I think AllenJB explained very well why Sabayon isn’t Gentoo:

Sabayon is considered ‘close’ to Gentoo, but not necessarily ‘very close’ (atleast in my view). The reason for this is because Sabayon uses its own versions of some pretty major packages (browsing through their overlay, I see packages like grub, xorg-x11 and xorg-server to name just a few).

The problem is not that we (the Gentoo community) don’t want to provide official support, it’s that we can’t (beyond a certain point). Sabayon provides its own version of many packages and these seem to (sometimes) lag behind the official Gentoo tree. A case in example: The other day someone came into #gentoo complaining that nvidia-drivers wouldn’t install with glibc-2.6. Glibc-2.6 no longer includes the nptl and nptl-only USE flags, but the Sabayon package was still looking for them. There’s nothing the Gentoo developers can do about this - it would require commit access to Sabayon’s overlay. There’s nothing much most users can do about this - The only suggestion I could make was “ask in #sabayon or use the package from the official tree”.

This is a simple, obvious example of a change that caused problems. There could easily be many much more subtle problems that break systems in a much more subtle way. Most people in #gentoo will happily provide support for Sabayon users, but if it becomes suspect that the problem lies in using Sabayons packages, then there’s frankly nothing we can do as we don’t know how Sabayon’s packages differ, with most of us being Gentoo users, not Sabayon users.

As for providing official support on Bugzilla, a Sabayon users first point of call must be the Sabayon developers (via their Bugzilla). If the Sabayon developers then determine that the problem lies in Gentoo’s tree, they should report it to the Gentoo developers (via Gentoo’s Bugzilla). This is the same way things work with Gentoo vs upstream. Users report bugs on Gentoo’s Bugzilla, if the developers determine that the problem lies with the program itself, the problem will then be reported to the packages developers (AKA upstream). There’s a hierarchy of responsability here, the model of which is generally followed throughout the open source world. (To take the hierarchy further, the packages developers may determine that the problem lies with a library that they use, in which case they may report the bug to the library’s developers (further upstream)).

There are two seperate questions here, with seperate answers:

1) Can Gentoo’s developers provide official support for Sabayon. The answer is no - Sabayon users should report problems to Sabayon’s developers, who will then report the problem upstream if necessary.

2) Can Gentoo’s community provide unofficial support for Sabayon. The answer is yes - up until the problem is determined to be (possibly) Sabayon specific - and it does.

To translate this on to the Debian vs Ubuntu example: If an Ubuntu user asks for help in #debian, they’ll get it, but if the Debian community determines the problem is possibly Ubuntu specific, they’ll tell the user to go back to the Ubuntu community as there’s nothing they can do. If an Ubuntu user reports a problem to Debians bugzilla, the Debian devs will tell them to go talk to the Ubuntu devs because there’s nothing they can do - they have no influence over the Ubuntu packages.

In summary:

 

* Sabayon is NOT Gentoo. Sabayon is CLOSE TO Gentoo.

* The Gentoo community does provide unofficial support for Sabayon users.

* Sabayon users should report problems to Sabayons developers, who will then report the problem upstream (which may or may not be the Gentoo developers) if necessary.

* If it’s a Sabayon specific problem, then only people who know Sabayon (ie. the Sabayon community) are going to be able to help solve it.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 11:18 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.