Some are Boojums--

purpose: Grant's less-than-daily weblog.

Fri, 01 Feb 2008

Thought for the day

In drobbins' post today, http://blog.funtoo.org/2008/02/refocus.html, he offers the following advice:

If a project doesn't meet your needs, I encourage you to create your own project. If you do, I recommend keeping the development team small, tight-knit and independent. I think this will maximize your productivity as well as your overall enjoyment of collaborative and open development.

Is that the future for Gentoo? It's already happening to some extent. The next generation of the (in)famous Gentoo init system is now an independent project (http://roy.marples.name/openrc). Paludis (http://paludis.pioto.org/) and pkgcore (http://www.pkgcore.org/trac/pkgcore) are independent package managers designed to work with Gentoo's portage tree. Drobbins independently releases x86 and amd64 stage tarballs (http://www.funtoo.org/linux/). Anybody who wants to can create their own overlay repository such as those at http://overlays.gentoo.org/.

Internally, though, Gentoo works pretty much the same way. Take a look at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/index.xml?showlevel=3 sometime. Most Gentoo developers spend their time toiling on a handful of specific projects. Yet that specialization inside Gentoo seems to contribute to the feeling that Gentoo lacks any sort of coherent direction. Would things really be that different if those projects were independent, external projects?

I've no idea. Thoughts / comments welcome.

[ category: /gentoo | Permalink | 5 comments | Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:41 GMT ]

Posted by InnocentBystander on Fri Feb 1 18:58:46 2008
"Yet that specialization inside Gentoo seems to contribute to the feeling that Gentoo lacks any sort of coherent direction. Would things really be that different if those projects were independent, external projects?"

No they wouldn't. A bunch of organs in a pile doesn't make an organism. Smaller piles close to the bigger "official" pile doesn't either. An organism without a brain is a vegetable.

Posted by Hollow on Sat Feb 2 03:25:57 2008
I don't think so either ... people demanding for a superb global vision for everything just have no clue what is going on in the specific areas of gentoo

At least for the herds i'm involved in, it doesn't make a difference either way.

Posted by evadim on Sat Feb 2 04:40:11 2008
Gentoo not an organism - gentoo community...

Posted by mointrigue on Sat Feb 2 07:03:51 2008
They wouldn't be different but I see where drobbins is coming from. Small groups are easier to manage and keep on task, but there is a cost for that. A large number of teams requires a very balanced and refined level of communication between groups in order to maintain effectiveness. Obviously, a clear community vision helps as well. That's going to be true whether all those projects or external or internal.

Does Gentoo have that level of communication? I don't know. I'm just a user and I'm not qualified to judge, especially as I have limited knowledge of how that communication works internally.

Personally, I haven't really had issues that some users complain about, mostly because I take the time to read the docs. ;-) That being said, I'm really pleased with Gentoo PR's efforts to improve communication with users and actively seek feedback.

Posted by Donnie Berkholz on Tue Feb 5 02:41:53 2008
That depends on the project. Some of the projects we have would pull us in directions that are just too different, and they should be split off. Others don't really cause a conflict, so that's hard to say.

pyblosxom::1.4.3 01/10/2008

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