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Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew. I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram. Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future. Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Thank you @drobbins. It's really great to be back to my roots and working with you again! I'm having a really fun time and looking forward to getting to know everyone in the Funtoo user community.

@dutch-master I totally agree. Ironically, I started Enoch (which became Gentoo) when I got frustrated by dpkg in Debian 1.3. Portage has since 'evolved' into something that has a lot of problems that dpkg originally had -- of being very good at telling you why it can't do something but not very good at resolving the problem it's complaining about, or providing a coherent error message when there is a problem. Software tends to evolve this way -- it becomes more rigid over time. The cause is that most engineers will try to make the software more 'correct' and eliminate problems, but they often do this without advancing the architecture and just adding more internal checks. This actually can significantly reduce the usability of the software. This approach becomes much worse when the error messages displayed are not comprehensible by mortals. Despite Portage's strengths, it does suffer from this way more than I'd like. We do have some technical work in progress that should offer some relief for this to some degree.

I'm not sure this is within the realms of the Funtoo dev's, but better conflict resolution for emerge would be a great start. One of the things putting me off Funtoo (and straight back to Devuan) was the issue that portage drops out the moment it encounters a conflict (like multiple packages for a slot, etc). For all its flaws, perceived or otherwise, apt has really good conflict and dependency resolution mechanisms build in. Now, I'm aware there's a different design philosophy behind emerge/portage against apt, but dropping a user back to the cli with a cryptic error message stating a conflict has occurred and masking a package may resolve it and effectively leaving a system in limbo while updating/upgrading is not a great way to experience Funtoo for less experienced users. FYI: I've been using Linux as my daily OS since 2005 and experienced the "Dependency Hell" with Red Hat 8+9 and Suse (pre-Novell days), then I found Debian (Woody) and apt was such a relief. Stuck with Debian until systemd made it impossible (really-old Stable, IIRC Jessie) then eventually switched to Funtoo (2015) before finding Devuan a few years later (2018). Tried Funtoo again earlier this year, but still got issues with emerge/portage so now running Devuan once more. Thing is, I'm not smart enough to be a coder. If I were, I'd be a Funtoo dev for years. But as it is, my contributions are (severely) restricted to signalling something went wrong and that's pretty much it. HTH!