> > > I've caught a whiff or two lately that Gentoo is declining in
> > > popularity amongst users and developers. Is it all in my head? I
> > > personally still love Gentoo.
> >
> > there are always several phases in the life of a distri.
> >
> > Beginning, when it becomes 'cool' and a sudden surge in users, some time of
> > high popularity, a decline, and at the end, only the users who are
> > really 'the right ones' for that kind of distri are left.
> >
> > So the 'always using the cool thing' users are gone and the 'we are using
what
> > the cool guys were using' crowd is leaving now. So what? Are they important?
> > No. At some point ubuntu will suffer the same. And then the next cool distro
> > de jour.
> >
> > Some decline in user interest is normal - and a healthy process. Because it
> > removes the 'I use it because it is cool' and 'I use it because everybody
> > else uses it' type of users.
>
> I'm thinking this over a bit more, and it seems like the best thing
> for Gentoo (or any distro) is a lot of users. More users must mean
> more active developers, and more active developers must mean an
> increased rate of growth for the software.
Well, I must say not all users really add to the distro in any way...
Every user does add to the distro because they make it more popular,
and, generally, a more popular distro will have more active developers
than an unpopular distro. Active developers make the distro. For
example, I submitted this bug about a mod_perl-2.0.3 version bump on
11-28-06, and there hasn't even been a reply yet:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157239
One way or another, this is a (big) problem of not enough active
developers. Gentoo needs more users so it can get more active
developers so we can get a better Gentoo and a continually up-to-date
Gentoo. We very well may have to adapt to survive.
- Grant
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