雄文一篇，看完了眼睛湿呼呼的
收件箱 gentoo
Aron Griffis
致 gentoo-dev
更多选项 7:55 (7小时前)
This is kinda bloggish, because it’s basically a transcription of an
IRC monologue. My apologies if it’s hard to follow… Nonetheless,
I’m interested in how other developers feel on the topics I bring up
below.
There have been some really interesting points brought up recently
about “where is Gentoo going?” I have been wondering that myself.
Some people seem to think that Gentoo has the potential to be an
enterprise player. I have not responded directly to those people, but
I wonder if they know what they mean. I have worked in the enterprise
UNIX market for 6 years. My code is running in places like NASA
mission control, 9-1-1 call centers, and most of the telephone
carriers. I’ve produced patches on weekends to close $800m deals.
I now work in hp’s Open Source and Linux Organization, mostly on RHEL
and SLES, so I have a good idea of what it takes to be an enterprise
player.
In my humble opinion, Gentoo is missing too many points to be an
enterprise Linux. We commit to a live tree. We don’t have true QA,
testing or tinderbox. We don’t have paid staff, alpha/beta/rc cycles.
We don’t really have product lifecycles, since we don’t generally
backport fixes to older versions, requiring instead for people to
update to a more recent release. We don’t have, and probably will
never be able to offer, support contracts. We support as wide a range
of hardware as the upstream kernel, plus hardware that requires
external drivers; we don’t have access to a great deal of the hardware
for which we provide drivers. We understand when real life gets in
the way of bug-fixing, because all our developers are volunteers.
I think that attempting to take Gentoo in the “enterprise” direction
is a mistake. I think that we are a hobbyist distribution. This
doesn’t mean that we should not strive to meet some of the enterprise
goals. Those things can be important to hobbyists too. But I don’t
think we should be aiming for corporate America.
I don’t even understand why that goal appeals to people. Let other
distros go there! I want Gentoo to run in people’s homes, in student
dorm rooms, etc. Places where people want a fun distribution that
they can tailor and work on easily.
I like the idea of Gentoo on alternative arches and in embedded
environments. Not because I want Sony to start using Gentoo on
walkmans, but purely because the idea of running Linux on a PDA is
cool. I’d like Gentoo to be a place where neat things are developed.
If RH or SuSE (or another for-profit Linux vendor) wants to take some
of those developments and use them to make a profit, that’s fine with
me. We’re over here having fun.
Also I find it amusing when people say that Gentoo exists for the
users. I think that is wrong. Gentoo exists for the *developers*.
It’s our playground, and it’s the reason we use a live tree rather
than switching to an actually sane approach. The users are cool
because they point out bugs, help solve problems on bugzilla, suggest
enhancements, provide patches, and notify us of package updates.
Sometimes they become developers. But the truth is that Gentoo sees
improvement and maintenance in the areas that appeal to the
developers. And that is why Gentoo exists for the developers first,
the users second.
Regards,
Aron
–
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer
