In one of the NY Times crossword puzzles last week, the clue for one of the answers was “Blog post, often”. The answer was, of course, “rant”. (For those that don’t know, i’m addicted to the NYT crossword puzzle, and have collected every puzzle i’ve done for about the last 3 1/2 years now.) Anyway, prepare yourselves for one of those “oftens”.
What spurned this on was lots of things, but today it kinda summed it up when someone in #gentoo-dotnet on freenode said:
<anonymous -guy-i-know>: don’t take this the wrong way, you’ve been kinda touchy recently, everything ok?
You know what? I have been. And i don’t like it. Beyond the usual RL (Real Life for those acronym impared out there) stuff, which has been bizarre and stressful, Gentoo stuff has been irking me and frustrating me in odd and annoying ways. Here’s a list of some of the things that have been bothering me recently. Having a b*tchfest is by no means something i like doing, and that’s not really the point of this post (although it’ll certainly act as one). What I’m more looking for is people’s opinions on maybe *why* some of these things are the way they are, and what can be done to avoid them.
- Being embarassed about Gentoo while participating in other public forums - It’s really sad, but I find myself not wanting to associate myself with Gentoo when talking in various IRC channels, on mailinglists, whatever. That sucks. I’m really proud of what Gentoo accomplishes, and how hard everyone involved in the project works. I think this is directly related to point #2.
- Vocal minority of users tarnishing “Gentoo” as a concept? - This point may make some people pretty angry, might not, i’m not sure. I think the first issue is directly related to a vocal minority of our users, whom most recently have been coined “ricer users”, whom seem to be willing to try the latest package.mask, BMG, love-sources, etc packages/kernels, without any concept of consequences or desire to actually know what they are doing or fix things themselves. Gentoo has always been “tinkerers distro”, but in my mind that concept only works when the people doing the tinkering actually have at least a basic knowledge of what they’re bloody tinkering with. I had someone in #mono complaining that they were having all these bugs recently with gentoo, and were fed up and going over to using ubuntu. Of course, the next comment they made was the fact that gnome-2.10 wasn’t compiling for them, but that it worked fine on ubuntu. If you’re gonna be using a package.masked and ~arch package, you’d better d*mn well have on your hard hat, and be ready to actually research and fix any problems you run into. Not to get too off-topic or rambling, but how do we keep users like this from “ruining Gentoo” in the eyes of everyone else? Perhaps Gentoo makes it *too* easy for people to try out things they shouldn’t be? Maybe we should remove all our docs about using package.unmask, package.keywords, and PORTDIR_OVERLAY, strike all posts about this from the forums, and kill on site anyone uttering the word “love-sources”? (I’m kidding, but sometimes I get so frustrated that it sounds like a good idea).
- In-fighting among devs - This one probably is one of those innevitabilities in life, but it still really gets to me. Having what i’d consider a pretty diverse interest in all-things-Gentoo, I end up getting involved in stuff all over the board in Gentoo. One of the things that consistently irks me is the bickering and downright hate displayed between some devs. Maybe i’m just too much of a hippy child or something, but I get really frustrated and upset when people start throwing insults, threats, accusations, etc on the mailinglists and IRC channels, etc. “Can’t we all just get along?”
Anyway, that concludes this edition of “Latexer complaining out load to lots of people who don’t care”. I’m gonna go get mono-1.1.5 into the tree now. Please feel free to leave comments here, although the viagra and texas hold ‘em spam might obliterate your feedback.