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Is Gentoo becoming Debian?
Posted on August 28th, 2006 by Daniel
Take this post, and run “s/debian/gentoo/” on it, and you basically get the feelings of lots of Gentoo devs recently. This is kind of scary, because I consider Debian to be completely broken as a project. I don’t want Gentoo to become Debian. Is this the only possible outcome of a completely free and open distro? Does a distro need a corporate master to survive?
I hope not.
s/corporate master/real leadership/
Sure, but I have yet to see any indication of real leadership outside of either corporate masters or Linus, and I doubt we could convice him to run Gentoo.
I’d love to be proven wrong. Please, prove me wrong, someone.
Too much politics and insanely long mailing list threads. The occasional discussion regarding various points of Gentoo is fine, but when developers get too involved with the politics then the development of Gentoo suffers.
A leader of some sort can decide on the core values of Gentoo, instead of allowing everyone to debate on it. By allowing people to submit proposals to everyone in a democratic way just causes far too many arguments with conflicting views. Ubuntu for example has clear objectives and proper leadership, something which both Debian and Gentoo lack.
This is good that parts of the community are analyzing the problems of global-vision and order. But we shouldn’t end up yearning for some singular leader to emerge (haha pun) from the dust and impose order. The community (or people within it who get a snowball effect going) should step up and promote etiquette, encourage meaningful discussion about Gentoo’s philosophy or ask people to carry on their long discussions on simple topics in private.
Alex hit it on the head that our political institutions (while good at imposing order for formal decision-making) are not the only means of communication/brainstorming/development.
Time for another beer. Cheers.