FOSDEM is over and I'm back home now. That was a really interesting weekend!

I love meeting fellow developers in real life and FOSDEM gave the opportunity to meet
lots of them. Listing all of them would certainly exceed any bandwidth limits. Anyway I'd like to emphasize I enjoyed talking to the SeJo and the guys he hosted (Mike & Mike, Chris & Chrissy), and as well hacking with Stephen on some nifty new Paludis feature.
Also, going on this trip with Tobias was excellent, just as back in 2006 for the UK
meeting.

I enjoyed most of the talks, though I admittedly only went to the
Gentoo DevRoom talks. My own talk went very smoothly I must say, and this really
made my day (I had been really nervous because this was only my second talk in english!)

If you're interested in my talk's slides then you can download them right
here.

Hrm... trying to get comfortable again in my blog. It's been some uhm... much time since I last used it . Anyway:

2 days ago I wrote a little gimmick for adjutrix's --keyword-graph action to show unused versions. (Mind you: this does not consider profile masks nor reverse dependencies (yet))

As you will see, potentially unused packages are marked with an asterisk.

I also hacked up a new action for adjutrix to list all potentially unused versions in the tree. At the time of my last run, this was a total of 4147 packages with unused versions,
a total of 7111 unused versions. (Just for comparison, the tree has currently around ~23k versions )

I started to weep out versions for packages which are listed as 'maintainer-needed'.
It turned out that of 115 unused packages 113 packages could be freed of any potentially unused version.

Further I cleaned many unused version in sci-* packages; from originally 97 packages only 49 have unused versions left.

For the rest of the tree I'll contact the resposible herds and maintainers for further clean-up.

Aron Griffis started the self-presentations for the upcoming election of members of the yet to be Gentoo Council. I considered this to be a really nice idea, and as I was nominated for this election as well, here we go:

My life as a Gentoo Dev started on April the 11th 2004 when I was recruited by Jason Huebel to help the Gentoo/AMD64 Project (then 'porting team') with the increasing number of bugs. Since that time I also joined the Gentoo Scientific Project where I help to maintain mainly libraries (blas, lapack and derivates). Nowadays I serve (together with Mike Doty and Simon Stelling) as one of the Gentoo/AMD64 head monkeys and help Aaron Walker and others to get app-admin/eselect working.

My non-Gentoo live mainly consists of studying physics at Dortmund University, currently being in my second year and merely a month before pre-diploma. In my current job I assist a befriended graduate student with his research on 'Diagnosis and localization of discrete damages by measurement of eigenfrequencies'.

I would enjoy serving as a member of the Gentoo Council and I will appreciate every vote :-)

Much has changed since my last post:

Ciaran has been suspended for 60 days from working on Gentoo. He took it the hard way and broke as many bridges as possible. One of those bridges is eclectic.

That's why Aaron (ka0ttic), Tom (slarti) and I forked it. The new project is called eselect and lives already happily on Gentoo Infrastructure. Kudos to Lutz Henckel from berlios.de who shipped us a complete dump of the old eclectic repository, that's quite some service ;-) Additionaly, Sven (SwifT) has provided us with one of his most recent additions to the Gentoo Documentation Project: He's called Shyam (fox2mike) and will help us by XMLifying our docs and keeping them up to date.

At the moment, there is no app-admin/eselect in the portage tree, only app-admin/eclectic. We will change that together with our first release (0.9.4) of eselect.

Also, a big "thank you guys - i simply love you" to Christian (trapni) and Lars (Pylon) for setting up svn.gentoo.org, thus implementing GLEP 36. Some projects already use it, some will probably move soon. However, it is not meant as a replacement for the existing CVS service. Subversion shall rather be another possible choice of managing your project. Heh, once again, Gentoo's all about choices! :-)

Yeah, it's out now. Have a look here and here and of course here for a brief overview about this project.
Interested Developers can have a look here to learn how to write an eclectic module.

I must admit, I wouldn't have thought we would succeed in writing eclectic completely in Bash, but we did. The framework is there as are several modules of varying complexity.

We're still using Berlios.de to host eclectic, but i'm still hoping that GLEP 36 will be implemented any time soon, so we can finally move to Gentoo hosting. After all, this is an effort by Gentoo Developers aimed at Gentoo.

And SpanKY said he'd touch its source as soon as it hits Gentoo hardware. I wonder wether we should start worrying ;-)

This morning at 0600 i finished the last catalyst run. The stages are already uploaded to the server and the last cd (universal livecd) is currently hitting my homedir on toucan. Beside some minor tweaks to the directory layout for the livecds and writing the release notes this should be finally done.

In the end, I kinda enjoyed it (really!), though it took so long and though I kept cursing at catalyst and genkernel for a long time. Chris Gianelloni (wolf31o2) and Tim Yamin (plasmaroo) have had quite some work with
the AMD64 release (and with me in special :-) ). Thank you guys very very much!

I already spoke with Jason Huebel and got his blessing (and probably prayers) for taking over release engineering for Gentoo/AMD64 in the future aka 2005.1 :-)