In short a concept aimed at forking Gentoo Linux. First some history and my own experiences.
Gentoo is a sick adolescent who refuses to acknowledge his illness. Because he refuses to acknowledge the illness he can't be helped. There are many who have ideas about how to help him. Some of those are wrong.
Gentoo's biggest problem? Democracy. Making it actually work is not easy. Most of the really successful, open source, projects have one or two people at the top. A good benevolent leader is needed, imho. Gentoo's developer council did not seem to have things under control for the better part of 2007. Some things seem to have improved but I have lost faith in them.
Dan Robbins (gentoo's creator an prior benevolent dictator) made 2 offers to help, but left quickly after both. It is obvious that he can't/won't (shouldn't?) attempt to save Gentoo.
Political is Gentoo's biggest thorn and as a result it is suffering technically.
Portage (gentoo's ports like package manager) is said to be unmaintainable, buggy, and un-fixable. I believe there are 3 package managers being written separately, with the idea of being alternatives. From what I've seen of Paludis and Pkg-core neither of them have the right idea for an actual replacement. I will go into that in another post.
Gentoo's dev's have no respect for standards or conventions, and as such certain area's which could be easily fixed have suffered. such as Gentoo's Apache binary being named apache and apache2 instead of httpd which is mostly a convention, or the lack of an /srv which is not optional according to FHS.
Gentoo lacks a sense of business, to the point the foundations charter was revoked (or was it almost revoked, plenty of confusion to be sure). If support rallies behind me (or the idea) I fully intend on incorporating for the purpose of commercially supporting the distribution.
In short, I hope ReGen2 will be a commercial funded, rapid developing, fast, versatile, source based linux distribution. Which will continue to be a leader in the open source world.
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1 comments:
Is gentoo even really a distro? (anymore)...maybe a meta-distro at this point....
I think this year you'll see some change in the "gentoo-status-quo". Either things will shape up, or serious forking will occur. I, for one, would be happy to assist & promote a true source distribution. I need to compile my own source to stay sane (watch the ubuntu people take wild leaping stabs at solving broken software - it's as bad as watching gentoo devs...et al try to get any work done ;-> )
Sabayon has a new look, and a new tool - entropy - which is supposed to access the gentoo_portage tree, as well as overlays, and apparently APT & YUM repos. Dan Robbins is building a weekly tarball, so those of us in the know can actually do what you intend with regen2.
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