Today I was feeling somewhat blue, mostly because I’m demotivated to do most stuff, and I wanted to see what it was like to work in Gentoo two years ago.
One thing I read is that a little shy of exactly two years ago, ICQ broke Kopete, just like they did yesterday. Interestingly enough, even though a workaround has been found for Kopete 0.12 (the one shipped with KDE 3.5), there is no bump I see in the tree this time. Sign that the KDE support in Gentoo has changed, most likely.
There is also the whole thing with ALSA problems, which span so many posts that it’s not worth listing all them. The current ALSA maintainer simply gave up on providing something that, at least for some users, ended up being quite important.
And all the work on Gentoo/FreeBSD! Although Javier is doing a huge work now to support FreeBSD 7.0, he’s not prone to blog about it, and you can see that Gentoo/FreeBSD is easily ending up in the “historical” memory, rather than being discussed and tried out by users daily.
What didn’t change at all is my insomnia, it’s almost 2AM and I’m still up. And this time I don’t even have Antiques Roadshow to watch. I’m currently working on xine, just like two years ago.
In general, I think a lot of areas in Gentoo did go downhill from two years ago, rather than improving. While Portage is certainly improved, thanks to Zac, Genone and the rest of the team, and we can see that in the new extended repoman checks, that also helps QA. But the general user support seems, to me, lacking.
This is a direct consequence, in my opinion, of leaving open doors for people who are just driving Gentoo’s energy away, by taking over projects to make them stall, by discussing details over and over and over, by repeating the same request even when people reject it as it stands, and so on.
I hope things will improve in the next months, thanks to a new council that can finally grow some balls, straightening up the situation, but if this does not happen, I’m already preparing for my plan B…