Clarifying my role and some docs updates

First let me say, thanks for the welcome lisa 🙂

I received a few comments on my blog, in irc and an email or three on the redesign already. Most of them were very encouraging and I thank everyone for the kind words. I can’t take credit for the design though, that was done by Aaron Shi. Gentoo sponsored a contest to redesign the site. There were five contestants that were picked by the Gentoo developers and Aarons’ design won the poll that was posted to the forum for the Gentoo user community to vote on. His design won by 46% and the runner up had 20%.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-227589.html

My role in this is simply to implement the new design in the XSL template that powers the Gentoo web site. While I’m doing that I’m also going to make the XSL a little more friendly to administer so that future Gentoo devs will have an easier time making changes. The current XSL evolved over the last few years in an ad-hoc manner and this time around it will be planned out.

Some of the emails and comments on irc were suggestions for how the design should be changed. I have no power over that. I was told up front before being offered dev status that I cannot change the design in any way other than usability issues (accessibility, cross-browser support, etc..). Besides, I’m not an artist. I can’t even draw stick people without a ruler and I’m slightly color blind. 😉

If you want to give your ideas and suggestions please join the www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list by sending an empty email to www-redesign-subscribe@gentoo.org and send your suggestions and ideas there. Aaron and the powers that be are subscribed to the list.

—————

I got a lot of work done on the kernel configuration guide today. I should have a first draft for the interested kernel devs to look at in a day or two so keep your eyes peeled for it. bug #94955

———-

I wrote a new FAQ in the Forum. It covers the RSYNC_EXCLUDEFROM variable in make.conf. We get a lot of new threads started asking this question and it isn’t in the portage man page so a FAQ was in order. Hopefully this will cut down on all the duplicate threads.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2551222.html