Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Gentoo: Time to bounce back

When you pack a large number of exceptionally gifted people into one room, over time, conflicts are bound to happen. I was very interested to see Daniel Robbins involved again in Gentoo and honestly… have noticed things are getting “stale” with quite a bit of indirection. Apparently Daniel walked into a *storm and quickly walked back out. I read some of the notes exemplifying absolute disrespect or regard for what he personally built and was amazed at some of the personalities that are vocal enough to be viewed as a representation of Gentoo.

Gentoo used to be the bleading edge distro, but I’m not sure things have ‘kept up’ with the pace. The brilliance of Portage can keep you up to date, but there’s less innovation in Gentoo these days it seems. Of course, the forums are still hands down the #1 Linux user support community out there.

It seems we’ll watch how this all shakes out publicly, but for now I hope the Gentoo community of developers takes an honest look at where things have worked / or not worked and bounce back providing their users the ultimate distribution they’re so well known for. There are too many involved with Gentoo that have the best interests at heart to see this developer community fall down b/c of a few. I’m not sure if a new code of conduct will fix everything, but maybe it’s the tipping point back towards the Gentoo that fired on all cylinders.