflects some kind of top-down policy decision to forbid something. -- Rich
