So people have been commenting lately about Gentoo. I respect these people, yet I also fear them. We have a new council; they are better than the old one already (after just 1 meeting!). The council is full of doers. Many of the last set were not doers. This is an improvement ;)

The Philosophy of Gentoo

Every user has work they need to do. The goal of Gentoo is to design tools and systems that allow a user to do that work as pleasantly and efficiently as possible, as they see fit. Our tools should be a joy to use, and should help the user to appreciate the richness of the Linux and free software community, and the flexibility of free software. This is only possible when the tool is designed to reflect and transmit the will of the user, and leave the possibilities open as to the final form of the raw materials (the source code.) If the tool forces the user to do things a particular way, then the tool is working against, rather than for, the user. We have all experienced situations where tools seem to be imposing their respective wills on us. This is backwards, and contrary to the Gentoo philosophy.

Daniel Robbins
Previous Chief Architect

Do the tools Gentoo produces work for you, or against you? They work against me and it bugs me quite a bit. Especially portage with all it’s shortcomings; but other tools as well. Webapp-config is getting better (as is layman). eselect depends on the module; etc-update is crap (but has replacments). Quickpkg is horrid but portage-utils rocks out over equery. What tools piss you off? What tools are working?

Gentoo is supposed to be an intuitive system for “making my own gentoo.” It no longer is. I can’t build KDE the way I want because it just stops building. Giving users a choice is pointless if that choice is always broken (No Flameeyes; I’m not trying to bash you or KDE here). Every piece of complex software has these issues; PHP had it last year and it was only quasi solved. Any attempt to deviate from the “normal” USE flags often fails.

This was the case for the stage1 install and it was canned due to an inability to support people doing dumb things. When will “trying to use PHP in a certain configuration” be equal to “doing dumb things with PHP”. Will PHP get cut as well (again; not a jab at the PHP folks; more of a conjecture).

If we get pkgcore or paludis; what will happen with USE and slot dependencies. They better represent the complexity that is inherint in the problem of building packages from source. Will this new representation even help? What if the complexity is too much to handle in a sane manner?

Obviously QA has problems (they can’t test all 5.5 * 10 ^ 57th combinations of php USE flags); so what will they do to address these issues? While choice is important; too much choice is also too much work.

Once again I ask; where is the middle ground?