Gentoo in crisis



Last week, the Gentoo project entered the lowest point of its 7-year old existence. The single most telling statement attesting to this fact is this brief excerpt from the current issue of Gentoo Weekly News:



The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:

* Daniel Robbins (drobbins) AMD64 team



The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:

* Daniel Robbins (drobbins)

Yes, this is the same Daniel Robbins who founded Gentoo Linux back in the year 2000 and who left the project in 2004 for personal reasons. He officially re-joined the Gentoo development team two weeks ago - only to resign a few days later. The reason? Strong personal attacks by some of the current developers of the project.



Take this mailing list post by Ciaran McCreesh. Replying to another developer's request to treat Daniel Robbins with respect, he resorted to the following tirade:



What kind of response do you think anyone else would have received had they started repeatedly attacking a project when they didn't even know what that project was, repeatedly tried to interfere with the management of a project when they don't know who is involved with or managing said project, repeatedly posted all kinds of outright lies after having been told that something was untrue and repeatedly resorted to ad hominem attacks in a technical discussion? I'd say that, all things considered, people are showing Daniel an awful lot of respect...

Now, let's review the credentials of Daniel Robbins. After working as a Stampede Linux and FreeBSD developer, he eventually founded his own distribution - Gentoo Linux. By the time he resigned from the project some four years later, Gentoo had become the fastest growing Linux distribution of all times - a much-loved project with a wealth of original ideas, truly comprehensive documentation and excellent package management system. At the same time, Daniel Robbins, an expert kernel and Python hacker, contributed nearly a hundred well-written Linux articles to the IBM developerWorks, including various topics covering the Linux Professional Institute certification exams. Although certainly not without his faults, Daniel Robbins has become one of the best-known personalities the Linux world has ever seen.



Contrast that to the credentials of some of the current Gentoo developers who are so quick to attack the former Chief Architect at every opportunity. Even if they have written useful code that has improved the distribution, they have a very long way to go before they reach the same status as their former benevolent dictator. Furthermore, one has to wonder: with the amount of time some of them spend flaming other people on the various mailing lists and planet blogs, do they actually have any time for coding?



This highlights the complete ineffectiveness of the current power structures at Gentoo Linux. If a person who repeatedly engages in personal attacks against other developers is permitted to remain with the project, then there is something wrong with the way the distribution is managed. Yes, disagreeing with other developers on organisational and technical matters is perfectly fine; launching personal attacks against anybody who has a different idea is not. We see an awful lot of disagreements on the Debian developers' mailing lists as well, but rarely, if ever, we see such staunch personal attacks as we've been seeing on the Gentoo developers' mailing lists.



Talking about Debian, it's worth noting another interesting point. While the Gentoo social contract was loosely modelled on the one written by Debian, the more observant among the readers will notice the lack of any outward statements that would define the goals and priorities of the Gentoo distribution. As an example, the point 4 of the Debian Social Contract clearly states that: " We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. " In contrast, Gentoo has no such clause anywhere in its Gentoo Social Contract and the word "user" is hardly ever mentioned.



Conflicts and disagreements are a natural part of any large and democratic organisation. Ironically, it was Daniel Robbins who first pointed out the dangers of working with "freaks", as he called them, in his article Making the distribution, where he described some of the events that eventually lead to the collapse of Stampede Linux. Many other open source software projects also suffer from large scale flame wars from time to time. However, what distinguishes Gentoo from other such projects is the fact that it doesn't have a mechanism to deal with poisonous individuals. Or to be more precise, the existing mechanism do not work, since the present structures don't have the necessary powers to be effective in solving conflicts. As a result, over the last few years Gentoo Linux has degenerated into a loose structure that is increasingly run by a small, power-hungry clique that resents any attempt to change the current status quo.



As such, Gentoo has become a distribution without any clear goals, without the drive to implement new ideas, and without the ability to deliver products that its users want. Quite a sharp contrast to a few years ago when one couldn't take part in an online distro discussion without somebody coming out with a strong recommendation for Gentoo!



Can anything be done to reverse the situation and to return Gentoo on the path of its former glory? Without the radical overhaul of the Gentoo power structures, it's highly unlikely that anything positive will be done to Gentoo in the near future. With the developer turnover at an all-time high, there is little chance that even the minimum of release and bug-fixing goals will be met. But since the current project leaders are unable to see the rapid downfall of the distribution and unwilling to take any radical measures to reverse the trend, there is little hope for the project. Unless they wake up soon, Gentoo Linux, once the most innovative and refreshing of all distributions, will become nothing more than an average, buggy operating system characterised by endless bickering among the few developers that will bother to remain with it.



