Gentoo News

Note: this announcement was originally made on January 13, 2009. As you may remember, it's all part of the process of transitioning to weekly installation media builds. Preston Cody contributed the original announcement.

A few months ago the Gentoo Release engineering team changed the way that releases are done to simplify, automate, and provide more current release media on a more regular basis. One of the consequences of
this is that the LiveCDs are no longer being released. This leaves the installer with no place or function any longer. The installer developers have all moved on to other projects, leaving the GLI in an
unmaintained state. We can no longer offer support for the 2008.0-r1 LiveCDs for x86 and amd64, though we expect it to work for those that use it. During this project's five year existence, it has been both a pride for Gentoo and a source of controversy. The Gentoo Handbook is still the official installation method for Gentoo. For those still seeking to do automated gentoo installs, please see the Quickstart project at http://agaffney.org/quickstart.php.

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter has previously featured Nova, a free Linux distribution based on Gentoo. It looks as if the project, which began in 2007, is finally coming to fruition.

Several other international news agencies have picked up the story, including Reuters, Heise Online, and The Register.

We've always called Gentoo a metadistribution: we give you all the tools you need to create your own distribution. Nova will be one of the biggest distributions based on Gentoo; it has the backing of an entire government!

Gentoo developer Hanno Boeck was recently interviewed by the FSFE.

In the interview, Hanno discusses his Gentoo work, software freedom, other development areas, and more. It's an enlightening interview, so be sure to read it!.

Summary

Gentoo is made up of 251 active developers, of which 42 are currently away. Gentoo has recruited a total of 677 developers since its inception.

Moves

The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:

• None since December 2008

Adds

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:

• Michael Münch joined the German documentation team
• Theo Chatzimichos joined the KDE team
• Markos Chandras joined the KDE team
• Alexey Shvetsov joined the KDE team
• Rudy Grigar joined the Infrastructure team
• Alex Legler joined the Ruby and Security teams

Changes

The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:

• Tobias Klausmann is the new Alpha Arch Team lead
• Patrick Lauer joined the forensics, KDE, and Python teams
• Friedrich Oslage joined the LXDE team
• Sebastien Fabbro joined the Python team
• Donnie Berkholz left the science, high availability cluster, and high performance cluster teams
• Andrey Kislyuk joined the high performance cluster team
• Peter Alfredsen joined the video team
• Raúl Porcel joined the Kernel and s390 teams
• Ben de Groot joined the desktop-wm team
• Zac Medico joined the tools-portage team
• Olivier Crête joined the gstreamer team
• Heath Caldwell left the kerberos team
• Jim Ramsay joined the vim team

The Gentoo Council held a meeting on February 12, 2009. The items discussed were:

Nontechnical issues:

• Secretary: Should the council have a dedicated secretary? Previously dberkholz fulfilled this roll, but he became busy. Because fulfilling the secretary duties can distract from the meeting, a dedicated, non-council member secretary is ideal.
  Conclusion: tanderson (gentoofan23) volunteered and is the new secretary. Logs and summary are to be posted on the -council mailing list. If no objections to it are raised in 1 day, it is posted to to council page.
• Elections: Should there be staggered elections every 6 months where half the council members stand for reelection?
  Conclusion: Leave as-is, elections every 6 months is too cumbersome. Full elections will be held once a year.
• Lack of nominated candidates: What happens if there aren't enough candidates nominated to fill all the council seats?
  Conclusion: If the pseudo-candidate '_reopen_nominations' appears in 7th place or higher those candidates that rank above '_reopen_nominations' will be the current council. A second period of nominations will be opened for the remaining council seats.

Technical issues:

• Prepalldocs: Should the 'prepalldocs' be allowed in current EAPIs?
  Conclusion: Prepalldocs is banned in current EAPIs(0,1,2). It should be removed from ebuilds. Betelgeuse will make QA checks for repoman.

Open technical bugs:

• GLEP 54(-scm package version suffix): There are two approaches to the problem of version ordering with so-called 'live' packages, '-scm' and 'properties=live'.
  Conclusion: No decision. The council cracked the whip on Luca(lu_zero) and he's going to handle the issue.
• GLEP 55(.ebuild-$eapi ebuild suffix): Should .ebuild-$eapi be approved?
  Conclusion: No decision. Tiziano(dev-zero) will be handling this bug.

Open nontechnical bugs:

• Code of Conduct: No discussion.
  Conclusion: No decision. Donnie(dberkholz) will be handling this bug.

The complete log and summary are also available.

The Gentoo Council meets twice every month to discuss important technical issues that affect Gentoo as a whole. The next meeting is scheduled to be held on February 26, and everyone is welcome to participate - #gentoo-council on irc.freenode.net at 2000UTC.

With the retirement of council member Markus Ullmann due to time constraints, Gentoo held an election for one open seat.

Tiziano Müller was chosen for the 2008/2009 term.

The council for the remaining of the term will then be:

Donnie Berkholz (dberkholz)
Mark Loeser (Halcy0n)
Petteri Raty (Betelgeuse)
Luca Barbato (lu_zero)
Tobias Scherbaum (dertobi123)
Doug Goldstein (cardoe)
Tiziano Müller (dev-zero)