How big stable is Gentoo community 984

Geico Caveman

He was working for Microsoft as an Linux expert, but some months ago he quit his work there and went to another company. What Mr Robbins works with don't affect Gentoo, don't think he does do any real contribution for some years (I may be wrong here, it's time since I hastily read some docs about him).

I would say it's quite big, specially if you do count all the arches as a big community, of course most people uses x86 based machines, but the PPC community ain't that small either. The number of Gentoo newsgroups is low, which IMHO is a draw back, of course there is the web forums, but gentoo.org is blacklisted at many mail providers, so it can be difficult to register as you don't get the confirmation mail. There are a great deal of IRC channels, one for each arch and a few more, all of them you can find at freenode.

The activity is quite high at the bugzilla too, not everything is about bugs, you can find requests and example ebuilds for not yet supported package.

At least the developers has some good relationships toward developers in the Debian world and there been direct sharing of patches. The only distro that isn't higly regarded by the developers I think is ubuntu, as those have behaved quite badly at some Linux shows against Gentoo.

I don't know more than mupper that is based on Gentoo, it's really not a distro but a rescue CD for PPC based machines. The community seems to grow, at least at Gentoo PPC and Sparc, don't hang around those x86 as people seems to know each other a lot less.

Lately there has been put on work to uniform all the docs, IMHO a bit bad as you get x86 examples when you work with other arches, like more the old docs that was specially written for each arch and could differ more than todays docs.

-Aho