What happened to Gentoo?
I started using Gentoo Linux around the 1.2 release. Lately I’ve been noticing that things seem to be slowing down in portage. I remember when GNOME would be available the day it was released. Now it’s more like weeks/months after the fact.
Other packages like compiz/compiz-fusion haven’t been updated in a while. One of the devs was saying to expect an update this weekend which never happened. It would be nice to have VMware Workstation 6.5 but no ebuild are available for that either.
Kernel updates get released (e.g. 2.6.26.2) and gentoo-sources seem to ignore them. LiveCD releases are cancelled. The current team can’t manage to release 1 or 2 LiveCDs a year, yet somehow they are going to get automated weekly CDs available (read: not tested at all).
Might be time to find another distro.
There’s a lot of things here that aren’t quite right, so let me try to clear them up.
gentoo-source incorporates updates as revision bumps, not as 2.6.xx.y. From the ChangeLog:
*gentoo-sources-2.6.26-r1 (14 Aug 2008)
14 Aug 2008; Mike Pagano
+gentoo-sources-2.6.26-r1.ebuild:
Update to Linux 2.6.26.1 and 2.6.26.2 including a patch to the main
Makefile. New mount option for FAT filesystems allowing timestamps to be in
coordinated universal time (UTC)
A lot of us now find virtualbox (app-emulation/virtualbox-ose) or kvm (app-emulation/kvm) more compelling than vmware because both are open source and work well, so it may not be getting as much love. If you want to track vmware more closely, check out the vmware overlay in layman. I also found bug #238940 and bug #232230 for it.
If you want to track gnome more closely, follow the gnome overlay in layman.
For completeness’ sake, I want to comment on some other things. As the blog you linked to says, the new compiz is easily available in the desktop-effects overlay in layman You didn’t mention this, but similar goes for the new kde in the kde overlay.
I was wrong about the kernel version 2.6.26.2 is in gentoo-sources-2.6.26-r1 as you said, but the latest stable release on kernel.org is 2.6.26.5. So shouldn’t there be an -r2 for gentoo-sources?
I have used KVM and I do like it. I use it my desktop and servers.
However on my laptop I prefer vmware-workstation. USB works better. Cut/paste between host/guest is easier. I’m sure KVM will catch up at some point but until they do I’ll keep using WS.
I’ve checked the vmware-overlay and there is nothing for Workstation 6.5. I saw some people trying to make it work in bug #232230 this morning. Glad that is in progress.
As for the desktop effects overlay, I’m leery of that. They used to have custom eclasses, patches to Gtk+ and what not (if I recall correctly). Maybe that has changed, I can look into it.
about Gnome being in portage the same day it’s released is a bit unrealistic. A good number of new packages comes in and they all have to be scrutinized. I seem to remember Gnome 2.22 got in portage a few days after it’s release. I don’t think this delay is unreasonable since every package has to be gone over again to ensure integrity. Give the developers a break, they’re making a great distro without breaking their backs.
I’m not trying to break their backs. I was just wondering why it seemed like things were slowing down to me. It’s my blog I can wonder about stuff like that here. If people don’t agree that’s fine too.
I’m not abusing the devs or making personal attacks. I like their work in general or wouldn’t have used Gentoo so long in the first place.
I think it is internal fragmentation and some core people changes. As the number of packages grew the system got slow and there wasn’t enough people to take care of it. There are now 50+ overlays, most people don’t know about them. Someone decided that they would clean stuff out of portage which started breaking updates that hadn’t been done in a while and ebuilds like virtualbox that have a fetch restriction and are to stupid to realize it is an update, stop an ebuild midway for human intervention sometimes. I still think it is the best, but I have a few suggestions….Bintoo: your hardware profile and useflags are identified with a guid, this is sent on sync, if your flags are already built into a binary, you get it else you build it and upload it. Eventually it becomes a distributed compile. automatic Fallback repos.
I’ve had many of the same thoughts as Loren has had about Gentoo. I’ve been using Gentoo for a while now and early on it was the speed of the package availability that stuck me at gentoo, plus the ability to update to newer packages without waiting for the distribution to release a whole new release (since most linux distros don’t do major upstream updates within a distro release).
I’ve come to many of the same conclusions above that this is difficult to do as Gentoo and portage packages grows, and it’s a fact of live that I’ve accepted and Gentoo is still my preferred Linux distro.
I do find that the overlay push to be unfortunate though. The point of gentoo was the portage tree. Now to get newer things I’m expected to pull in random other trees of varying quality (the quality within portage itself is already varying, but I’ve found the overlays to be even more so) and many times, I’ve found major issues with the overlays and arch vs ~arch packages in the main tree. This type of thing turns me off from overlays in general big time.
Don’t take this as an attack against gentoo though, this is just some off the cuff musings of mine about what is currently my distro of choice, and what I still consider to be the best Linux distro out there.
My Linux mantra has always been “All Linux distributions suck, you pick the one that sucks least for you, and make it good”
In that sense, Gentoo sucks OOTB, but the very design of Gentoo makes it extremely easy for me to make it “good” for myself. It’s just that it’s taking more and more maintenance as the years go on to make Gentoo “good”.