Of Broken Piñatas and Developer Platforms (XMMS vs. Gentoo)

Am I harsh? I don’t think I am: I am just calling it how I see it. And, I certainly mean no offense by anything I say. I thought initially to just respond to the comments in my last blog, but as you can see, I had a lot more to say on the subject: enough to warrant a new post. So here it is.

Apparently, at least a couple of people believe Gentoo to be a User focused distribution. And that is OK, to be honest. Gentoo isn’t a strict set of anything for anybody, so each person brings in their own vision and their own baggage: they join for their own reasons and leave for their own reasons.

Most of the time, I would venture, people join Gentoo development (or really, any open source project) to scratch their own set of itches. Hell, my itch was getting rid of the cruft NLS stuff and GKrellM plugins (though I do see an XMMS version bump request there too). And you know why? Because I wanted that stuff in portage. I wanted all those plugins, I wanted nls-free gnome installations on my computers, and I wanted to use yahoo messenger, God help me.

If people are expecting something other than a developer platform out of Gentoo, then I would have to wonder: what exactly do you expect? And how will you get everyone to agree with you? Because, now you’re faced with trying to define the user. Surely, Tiago is a user. But hey, so is Alex. Which of them is the right user? And there are other users with different needs: the people who want gentoo to power their firewalls, those who want gentoo on their gaming machines, those who want them to power their sparcs and alphas and other 64-bit platforms, their macs; there are those who want a great desktop system, those who want a better multimedia platform; those who want to replace their digital video recording devices; you name it. Who is the right user? Which is the right audience? I don’t know the answer to that. Let’s not even forget the “holy grail”: the Enterprise users. If you know the right answer, pipe up.

As for this being some sort of “new-found” developer focus. It isn’t new-found. It’s very old-found. It’s, in fact, original-found. What else would you make of Daniel’s thoughts on the subject?. After all, he founded this thing in the first place. Or hey, read Aron’s observations (though gmane may be a better way for some to catch it).

I’m sorry, but if you want a user distro, there are far better choices out there: ubuntu being the primary one. You get coddled and you get sane and sensible defaults. Gentoo doesn’t do that. We give you the tools for you to build whatever you want. So you can fall into all of the above audience choices and more (thanks to the power of profiles and USE flags, primarily). Hell, go nuts with your compiler flags, we don’t care. Think that flies as a user-centric approach? It doesn’t. It’s a support nightmare, ask any Gentoo developer about it.

And finally, the piñata: where is all the anger about XMMS? I mean Diego is seeing it. I’m seeing it in some of the comments and conversations on IRC. But are the original perpetrators of the crime seeing it? Yes, I’m talking about upstream. I’m talking about the people who have ignored any and all attempts to receive and incorporate patches to fix known, long-standing issues of their own bloody product. I’m talking about the people who have this player being used by millions of people across most distributions, and they could give two craps about, you know, caring for it. Their entire focus for more than 2 years (2 years ago was the last XMMS release from them) has been this mythical XMMS2 creature that will “will nicely ditch all of the reasons why people actually use xmms” (thanks for the quote, spb): some sort of client-server mpd-like monstrosity that uses SconS as its build system (last I checked, anyway, which was about 2 years ago).

So, with millions of people using it, you’d think they would care. But they don’t. They have other toys to play with. So argue all you want with me, but if you’re going to talk user-centricism and the lack of consideration, please start at the source.

My friend Rach (who’s probably either angry or completely disillusioned with me for being out of touch) once asked me why I felt that way. She felt that since the Gentoo project/product is out there and public, we have a responsibility. And so we do. I do not disagree with her at all. I think that on this issue (her opinion I do not know), however, a line has to be drawn somewhere. It’s not scalable for upstream to just ignore its own product for 2 years. That is irresponsible. You can’t have 10 different distros with 10 different patchsets and expect that model to last. It won’t (and that’s why x.org is a better thing than xfree86 ever became, by the way — the number of disparate patches for xfree86 on a per-distribution scale really got out of hand).

The sound team did what they could, but they had to stop short of becoming an upstream source for XMMS. That’s how it is. But this is open-source, so I say again: to all you who are bitter and angry about it: DO SOMETHING. Take the XMMS source, make it your own, incorporate patches and fixes from all the distros and release something. Improve the product to make it less of a fractured maintainance issue. To boot, I hear some rumblings that upstream is gearing up a new release. Their motivation? To laugh at Gentoo, no doubt. It’s a release out of spite, and nothing more.

If you want XMMS, you have to take it, it’s simple as that. XMMS-1 needs a new upstream. Right now, every distro has its own huge patchset for XMMS: make that go away. Or, if you’re ok with with XMMS problems, create your own overlay. You have a ready-made community to back it up. Use that!

But please, stop being sad that Gentoo isn’t something you thought it was. We never claimed to be the user centric distribution that people imagine it to be. I’m sorry if reality hits that way, but there it is.

Flame on!