Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

There’s growing interest in a recent DistroWatch.com article, where they’ve started asking reasonable questions about whether or not Gentoo is in trouble. Folks (including Gentoo devs, alas) are hammering DistroWatch for the article, but tbh I think they need to look closer to home.

If you’ve got a bunch of folk, known to be associated with Gentoo, making statements about how they’re quitting over this, that, and the other, then expect to see articles like the DistroWatch article appearing on the ‘net. Couple that with blogs complaining about things and public fights on -dev, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

Then, imagine you’re outside Gentoo, and all you get to hear from the Gentoo project is stuff like the above. We know that it’s only a small part of the Gentoo story, but right now it’s the only part that anyone gets to hear about. It’s inevitable that folks outside Gentoo are going to be feeling that we’re only giving off a doom and gloom vibe.

They’ve got nothing else to tell them otherwise. Gentoo (as a project) needs to start getting its own message out there. Otherwise the vaccuum that’s left will inevitably fill with stuff like this.

Kristi and I have just come back from the lovely town of Skien, Norway, attending the php|vikinger event organised by Zak Geant. It’s the first time I’ve attended an event like this, and I thought that Zak did a good job of running the unconference with the mighty power of Thor.

It was great to meet Sebastian for the first time, and to pick his brains about PHPUnit test suites. I confess I spent most of the weekend hacking away on my tests, rather than actively joining in the sessions; I now have unit tests for most of my Datastore PHP library. Need to track down and fix a PDO segfault, but otherwise it’s getting to the point where it’s actually useful. I hadn’t seen Hartmut’s PECL_Gen package before; I’m looking forward to when it can throw exceptions back into PHP (grin).

If you’ve never been to Norway before, it’s well worth the trip … especially if (like me) you’re used to how dirty and grey the UK can be. Don’t worry if you don’t know enough Norwegian. I think we met just the one person who didn’t speak English, and we’re pretty sure they were tourists too!