12/15/2006
Gentoo Council… Gentoo Trustees…. Who’s really in charge?
Can we just officially say every single Gentoo developer is part of a “leadership” position? After reading Diego’s post on the planet, I’ve come to realize that a lot of us do find this terrible corporate / Congressional Committee system of overlapping priorities and overlapping goals. Look at how Release Engineering fought Seeds. Why do we need so much organization? Are we about the organization and the titles that people get from being on these committees? Or are we about the code?
I say we’re about the code. It’s time to trim some of this fat off. Take some simple organizational structure like Debian has and adopt it. Who is the voice and face of Gentoo? Larry the Cow? I’d like one person every year elected to be the voice of Gentoo. None of these silly requirements, “you have to be this tall to vote..” (Texas Governor) or was that “you have to be a developer for a year to vote..”. These knew devs are passionate about Gentoo and want to get involved, let them. And let them not get burnt out by our insurmountable mountain of bureaucratic tape that some of our past developers have.
Filed under: 
2 Responses to “Gentoo Council… Gentoo Trustees…. Who’s really in charge?”
Leave a Reply
December 16th, 2006 at 11:35 am
I’ve actually disappointed in you on this one Cardoe. I would of thought that you knew that the Trustee’s and the Council are entirely seperate in their goals. The Council is about the technical issues within gentoo and projects that are under that.
The foundation is handling of incoming money, the trademarks, funding of projects from the cash coming into the foundation. Proper legal procedures for the group, and other administration details.
The council doesn’t deal with these things, or shouldn’t….Each one has their purpose and is independent of the other. There isn’t any overlap like you are talking about as far as I’m concerned.
December 19th, 2006 at 4:40 am
> Take some simple organizational structure like Debian has
> and adopt it.
this can’t be serious i guess
My impression is that: if the organizational structure of Gentoo would be like Debian’s, you would wait 2 years for a recent kernel in stable and 4 years for a recent glibc to be supported among all arches.
The organizational structure of Debian is far more complicated, bigger, centralized and “home grown” than the one of Gentoo in my eyes.
And new developers would simly not be allowed to touch stuff that breaks other stuff.
However, at the moment we have pretty much developers breaking stuff in Gentoo portage. Which is a bad thing and a good thing.
The good thing is that they are actually allowed to break stuff. They learn to be better devs this way. The bad thing is that breaking stuff usually makes users unhappy and should be kept at a reasonable level of control and supervision … and i guess that’s what the structure is meant to be: people are not free any more (as they were) to break everything everywhere any more.
I can’t say much about the politics you mentioned though. Perhaps because i learned to avoid it
-Alex