As one who has done software and hardware testing on a professional level, I think misconceptions abound about what “testing” really entails, and how it works.

That being said, let me make it short and sweet.

1. Testing something thoroughly takes a LONG time.
2. Testing is very tedious
3. Testing is VERY boring.

It involves *many* regressions, many passes through the same application, doing things repetitively in as many different environments as you can. Trying to get something to break, and figure out how you did it. This all depends on how the test case is written.

In testing you follow the test case.

Now, for Gentoo applications to be tested as they deserve, we need help. As users, you can’t just rest on your laurels and ride the wave of package releases, and bitch when uber-new Gnome 3.8 doesn’t work right with your 123123123 different optimizations. Use sane optimizations, and *HELP* us test these applications.

Perhaps Red Hat, with their deep pockets, has a dedicated testing department.

Gentoo isn’t in that situation. We need to use the resources we have, and fortunately you, the userbase, are a huge resource.

As a IEEE student member I had the privaledge to hear one of the engineers from RedHat come talk in last september or so. He was on of their benchmarking guys who came and gave a good talk about different benchmarks, how they can be cheated, and what they actually mean. He also gave a short rant on the pentium 4. After the presentation, I just had to get his opinion on Gentoo Linux. He replied that he just barely didn’t bash Gentoo in his presentation. He told me that “all that optimizing doesn’t make that much difference” and that “they [developers] don’t really test their stuff.”

The first comment doesn’t bother me at all since I’m tempted to say the same thing. I have yet to see someone on the forum say that a single application loads faster or performs better with aggressive CFLAGS/USE settings. This is part of the Gentoo Ricer stereotype — all that optimizing for a performance gain, only noticeable with a benchmark. The /other/ half of aggressively tuning /etc/make.conf is customizability. That’s what /should/ be the image of Gentoo — a Linux that’s even more customizable than Slackware that makes applications easier to maintain.

But along with that maintainence comes the second comment, which really hurts. Our dev’s don’t test Gentoo-related software!? Are you joking? If they don’t test it, why do we have package masks? Why is gentoo.org such a large website? Why do we even have a bugzilla? What’s the purpose of #gentoo-dev?

The answer is simple: users go ahead and install masked packages that don’t work, or don’t work well. I’ve been having my fun this week trying to make PHP and mod_php for Apache work again — a frustrating experience that shows me why I’m never fooling around with unstable packages again.

How many threads can you find on the forum where users, like myself, are saying that PHP died on them when they “emerve -uaD –newuse world” unsuccessfully tried to install PHP5. Generally speaking, these users are sometimes inexperienced and haven’t read the doc’s on how to use portage correctly.

But on the other hand, we have brilliant, enlightened users waiting for a piece of software to become unmasked for way to long sometimes. I’ve been waiting for Valknut/DClib to get unmasked since January and I’m getting tired of waiting.

So this is a sort-of-related problem with no end in sight. On one hand, users are having to wait for sometimes unreasonable times before packages get unmasked, hence the opinion many other-distro users have that Gentoo is slow to get packages out, but really it’s because Gentoo devs are testing those same packages. On the other hand, we have users going ahead and installing those packages, which are taking too long to get unmasked, at their own peril.

As for being embarrased about Gentoo: not a chance here. Slashdot kiddies try to bash Gentoo, but hey, it’s Slashdot and most of them are hopeless newbies anyways. If it’s Slackware…well it’s Slackware. We go from the ground up too, but we do it better. If it’s Linux From Scratch…well at least we know they won’t look at us funny when we talk about CFLAGS. If it’s another applications’ forum/list, then people need to get over their prejudice against Gentoo. If, say, the Apache developers started hating against Gentoo then we should just tell them that we’re just one more Linux distribution to support. Gentoo represents pretty much every platform and kernel, so any developer that doesn’t want to support Gentoo’s efforts is saying they don’t care about having support for many platforms and kernels. If anything, we should get loads of _respect_ for our flexibility regarding almost hardware/software configuration, not to mention customizability, and never to mention performance :)

I believe (and I know that I fall into this category more often than not) that in point 2, alot of times, it is due not necessarily to not knowing what they are doing, but to wanting instant gratification. Yes, I do understand that it is the unstable/testing branch, which is why I rarely complain about (most) things these days, however some do not. I am proud of my Gentoo systems, I wouldn’t use any other distrobution, I like the flexibility of it. I like the fact that if I don’t want something on my machine, a simple USE flag means that I don’t need to put it on there. The irc channels have been more than patient with me over the past couple of years, and the documentation is (normally) first rate. The documentation brought me here, the ease of use makes me stay.

There are some general observations to be made about how the Gentoo-dev community looks on the Gentoo-user community. Firstly it’s clearly two communities now a days, and that is bad. When browsing forums.gentoo.org you find loads of “unofficial” scripts and tools and stuff created and kept alive by the “users”. But it is very rare that any of these projects get any apreciation from the dev community, and thus side projects like bmg are spawnded.

One thing that constantly keeps nagging me, is that it’s such a high barrier of entry to start develop anything in gentoo world. The occational ebuild and patch on b.g.o is easy, but there should exist some infrastruture to boost developemnt efforts and actually encurage and lead “n00bs” into productive developers.

I think that Gentoo seriosuly has to address this issue. There shouldn’t be an elite developer community serving some stupid user community with tools and then try to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot all the time.

The first remedy should be to create a plan. We has to have a presice defenition of what the heck it is we want Gentoo to be. Then we must form the community into an optimal echosystem to achive this goal.

I’d be the first to say, we do not want the users from Mandra, Xandros or Linspire, Gentoo could and should never have that as a target base.

Gentoo is about the community, the distribution in it self is rather ‘unsexy’, so that is what we should focus on.

Step two would be to spend som more effor and energy in thinking about how to integrate and improve all the gentoo forums: bugzilla, forums, wiki , bmg, script repositories and so forth.

Users have to become devs, all of them.

I the Gentoo experience of a gentooer should be one of development, personal development. New gentooists are to be viewn as first year caddets, they need training and they need som handholding, but they’ll grow and integrate into the community as productive members with the right support.

From the outside, I think I’d like Gentoo to push even further in its effort to stay close to the upstream distributions. Gentoo is not much about integration and distribution. With the right kind of infrastructure and support in Portage, gentoo could be THE development platform.

This is turning into an OT rant. So I’ll stop, but in short, the problem with “embarrasing” users is that we dont guide the correctly.

I have nothing to say about #3, but in my opinion, I am disappointed about your feelings on #1. I am certainly proud to be a user! Gentoo is great stuff and I have been using it for about 2-3 years now. Got it running on my wife’s pc, and each of my kids pcs;and my kids are 13,12,9! Needless to say my desktop and laptop are on Gentoo.

I am on of the very silent minority:I just use it. I don’t post on the forums, mailing lists, and never show up in irc. I just use it because it works and works well. (When it gets borked, invariably I know it is *my* problem.) In fact, I had a long debate with myself whether to leave a comment or not.

But #1 bothered me so I broke my habit of not saying anything. Be proud man, you all make one hell of a fine distribution.

And it keeps getting better. I really don’t play around with my system that much. But this last week I wanted to try out wordpress and mediawiki and saw this thing called webapp-config which I had never seen before. Took me a while to figure out, but damn that is handy.

So thanks for all the great work and the great distribution! I’ll go back to my cave now.

(lol, I stared at this post for 10 minutes debating with myself whether to click on “Say It”. What the hell….here goes…)