Month: October 2005

Today, I had a funny conversation with a user. He popped into #gentoo-portage and asked how he could compile a whole system with static binaries.

<user> how exactly, do i build static binaries using portage?

well, and since I couldn’t think of a FEATURE or something, I just said

<blubb> user: you don’t at all
<blubb> because nobody would want that 😉

Which he didn’t seem to like very much:

<user> well clealry, i do

Why the hell would one want to have a whole system with only static binaries? It seems like a huge overhead to me. I thought perhaps there’s another, more elegant way to fix his problem. Asking why he wanted static binaries, I got this reply:

<user> you do not need to know why.
<user> this is irrelevant

Bummer. Am I working for the NSA now? “I can’t tell you, otherwise I’d have to kill you” comes to mind.

Anyway, I told him that I can’t help him then. He asked whether hacking CFLAGS would work, which I negated. After that, he finally told me what he wanted:

<user> i am placing a single application in a chroot
<user> i would like a single binary for that application
<user> so i dont have to write perl scripts to copy library dependencies into the chroot
<user> when it is, as i understand it, totally redundant
<user> and even if they do share the same memory space, maybe i dont want that?
<user> (the libraries outside and inside the chroot)

I still didn’t get why this guy wanted static libraries, but I pointed him to ROOT. Then, I thought I knew why this guy didn’t want to tell me his obscure reasons:

<user> as i understand it, it is also slower to dynamically link an executable than to statically link it

A-Ha. A ricer. Take a deep breath and tell him that it’ll only eat up his memory and hd space but not making anything really faster. Oh, and don’t forget the

<blubb> that’s why really nobody would want static linking 😛

<user> however, maybe i dont want this application to share the same executable memory space as other applications?

Now I started to feeling assed. This guy wanted me to tell him how to do something that is not possible, and he didn’t want to tell me why he wanted it, so screw him.

<blubb> maybe. but then you’ll have to go your own paths
<blubb> gentoo is not about beeing the users’ slave, it’s about beeing useful 😛

Obviously, he didn’t like my last statement at all.

<user> as ever
<user> if you actually want to make a vague attempt at securing a gentoo system
<user> which is really rather embarising
<user> y’know?
* user has quit (“leaving”)

It seems that certain people didn’t get that open source developers aren’t their personal slaves but free people with their own needs.

GLEP 41 got rejected in it’s current state (CVS revision 1.2). I’m quite happy about that, since it wasn’t just a ‘No, go home’. The council pointed out a few flaws and told us, that if we update it properly, they’ll vote on it again. In contrary to my last blog entry, I’m pretty optimistic, as I see space for improvements again. Also, the meeting was fun, I expected it to be much more formal and boring.

Back to GLEP 41 again. The updates we need are:

* ATs get a user@${notyetknown}.gentoo.org. When they become devs, they’ll just get a forward to the @gentoo.org address, so that shouldn’t be a big issue.

* Longer probation period: The council asked that the probation doesn’t get shortened, i.e. it should be at least 1 month. This is a valid point, and since most of our current ATs already have more than a month, this isn’t a big issue either. Also, a probation period should be introduced before the user gets AT, to see whether they will actually stick around or just go fetch a cool email address and then disappear.

* A clarification on the ‘r/o access to gentoo-x86’ term: ATs shouldn’t need an account on dev.g.o or cvs.g.o

So, we’ll get into round 2 next month.

So long,

Looking at my environment, global warming seems to get more and more noticeable. Not only because we had one of the warmest autumns this year, where you could actually still go (sun-)bathing, but also because people seem to be everything else but cool.

When I joined Gentoo, I was shocked how many arguments there were between Gentoo developers on the -core mailing list. One told me that it always was like that and that it’s hard to ever change that. “You’ll get used to it.” some embittered devs told me. They were right, i got used to it. But still, after a bit more than a year, I’m shocked how fast people can get aggressive, how little is needed to make everybody throw slum at each other. Instead of beeing technical, people get personal, instead of staying on-topic, they start to discuss absolutely unrelated things like how one does have to understand the terms ‘open source’ and what the difference is between free software and open source software.

I’ve never posted much to -core, as I always hated it. Sometimes more, sometimes less. At the moment, there’s nothing I could think of which I hate more, except drip coffee. When reading -core, it rather reminds me of a talk show than of a mailing list where technical issues are discussed in an appropriate manner.

What I find very irritating is, that on other mailing lists, devs usually are friendly, stay on-topic and don’t get personal. Why is this? Is it because -core isn’t public? It looks like some people do know what good manners are, but only use them in public. I really wonder whether these people fart when eating at home too, just because there’s nobody looking at them.

There is evidence that Gentoo is slowly falling apart. If you don’t think so, just have a look at the project listing. Gentoo is cut apart in all kinds of projects, which don’t really interact. To be honest, I know nearly nothing about other projects and their environment.
Another point is, that we can’t trust each other anymore. Gentoo is far too big to be a family, it’s probably rather a corporate group. None of both is bad per-se, but it’s definitively bad when you want to be a big family, but are a corporate group. What can we do about it? First, people should probably ask themselves “do I really care?” when replying to a thread. Second, people should ask themselves “do I know the context of the problem?” If both questions can be answered with ‘yes’ without hesitation, then go send your mail. I think that would massively improve the signal/noise ratio on lists like -core or -dev.

Another, probably easier solution would be to split the general mailing lists. That way, people would have to subscribe themselves to a specific mailing list, before suggesting ideas that don’t affect themselves but do affect other people. I still can’t understand why MIPS devs ‘ask that the amd64 and x86 keywords are merged to improve the quality of the x86 tree’ on a huge mailing list without first talking to the people will have to bear the consequences afterwards. Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t find this very smart.

The above is just one example out of thousands. Are we unable to communicate accurate? It seems so. What can we do about it? I don’t know, beside stopping to communicate at all.

Interestingly, the same problem seems to affect user<->developer communication as well. A very nice example is this one: http://gentoo-stats.org/. But that’s by far not the only one. Again, just one example out of thousands.

Before writing this blog entry I thought about retiring as a dev. But still, I don’t feel bitter enough to do so. So I just continue to try to ignore all these problems, since I don’t know a solution to them.