Curious about Developer activity/ community involvement

[MarcusCrassus]

I'm a long time linux user and for 3+ years I've been using Gentoo exclusively at home. I'm a sysadmin and am used to many different distros and it's communities. I'm getting rather concerned at the drop in devs and community involvement in Gentoo. I've been rather curious to see Sabayon linux, being Gentoo based, but am also concerned about the community with this distro as well.

This may not be the best place to ask, but I'm wanting to see what current devs/users of Sabayon think about the pace of the distro, current dev involvement/turnover as well as how active the community is WRT the distro.

[wolfden]

SL Devs are short in numbers and spend most time developing. They do hit the forums from time to time tho.

I think gentoo devs are doing good with community and they have made a lot of changes for the people and have been very active.

We don't want to flame any devs here of any distro.

[MarcusCrassus]

My purpose was not to start a flame war. Devs in general I think are in short supply. Especially in the OSS community. That wasn't really what I was aiming for. I was really looking at timeliness of package updates to stable, etc. I am certainly not flaming the Gentoo guys. They do a great job. I am concerned at the increasing number of times I've had to install ~amd64 packages that have been marked as arch unstable for months or even years. Early on, this wasn't the case, but now it seems that it's happening more and more often. For example, firefox 3.0.11 is still considered x64 unstable and it's been out for several weeks. In this particular instance I'm curious to see if SL has it marked stable in portage or not.

My biggest fear with Gentoo is it becoming like Debian was for several years in the early part of the decade, where /everything/ was in 'testing' and that all stable packages were months if not years behind in versions.

That's the only reason I ask. I'd like to know there is an active dev group and community behind SL.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Regarding your unstable vs stable question, Sabayon Linux is customised Gentoo Linux from the Gentoo testing/unstable branch, and the vast majority of the ebuilds available in SL are thus those in the testing/unstable Gentoo Portage tree. There is a Sabayon overlay containing relatively few ebuilds when compared to the main Portage tree, and the ebuilds in that are thus all in the testing/unstable branch.

If the latest version of an ebuild in the testing branch of Gentoo is marked as unstable then the same applies in SL because it's the same ebuild as in Gentoo. If the latest version of an ebuild in the testing branch of Gentoo is marked as stable then the same applies in SL because it's the same ebuild as in Gentoo. The SL devs do pass fixes upstream.

There used to be a stable branch edition of Sabayon Linux (it was called "Professional Edition", and, before that, "Business Edition") but it is no longer available or supported.

As far as SL's binary package manager is concerned, the binary packages in the Entropy repository are built from the above-mentioned ebuilds and thus all have exactly the same status as the ebuild counterpart as far as the branch is concerned. Entropy just provides pre-compiled Gentoo (and Sabayon overlay) packages.

I think Entropy enables a more stable installation than a source-based distro because the Entropy packages are pre-built. It's certainly more difficult (but not impossible) to break an installation in which you use only Entropy. Actually it's quite useful to have the choice of using Portage and Entropy: I tend to use Portage on my main laptop (but have found Entropy useful occasionally to rescue things if Portage breaks something) but on another laptop used by one of my family stick to Entropy for ease of use and greater stability.

~~~~~~~~ x ~~~~~~~~~

Regarding your question about the pace of the distro, turnover of devs and the activity of the community, I can only answer as someone who is not involved as a developer, only a user of the distro.

You can read about the development team from the link on the Home Page (Communicate > Organisation) but here it is to save you the trouble: http://www.sabayonlinux.org/pages/show/id/62. As you can see, it's a small team, albeit very dedicated. These guys have been around quite a while.

Regarding the pace of the distro, it has been very active over the more than two years that I have been using SL. You can gauge the rate of development by looking in the Press Releases 'shed' of the SL Forum, and also by looking at the announcements and road map in the SL developer's blog (a.k.a. 'Planet') - see the link at the top of this page. I think the pace has been exceptionally good, and the quality of the whole package has improved with every release, and each release has become slicker and better than the last. I'm having trouble with fglrx (my GPU is no longer supported by AMD), KDE 4.2, BlueZ etc. at the moment but, as I'm sure you know, they are not distro-specific issues. Bloody Linux (and AMD)!

The SL community is much smaller than the Gentoo community. That said, it seems to be quite loyal. There are a core of users who are clearly very devoted to the distro and you see them appear regularly in the SL Forum and are generally quick to help and some are very knowledgeable. As you know, Gentoo is not easy for newcomers to Linux (or from other distros, come to that) and I have seen many users come and go in the Forum. The introduction of binary packages and the home-grown binary package manager Entropy -- the brainchild of lxnay, the father and principal developer of SL -- has attracted new users and made package management a lot easier and faster for newcomers to Linux and for people used to binary distros.

The SL forum can be a little quiet at times, but you can judge that for yourself by browsing the 'sheds' and the Active Topics search. Actually, a quieter forum can sometimes be an advantage: threads don't disappear off the bottom of the forum page faster than you can say "Ubuntu Forums", for example.

By the way, did you know that the Cuban government's official distro, called Nova, is based on Gentoo and uses SL's Entropy as its package manager? Cuba crafts extra-communist Linux distro

[joost]

We don't mark anything stable.
We are 100% on the ~ branch.

Having said that, for critical packages we have a testing repository where we first test those in a very small group (most of the time within a week) and decide to push it out yes/no. We are always moving ahead and certainly do not have the time to wait for Gentoo to stable things, so we can have that in our (non-existent) stable branch.



If something really really needs to get downgraded because it totally fails due mem-leaks or serious security risks, yeah we WILL DO THAT.

Meanwhile we report anything we find upstream Gentoo. (e.g. gcc 4 and glic issues we find). Since no normal user would have a great part of portage actually in 1 chroot installed AND maintained, we are likely to find collisions and problems.

We keep the overlay as minimal as possible. One could say that apart from our kernel config sabayon is for like 98% precompiled portage.

P.S. I don't consider myself a dev. More a very dedicated power user.

[MarcusCrassus]

I really appreciate the detailed replies and info on the distro and how it's maintained/packaged/etc. I suppose my problem stems from the fact that I have a problem running a system from what in essence is a testing branch. Maybe that's just a brain fart on my part. I just fail to see what the hold up is marking packages stable. There are ebuilds in Gentoo in ~arch that have been there /months/. If there are no problems, why /not/mark it stable?

In my humble opinion this is due to one of two causes. One, there's not enough dev/community involvement to manage that process, which means, of course there's a lack of continued interest in the distro, and I would prefer to know that sooner rather than later and migrate any existing systems I have to another 'more popular' (for lack of a better phrase) distribution.

Or, two, it's just laziness. Which, of course leads me back to reason one. I want to see an active and conscientious dev group being proactive and following processes designed to allow the most recent versions marked unstable/testing and the previous version(s) marked stable. The fact that the last 3 versions of FF I've had to pull from ~amd64 (and indeed 3.0.10 is still NOT marked stable) is disconcerting to me. What is so wrong about marking something stable that has had no bug reports for X amount of time in testing?

Does that line of reasoning make any sense at all? I got fed up with Debian for the very same reason I'm concerned about Gentoo. If I have to download and install my entire OS (or to get the latest 'stable' versions) from a 'testing' branch, I have issues with that. Maybe I should call this the Google mentality, where everything is constantly in BETA.

Does that clarify my questions?

[joost]

Read this:
http://ben.liveforge.org/2009/06/04/gentoo-dying

No Gentoo is far from dead, the priority and the quality of things differs from other distros.
Ask yourself how long it takes for Red Hat to adopt a package that has been tested in Fedora.

Besides this, the whole Gentoo way of doing things is allot different then other distros.

To me it looks like there is a lot of so called "herds" with developers all with their own interests, demands and specialities.
There is the Council to oversee the problems that can arrise between them. Yeah its a true "land of the free" as I see it.

However, people can ask to get a package version stabelised, this can take a while because Gentoo simply supports allot of architectures.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue ... 29#feature