Wow, that title sounds pretty gloomy and not entirely meant as a news header. It’s true but it was never declared.

Let’s start out by looking at the b.g.o. 206455. Check out the header information on that bug. Let me reproduce the interesting bits:

Perl 5.10.0 was released about a month ago. I attach modified ebuilds and
patches that I used to install it successfully (?) on my system

Reproducible: Always

Opened: 2008-01-17 19:39 0000
Current Status: New

In case you didn’t catch that, check out the bolded text one more time. That’s right, it’s been about 18 months since perl-5.10 was released and Gentoo still does not support it. How could a source based distribution that used to pride itself on bleeding edge support possibly fall so far behind?

Simple: the herd maintainers, both of them, have basically abandoned Gentoo.

This is interested and saddening for many reasons. I’m a long time user and supporter of Gentoo and it pains me to see it fall. In my opinion, Gentoo was the only distribution to get package management correct. I loved being able to test bleeding edge software before everyone else, including Debian and RedHat.

This situation also shows 2 problems with open source projects that you would not typically exist. First, maintaining distribution supplied versions of Perl and CPAN modules is loser’s game. It’s nearly impossible to update all of those ebuilds as fast as the developers of the modules themselves. g-cpan was a terrible project that never really worked well and no one wants to take over (as you can see from some of the recent comments). What I’m taking from this is that CPAN authors themselves are the most likely candidates to keep their modules building and installing since they’re doing something very similar already.

It also points out that with any project, there needs to be some level of satisfaction. It’s apparent from the herd’s (not so) recent commits that they lacked the desire to continue. This could stem from the historically poisonous Gentoo developer community, the difficulty in maintaining the ebuilds, or real life interference.

What can we learn from this? How can we possibly improve the situation? These are difficult questions and it’s heartening to see that concerned parties are finally starting to ask them publically. I think the first thing that needs to happen is to stop asking “where is perl-5.10″. It won’t be released on Gentoo by the herd. I’ve had to live with that for 18 months and now everyone else needs to as well. What we can do is try to improve the tools we have available, fix their problems, and write new tools to fill in the gaps. We need tools to help distributors with the ever-growing nature of CPAN. No one knows what needs to happen for that yet. Time for asking “where is it?” is over; now is the time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

perl-5.10 on Gentoo should become a case study on how open source projects can succeed and fail. Gentoo itself is a case study with developer relations, but that’s a talk for another day.