Let's fix Gentoo's problems.

Let's fix Gentoo's problems.

Posted Jan 14, 2008 22:03 UTC (Mon) by csawtell (guest, #986)
Parent article: Gentoo loses charter; Robbins offers to return

I have been using Gentoo since Version 1.2. I forget the exact date but it's been many years.

It's true that Gentoo seems to have lurched from crisis to crisis, but in spite of that perception, for a user, it is a remarkably effective Linux distribution. I look around at other Linux and Unix distribution and have yet to find one which fits my needs better than Gentoo does.

If Gentoo has a problem it's that the developers mailing list has been populated by too many, shall we say, "overtly frank" individuals. It is a truly international forum and suffers from that. Misunderstandings abound. The Americans use taboo four letter words in much the same way as the rest of the world uses punctuation characters. The folks who live East of the Rhine transliterate directly from their mother tongues to English and tell it exactly as it is. The British and Americans are still separated a million miles by their common language. In many ways it's a miracle that the list 'works' at all, but amazingly it does. If everybody took a moment to re-read their words before they pressed the 'Send' button, realized that humour doesn't cross cultural boundaries, and finally put on their elephant hide suits, then the Gentoo developers list might become a happier and more constructive place.

Watching the Google "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)" video should be a condition of list membership.

Recently, a number of very competent developers have found that living in this linguistic cauldron to be a great deal less than fun and have, very understandably, become disenchanted with the emotional atmosphere and jumped out.

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I agree with this.  I've also been a Gentoo user since 1.2.  As an former Gentoo developer, I
would also say that Larry has become a headless schizophrenic.  Yet despite all this Gentoo
(the distro) has miraculously continued to serve its users well. 

Now if we can only fix Larry...