The Myths and Realities of the Gentoo/Government: Part 2

So let’s catch up quickly. Daniel started Gentoo, he led it, Gentoo grew and attracted all sorts, including (and especially?) those who would rather see Daniel not in power. I have a theory: some of those people who lobbied for distributed power structures were actually after being in control for themselves. It was certainly true of Zach (he admitted as much). To be honest, it was sort of true with me, as well. There were times when I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Daniel to step aside for a while and let me drive things. There, I admit it :)

Anyway, the momentum for distributed power started building (I believe largely due to back water conversations rather than any largely shared sense of unhappiness). After that, there was little choice left for Daniel but to relent. So Gentoo Technologies, Inc. gave way to Gentoo Foundation, and the Gentoo Managers gave way to the Gentoo Council. And of course, Daniel gave way to the Board of Trustees (13 in number). Various proposals happened in between, of course, to not let any one entity have too much power. So managers had to be neutered in order to be on the council (a note about this later).

And this brings us to the status quo for the last couple of years. Nobody allowed to “have” a vision for Gentoo. Actually, I think many people have visions for their projects, very few have a vision for the distribution itself. And of those, nobody has the power/blessing to see that vision through. There’s a big power vacuum, a complete state of anarchy. Democracy has brought to us that everyone can have a voice. Thus people believe that they should shout, no matter whether they make sense or not.

The new thinking is that the Council itself should have a head (told you we would come back to that point). Part of the thinking is that the anarchy is good. It hasn’t destroyed us, that’s for sure. Maybe the dictatorship did almost destroy us. I don’t know, to be honest. What I do know is that it’s a lot more agonising these days, with endless discussion on endless discussion because of endless discussions about endless tangential points to the original endless discussions, ad nauseum. At least when the buck stops, you can feel a little bitter but at least you know it’s done, and you can move on.

The point of bitterness for me is that two of those three who first advocated the idea of socialism/democracy to Daniel in the first place only succeeded in substituting one problem for another, and then not bothering with trying to fix either problem. I believe the best direction for Gentoo is to split itself into a core with overlays, as I’ve mentioned before in other posts.

The beauty about the old days that most people seem to miss for some reason was the size of the Gentoo development community. It was as efficient and friendly as it was precisely because of the kind of intimacy that is inherent in a small group. And in all honesty, that sort of happens already, because people tend to only care about the projects in which they have direct involvement — be it the amd64 architecture, science packages, clustering, gnome, whatever. Most of those devs lose nothing by having their own out-of-portage overlays. Hell most people with @gentoo.org could probably even keep that address (or a derivative like @contrib.gentoo.org maybe, who knows).

The core group of devs would be people who make packages and programmes that are crucial to a running Gentoo: baselayout, kernel and sys-*. Even portage itself should be in an overlay — with a party on the core team to determine the requirements for acceptance as an officially sanctioned package manager.

Things would work, because overlays could be given a lot more independence and a lot more visibility. Right now they are all overshadowed by what’s in the tree already. Instead, overlays would create competition, and thus increase the quality of submissions. The barriers to entry in our current system are high. Overlays reduces those. Anyone can enter — it’ll take a lot more quality and skill to be accepted as official (requirements to be determined).

Those are my thoughts. I’ve tried not to slander anyone, but feel free to take issue with me.