Gentoo 2008.1 Release Solutions
Gentoo seems to be having problems with .”1” releases – 2007.1 was cancelled and now 2008.1 has been cancelled. The Gentoo project has also announced a desire to move to a more “back to basics approach” where they are doing weekly builds of Gentoo stages.
Good idea. As many of you know, I am already building fresh stages for x86, i686, athlon-xp, pentium4, core32, amd64, core64, ~x86 and ~amd64 as well as OpenVZ templates at http://www.funtoo.org/linux.
Since I’ve been building Gentoo stages for a while, I know that Gentoo’s catalyst tool (the tool that is used for Gentoo releases) is in poor shape – it has been poorly maintained over the years and also does not have any documentation, so it is not really up to the task of building Gentoo releases anymore.
The lack of catalyst documentation makes it much more difficult for others (like Gentoo users and other Gentoo-based projects) to build their own Gentoo releases, and this, along with the poor state of catalyst itself, tends to perpetuate the centralized Gentoo development model – a model that is not very efficient and also isn’t very much fun.
It is a shame (and somewhat ironic) that a well-renowned build-from-source distribution does not have a decent and well-maintained release building tool. So it’s time to fix this…
In a few weeks, I will be releasing a completely redesigned release build tool called “Metro”. This is the tool that I use to build my daily Funtoo stages and supports building both stable and unstable (~) stages. It is much more capable than catalyst and has a much better architecture. Metro is a full recipe-based build engine that will allow the larger Gentoo community to build Gentoo (and even non-Gentoo - it is not Gentoo-specific) releases and stages easily and share their build recipes with others.
Metro allows anyone to set up their own automated builds and greatly simplifies the task of maintaining a web mirror of these builds. It will make it a lot easier for people to create their own Gentoo-based distributions as well.
My focus is on empowering the larger Gentoo community, but I do hope that the official Gentoo project will use Metro for their release engineering efforts – I think it will help not only the Gentoo project but also facilitate collaboration with projects outside Gentoo (by sharing build recipies) and thus help Gentoo to move in more of a distributed direction and innovate more quickly. It’s time to get Gentoo back to being the leaders of innovation in the world of Linux.
I am currently finalizing some interfaces in Metro before I start writing documentation for the tool. Once documentation is done (should be in a couple of weeks,) I will be releasing Metro to the public. Until then, you can enjoy the fruits of Metro by using my Funtoo stages at http://www.funtoo.org/linux .
:-)
36 comments:
Fantastic to hear that you are still innovating on the Gentoo platform, Daniel.
Looking forward to the release of Metro.
Daniel,
This sounds exciting, I can't wait to check this out myself. I'm just as hopeful as you that Gentoo will be able to make some good use of this. Thank you so much for all you've done for Gentoo and, as busy as you are, continue to do ( even if not directly through the project ).
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
w00t! there's more than one way to skin a cat! or in this case, build a working linux machine.
good stuff, can't wait to test.
Hi Daniel, it's a great news :P
So, did you have any contact with the Gentoo team about this announce ?
Maybe you could contribute to the Gentoo project officially with the official release of your Stages and Snapshot ?
I don't know about the rest, but it seems to me that 2 projects with the same goal should help each other.
In fact, I already use your Stages and everything is perfect :P
So Thank you again for what you have done for the Gentoo project.
Merci beaucoup !
awesome!
@slyvain -- 'official'. The funtoo stages are more official than the 'official gentoo' stages. They work and are up to date. This 'official' business is what has caused the decline of gentoo.
Maybe is time to start a fork man. Don't be late...
Thanks for the positive news. It is nice to hear that you will give us a tool that will help benefit the Gentoo community wihtout having to fork the distro.
Nice to see you back to your old 'Gentoo' self :-)
Great to hear that you are back in business regarding some Gentoo specific stuff! Especially when it comes to releases/development tools.
I'm looking forward to seeing this affect the community in a positive way, and I really hope it does.
Daniel,
As I'm sure you're not aware, since you tend to just do your own thing and pay no attention to what's actually going on with Gentoo's development, the Catalyst development team has moved their development away from Gentoo and onto its own infrastructure. We have a Git repository on my site, which is available for the public. Many of the issues with catalyst are due to the legacy of the horrid code which has been around for years. While I tend to disapprove of you essentially bashing all of the work I've done on catalyst over the past few years, I don't take it to heart. After all, the tool was never the issue with the releases, it was the development staff.
At any rate, I would hope that any changes that you might have would be at least proposed to the upstream development staff, either via a bug report on bugs.gentoo.org or via the gentoo-catalyst@lists.gentoo.org mailing list. After all, it's much nicer to try to actually work with the team in question, rather than trash-talking them and then going on about the concept of "community" without even contacting the team. Alienating a team of people who have been working on a project for years is a great way to win friends and influence people, isn't it?
I'm looking forward to the release of Metro and sincerely do encourage you to participate in the community by giving back. Remember that to make a community, it has to be a two-way street.
I don't really want to get into a flamewar with you Chris, and I was not trying to insult you or anyone who have been working on catalyst over the years. I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who looks at the code that at best it is not in a good state, so if I point this out, you should not take it as a personal attack against anyone. This is not a war of egos but an attempt to help Gentoo get on a better track.
I will defend myself against some of your accusations:
This is Gentoo's catalyst project page. I don't see any mention of anything you talked about (git repo, development happening outside gentoo) on the catalyst project page.
So how is anyone supposed to know about it? How am I supposed to know about it? An important part of the community process is actually communicating with the community.
I'm sincerely sorry I offended you. And - I am being sincere here - I have not found it to be a good use of my time to try to coordinate closely with the Gentoo project. It's simply too political and noxious overall, and I just want to code and fix problems rather than engage in pointless debates.
There are some good guys on the Gentoo project doing good stuff, and I try to support them and their efforts, and they also seem to try to support me and my efforts. This is true collaboration - the comment you posted here isn't going to get us anywhere. This is the kind of stuff that convinced me that it is not a good idea to return to the official Gentoo project.
Anyway, I wish you well and hope that you can get over your personal feelings.
Hi Daniel, if you need help to translate your documentation in French, then we will be glad to help you with that task :)
As a member of http://www.gentoo-quebec.org, if we can do something to help you, just ask.
Also, I'm not surprise at all from the reaction of a former Gentoo dev.
In fact, Gentoo seems to me like a black box nowadays. In this kind of info was inside the doc or even inside planet : http://planet.gentoo.org/
Daniel,
I'm a Gentoo user. Gentoo is a great distribution.
What we all expect is that it remains. If Metro is the best alternative to Catalyst, then the best thing for Gentoo users is that it becomes the official release tool. If it isn't, thank you anyway for your job.
But please don't talk about a "too political" project. It makes me feel that you are looking for a kind of revenge. Leading a project implies politic. When you want to come back to a project you left and announce it on a blog, this is also politic.
What we all expect from you, Daniel, and from you, Chris, is that you continue to make Gentoo better, not to send critics each other. Daniel doesn't HAVE TO coordinate closely with the Gentoo project. Gentoo project doesn't HAVE to integrate any project without debating. Anyway, thanks to you and to every Gentoo developer for having made it such a great distro. Nobody will mistake me, Gentoo spirit is still in Gentoo. So please continue !
Zaccret, I am not looking for a kind of "revenge," but I think it is important to be open about real issues facing Gentoo that have an impact on the community. And I do not mean to be rude, but as the creator of Gentoo, and as the leader of Gentoo for 5 years, I think I am entitled to share my opinions about Gentoo, positive or negative.
From my perspective, much of the Gentoo "politics"/drama is created by the official project - by canceling releases and by not filing paperwork to keep the Gentoo Foundation in existence, for example. These types of action *do* deserve to be commented on and discussed and are important to the Gentoo community. If we try to put a pretty spin on everything then we get nowhere.
Thank God I'm not the only one who recognized Catalyst sucked. I built my own slipstream just because Gentoo OS allowed the ease (something like 10,000 lines of code) of doing so.
The positive thing to take from all of this is that what you're doing *is* noticed by the Gentoo community. I understand your concern for the politics, among other things, within the Gentoo project. In my opinion once a distribution gets too organized or too big it starts to develop a sort of corporate mentality where it takes 3 times longer than it should to get anything done.
Either way, making your own distribution and tools is part of the Gentoo idea, so I'm not sure why anyone is trying to discourage you.
Thank you! I had heard about catalyst and wanted to give it a shot. I went to find documentation on gentoo's site, only to find there was none, at all. Not even an FAQ.
Daniel,
Don't mistake about me. As the creator of Gentoo, I have a great respect for you and I was sad when you left the project.
Actually, this is just a great new for us that you are going to release Metro. I just find it difficult to read your global intentions with Gentoo.
Zaccret - I apologize for the misunderstanding and let me try to explain my intentions with Gentoo better.
I want to give the Gentoo community the tools they need to innovate and collaborate. The Gentoo community includes the official Gentoo project, as well as Gentoo-based distributions and Gentoo users who may want to do something interesting with Gentoo. I want to empower anyone to do cool things with Gentoo. Power to the community. I don't believe that power should only be held by the official project - anyone who has the ability and desire should be able to improve Gentoo, build a release of Gentoo, collaborate with other people in the community, etc.
Hi Daneil,I can tell you that your project is very useful :)
In fact, today we had 24 students
(The Gentoo-Quebec Project) in from of us who wanted to install a Gentoo box and everyone used your Stages and your Portage snapshot, because they are up to date and also it will save a lot of compilation because the official Stages and Snapshot are now a little bit old.
Thanks you again.
Thanks for your continued hard work on these projects!
Hi Daniel, where do you plan to release your Metro program ?
Inside your Funtoo tree or even on an Overlay ?
At Gentoo-Quebec.org we will test your program for sure :P
I would think that this blog announcement would be enough of an invitation for open collaboration on Metro if that's what another developer truly wanted to do. All these lessons on community relations amount to nothing more than taking Daniel's time away from developing and putting it into answering blog comments.
It's great to see Gentoo becoming a great meta-distribution once again. Can't wait to see how much easier it will be to make custom stage4s...
Daniel, thanks for your answer, I really appreciated it. I was worry because in the last days, I've read some posts creating an unconstructive opposition between devs and users.
I'll keep an eye on Funtoo for Metro release !
Thank you for your work Daniel!
You've done a great job with gentoo, and I hope even people like Chris Gianelloni (no offense) recognize your good intentions towards the community.
Even I feel bad reading his comment knowing how proudly he points the fact he's the catalyst lead, a project he didn't improved that much during these years, and complain to you about it? How can he criticize you for doing work on your own when that's exactly what he's doing now? And criticizing you for not sharing to the community when it was you who gave away gentoo copyright?
He and some other devs have more pointless arguments then code written. More "don't touch my code" talk than solutions and willingness to work.
I just wish everyone realized this should be about making gentoo better then putting their signature everywhere they can. How about forking with the good devs untill gentoo dies and pick it up later?
OK it's clear.
Put up your working suit and keep on going.
For[give|get] all bad comments.
Gentoo is my FINAL linux distribution, after working with RedHat,Fedora, Suse, Slackware, etc., and it would be a disaster to spoil it.
I needed to use Catalyst but I could not find any introduction to it. As if it was a closed club for the already initiated.
How glad I was to read about the upcoming Metro.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Daniel, thank you for the strong will and for developing metro. I think you are absolutely right in all your decisions and you do not even have to defend yourself to prove it.
Looking forward to metro,a tool that will make the open source world stronger.
Dont waste your time by reading all the comments and pointless gossip. There sure is lots of drama around gentoo. It has to be a sign of how powerful its impact is on the open source scene
Nice work ;)
keep it up.. I am so glad I have found this going to use your stages for all the gentoo boxes
It sounds to me like you have taken the Linus approach to developing software. That is, you do what you think is important/good and if others like it they can tag along. So you've got your new funtoo distro based on gentoo.
I think it's great, as it is obvious that you are a talented developer and I think this model will work well for you and the gentoo community (and probably eventually the funtoo community).
Hi Daniel (and other readers too :p).
It's been a while since I posted here, but it seems that nearly 9 months didn't change many things in gentoo's world.
I was writing here, in the beginning of this year (1), that dividing efforts was the worse way to deal with gentoo problems. But today what's happening ? Am i misunderstanding things, or is it each day becoming more difficult to collaborate with the devs ? If this is just a political problem (ie fear of the importance you could get into the project if actively coming back into it), then this is only stupid. Or is it a structural problem (= difficulties to communicate generally) ? Then this is a very serious problem. I don't know, but it seems to me that a lot of precious time has been wasted... Again !
The main problem in fact is that, from the trivial user point of view, Gentoo seems to be sinking slowly (friends of mine told me that a few days ago). A lot of ebuilds are waiting in bugzilla : why ? Proxy-maintenance was supposed to solve this problem ! 18 months ago I was answered that developer base was constantly growing (1). Is it still the case ? If yes, why are portage tree and gentoo releases development so slow ? If no, where is the problem ?
In both cases, Gentoo (still) has organization problems. From the user point of view, this is really bad. I have been supporting Gentoo for a long time. I work in a french university, where my whole park is running Gentoo. But today I can't advise anymore my students to use this distro at home. What's next step for me ? If things don't get better in a near future, I'll have to choose another distro. This will not be a disaster for the users, but it will be a personal defeat for me, after 5 generations of students working on my favorite distro...
Maybe is it time to, at last, add a bit more modularity to the organization ?
Hubert
(1) http://blog.funtoo.org/2008/01/gentoo-developer-reply.html
(2) http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/46478/focus=46528
Excuse me Daniel !
But I'd rather have you concentrated on repairing Gentoo instead of excusing at any step with some whining bozo that can't accept criticism. It's their problem, not yours. If they can't accept the facts, well....
well ... i guess funtoo should go official :-). If the official project's team isn't able to keep up, i'd prefer funtoo replacing the gentoo project.
an interesting reading within the same stream of ideas
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10047439-16.html
@anigel
That's exactly how I feel. The last few weeks I've been testing various solutions (mainly Debian and FreeBSD), because of the problems with Gentoo you so well describe.
Gentoo has a loyal core of users and I hope it continues to grow for a long time.
There are times when a deep breath is needed by all involved.
Long live Gentoo !
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