When I’ve wanted to play in some new areas lately, it’s been a real frustration because Gentoo hasn’t had a complete set of packages ready in any of them. I feel like these are some opportunities for Gentoo to be awesome and gain access to new sets of users (or at least avoid chasing away existing users who want better tools):

• Data science. Package Hadoop. Package streaming options like Storm. How about related tools like Flume? RabbitMQ is in Gentoo, though. I’ve heard anecdotally that a well-optimized Hadoop-on-Gentoo installation showed double-digit performance increases over the usual Hadoop distributions (i.e., not Linux distributions, but companies specializing in providing Hadoop solutions). Just heard from Tim Harder (radhermit) than he’s got some packages in progress for a lot of this, which is great news.
• DevOps. This is an area where Gentoo historically did pretty well, in part because our own infrastructure team and the group at the Open Source Lab have run tools like CFEngine and Puppet. But we’re lagging behind the times. We don’t have Jenkins or Travis. Seriously? Although we’ve got Vagrant packaged, for example, we don’t have Veewee. We could be integrating the creation of Vagrant boxes into our release-engineering process.
• Relatedly: Monitoring. Look for some of the increasingly popular open-source tools today, things like Graphite, StatsD, Logstash, Lumberjack, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Sensu, Tasseo, Descartes, Riemann. None of those are there.
• Cloud. Public cloud and on-premise IaaS/PaaS. How about IaaS: OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, or OpenNebula? Not there, although some work is happening for OpenStack according to Matthew Thode (prometheanfire). How about a PaaS like Cloud Foundry or OpenShift? Nope. None of the Netflix open-source tools are there. On the public side, things are a bit better — we’ve got lots of AWS tools packaged, even stretching to things like Boto. We could be integrating the creation of AWS images into our release engineering to ensure AWS users always have a recent, official Gentoo image.
• NoSQL. We’ve got a pretty decent set here with some holes. We’ve got Redis, Mongo, and CouchDB not to mention Memcached, but how about graph databases like Neo4j, or other key-value stores like Riak, Cassandra, or Voldemort?
• Android development. Gentoo is perfect as a development environment. We should be pushing it hard for mobile development, especially Android given its Linux base. There’s a couple of halfhearted wiki pages but that does not an effort make. If the SDKs and related packages are there, the docs need to be there too.

Where does Gentoo shine? As a platform for developers, as a platform for flexibility, as a platform to eke every last drop of performance out of a system. All of the above use cases are relevant to at least one of those areas.

I’m writing this post because I would love it if anyone else who wants to help Gentoo be more awesome would chip in with packaging in these specific areas. Let me know!

Update: Michael Stahnke suggested I point to some resources on Gentoo packaging, for anyone interested, so take a look at the Gentoo Development Guide. The Developer Handbook contains some further details on policy as well as info on how to get commit access by becoming a Gentoo developer.