This week, as always, the Gentoo mailing lists are full of conversations regarding the future of distribution, and one of them caught my attention, to the point of being the central topic of this article. But before that we are going to know a little history about the distribution:
Your Creator
We go back to the last millennium, in 1999 Daniel Robbins, released the first version of Enoch Linux, a distribution that wanted to break with the standards up to that time conceived by all other distributions, create packages instead of receiving them precompiled. The main idea was to create a system that accommodates the user's hardware, and does not have unnecessary packages.
FreeBSD
After a few troubles with Enoch, Daniel migrated to FreeBSD, a UNIX operating system, and it was where he met ports the system's package control tool. As you can imagine, ports is responsible for compiling the programs instead of getting binaries, for this, the tool is used pkg.
Gentoo 1.0
Already in 2002, after having fixed the elusive bug, Gentoo had already acquired its official name, named after the fastest penguin species of all, and was showing the world its first official version. This milestone was the first step in a long series of changes and modifications that emerged over the years, but we are going to focus on the most important ones.
Community Management
This is a peculiar feature in Gentoo, since there is no specific company running, the community is the one that ultimately decides the best for both developers and users. But it is worth mentioning that large companies such as Sony and Google have used the Gentoo paradigm to improve their systems.
2004
This was a particularly difficult year for Gentoo, as its founder had to hand over management to the Gentoo Foundation due to personal issues. Due to the explosion in popularity that Gentoo was having at the time, people were starting to use Gentoo more and more and the numbers looked promising, but such rapid growth made it difficult to fit the framework to the correct scale. Always keeping in mind that many of these projects are carried out in "free time", an explosion of fame could not be so good if there were not going to be enough people to control the reins.
2007
Another difficult year, since due to the lack of adequate structure, and with a kind of series of internal guerrillas, Gentoo sank into the GNU / Linux world and became a "secondary" distribution. In this environment, Daniel decides to return to active development as a developer, but after many personal differences and attacks by both sides, he decides to retire shortly after his re-entry. Shortly after funtoo linux, a distro based on Gentoo, but with some essential modifications that did not overcome the unstable structure of that time.
GLEP 39
Gentoo Linux Enhancement Proposal (GLEP) are documents that propose changes, both technical and structural, to the community. A GLEP goes through continuous processes of preparation, review, voting, and may or may not be implemented, depending on the need of the community and the viability of the proposal. In particular, GLEP 39 is a project that wants to implement a new structure for Gentoo Linux, in which the order and the way of proceeding of many projects and developers are redefined. It started in 2005, and continued its development process until it was approved in 2008. It was definitely the response of the community, both developers and users, to improve the complicated structural problems that had been affecting it for years.
The damage was evident
By this time, Gentoo had already suffered greatly from internal guerrillas and lack of leadership. Many users and developers had retired and it became a small project awaiting death. But the surprising thing is that despite everything, and against all odds, the series of changes made Gentoo have a more stable structure, and also thanks to the decrease in developers and users (possible contradictory points of view at the time of development) you were able to start working on new projects and improve Gentoo at its core.
The ultimate test, the years
10 years have passed since that moment in time, and a lot has changed, and other things not so much, the structure defined back then has already been established, and a lot has been learned in the process, new developers have arrived and others have been. have withdrawn. In short, Gentoo is not dead (surprisingly). And this new wisdom is reflected in the forms and models of selection, problem solving, presentation of projects, in short, they have already made up their minds. And this brings us to this week again.
"A plan for Gentoo"
This has been the title from the thread of the conversation that caused this article, although the complete logs are not yet there, this is a bit of what has happened. Daniel wants to contribute back to the project, build more connection between Gentoo and Funtoo, and resolve some outstanding issues in various community projects.
This is currently being discussed in the lists, and the first impression is that Daniel wants to return more than actively and thus help the Gentoo leadership (as a council member). For this you are already taking the developer quiz without commit-access, in which a series of interviews are conducted via IRC between a Gentoo recruiter (usually a developer) and the applicant. In these interviews, the quiz questions are reviewed one by one, which revolve around the new structure of the community, how to proceed, how to propose and how to fix things.
Just as an extra note, there is a quiz specially designed to have commit access, this implies being able to directly edit the files .ebuild what come to be .deb o .rpm on debian or redhat respectively. This is much more rigorous in technical issues and program maintenance processes.
In order to conduct the interview, it is necessary to have been mentored by a Gentoo developer, who explains the processes to the applicant and guides them through the process of finding the answers (everything is so well documented that it can be done without a mentor, but it is necessary to have with one so that he / she is the one who requests an interviewer).
Learn from history
I do not consider myself a lover of history, but I have learned that it is necessary to know it if we do not want to make the same mistakes, and like programming, knowing what happened in the past teaches us to better understand the future. This will be a constant topic on Gentoo mailing lists for the next few days or maybe weeks, and hopefully for the better, as the years do not go by and both sides already have the experience of age. Ultimately we are all looking for the same thing, to keep building a better and better Gentoo. Greetings and thanks for getting here 🙂
Very good article, I congratulate you.
very nice article
If the political-economic class were thus chosen, another world would be possible, without savage capitalism (Friedmanites) and with a Keynesian vision of the welfare state.
Excellent article so far I understood how Gentoo works, and it is not easy at all.
They are "making their way while walking" Machado.
regards
Hola!
What do you think of Funtoo and what do you know about the reasons that led Daniel to create said distro (Funtoo).
I read that he was at Microsoft but he returned to Gentoo and did not join the project so he decided to found Funtoo.
That detail always made me a bit suspicious.
I would like to know if you ever used Funtoo and what is your impression and differences with Gentoo.
Regards!
Good post! as always 🙂
Hi Alberto,
Well, it is true, Daniel was at Microsoft, for purely labor reasons, as he says at some point: "The idea was to teach Microsoft how free and open source software works." Having resolved the personal issues that caused him to leave Gentoo in the first place, he decided to reconnect with the community, but at this point the situation was a bit tense, with some troublesome developers. The friction and personal attacks gradually made things more tense. At the breaking point, Daniel decides to leave the "hostile" community and found a new version of Gentoo ... Funtoo had structural changes in portage and other processes, "improvements" as some would say. This process of changing a schema or structure in an open source project is sometimes complicated, and trying to convince a community doesn't always work well. Today, Daniel constantly contributes to the development of Portage and today a new evolution is expected in the Gentoo package manager.
I have not tried Funtoo personally, I have heard good things about the distribution. The differences at this point may be the structures and direction of the project, Funtoo's priorities are detailed on its website, a series of priorities that serve to direct the projects.
I hope I can clarify the doubts a bit 🙂
regards
Hello:
Do you think gentoo is really that difficult for a user to handle on a day-to-day basis? I say this because, apparently and from the unknown, it seems that for a normal user, not a programmer or student of GNU linux, gentoo has an enormous complexity to keep it updated and free of problems, portage puts a lot of news, compilations take time, it would seem than the other binary distros although they are somewhat less efficient they are light years away in terms of ease.
Therefore a following article on gentoo would be how to maintain gentoo once installed.
Greetings.
Hi Fernan.
Short answer: No, I don't think it's that difficult for a "normal" user.
Long answer:
It is true that Gentoo's complexity curve is steep (it reminds me a bit when I first learned Vim), but this is partly because GNU / Linux is going through a process of "hiding" complexity. That something is complex does not make it bad, on the contrary, removing the complexity of something ultimately makes it bad, but look at Windows 🙂 Hidden complexity is worse than anything else because it makes the user become dependent.
Now I, today, I only have to run two commands to keep my gentoo running on the unstable (experimental) branch once a week, or every 3 days if there are many changes:
emerge –sync
emerge -avuD @world
or its equivalent
emerge --ask --verbose --update --deep @world
The first syncs the repository (like #apt update)
The second updates all the programs that I have installed plus their dependencies (#apt upgrade)
At first it is clear that it is a bit difficult to understand the news, and the errors, but once that first difficulty has been skipped, things begin to make more sense, and are seen more completely. (I have failed my equipment several times, having to install from scratch, but with each error a very important lesson has come 🙂)
And this not only helps the "normal" user to break the dependency, it teaches him things in the process that are really the essence of GNU / Linux, real freedom.
As for the latter, it is true, binary distributions are much simpler, for "users." And to some extent, to use Gentoo you must have a special penchant for technology, or a very strong need for efficiency. And that is also something beautiful about GNU / Linux 🙂 you are free to choose the level that best suits your needs 🙂 Gentoo does not try to hide the complexity of the software, on the contrary, it teaches the user that complexity so that he can decide what to do with Each piece, that is something that carries a responsibility, but when mastered, it delivers greater satisfaction 🙂 at least I feel better knowing exactly what I have on my team, and how I have it, and why I have it 🙂
Regards,
Hello:
At work they have put us Windows 10, I have been using gnome at home for 4 years well, windows 10 seems horrible to me, what's more, in my particular case, with my vision problem I have better adapted my gnome manjaro than windows 10 with an enlarger private.
Greetings.
Very good article, before discovering your articles I did not even know that Gentoo existed and now I am about to switch from Raspbian to Gemtoo. THANKS!