I’m on an Australian Radio…

Last week I was interviewed for Open Source On The Air, an online radio show made by James Purser.

You can download the whole show in either mp3 or ogg formats. Additionally, my good friend Jorge has made an edited version available: Ogg Vorbis, mp3: high quality and low quality.

Read below if you want a transcript of the show.

James Purser But first off, we’re getting into the LA Update and here’s Mark Kowarsky telling us all about Gentoo AU.

I’m speaking with Mark Kowarsky from Melbourne. He’s part of the Australian Gentoo community and we’re going to find out a little bit about what the source based distro is, how popular is and what it’s been up to in Australia. So first off Mark, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Mark Kowarsky I’m currently in the year 11 at high-school. I joined the Gentoo developement team in December of 2005. So I’ve been a developer for about 10 months now. I work with the Forums team to help support people and move spam that we get from the forums. I’m also now a member of the User Relations team and our mission is to improve the developer/user split. As we are a very user community centric distribution, we don’t have the commercial backing, we feel that this is an important part of our role.

JP So, you’ve said that you’ve been using Gentoo for about 10 months now, what drew you into Gentoo?

MK I’ve been using Gentoo for longer than 10 months. I started using it in September 2004. What originally drew me into Gentoo was that I could design a system with specifically the programs that I wanted, very easily, and maintain it indefinitely. So my original criteria were a distribution that had Xfce, which is a lightweight desktop environment, and Firefox (which was at about version 0.8, not many distributions were shipping with it.) And so I started using Gentoo and I’ve been using it ever since. I’ve been able to continually update my box since that day. I’ve not had to reinstall it all and I just love it!

JP Well how big is the Gentoo community in Australia?

MK Well, currently I’m not sure of the actual number of people using Gentoo in Australia. There are only 5 developers who are situated in Australia at this moment and only 4 of them are active and at points I think there a few hundred if not maybe about a thousand users of Gentoo in Australia.

JP So, given the small numbers, how active would you say the Gentoo community is?

MK The Gentoo community is quite active. The Australian channel, on Freenode, that I’ve recently created, it goes through its phases, so most of the time it’s dormant, because people are either at work, or at school or at sleep, but when it’s active there’s a few people talking and lines fly past it at quite a pace. Not quite up at the pace of the Gentoo support channel, which has over 800 people on it at any point in time, but the community is slowly growing. Every day we get, you know, maybe one new member.

JP Now the Gentoo community, as well as other community based OS projects such as Debian seem to be going through some growing pains in the moment. What’s your take on this?

MK Well, I feel that these growing pains… some people take them as been pains more than others. So for me, I personally am not particularly affected by them. So some developers fight on the mailing lists and we have huge flame wars, but it doesn’t affect my enjoyment of helping develop it, whereas with others it does. And I think there’s no easy solution to this growing pains and that’s just something that happens when you have a large group of people and they’re all sharing their opinions at any point in time.

JP One question I do have, I originally started playing around with Gentoo on my server and I’ve been playing around with a couple of things, but I noticed that you guys have only released one official release this year. How does the Gentoo release system actually work?

MK Well, from what I’ve gathered from Release Engineering, what they do, there have actually been 2 releases this year, 2006.0 and 2006.1. They were the first and second releases. And what they do is a few months before the release, they take a snapshot of the tree, which contains all the various packages in it and from that they build up installation cds, which will have a kernel on it and the basic software for installing. They’re also working with the Gentoo Linux Installer team to create one more live-cd, that is more user-friendly and that is easier to create – which comes with a GNOME Desktop on it. And so, from that they then make up various stage tarballs that people can use to install Gentoo or the installation media in the live-cds and there’s also live-DVDs with 2006.1, which contain even more programs on them. So that you’ve have a networkless connection you can actually install a very large majority of the common packages in the Portage tree.

JP Now Gentoo, like Debian, seems to be sparking off different derivative distros, such as Kororaa. I know in Debian there seems to be a small group of people who object to this derivatives, for whatever reason. Do you get the same thing in the Gentoo community?

MK From what I felt on the Gentoo community, people are very happy if other distributions base their work off Gentoo and create their own distributions. The only problem that developers seem to have is when those said distros, the users of those distros, come to Gentoo’s Bugzilla, with various bugs, which is due to software not in Gentoo. So, for instance with Kororaa, because it does XGL which isn’t officially supported by Gentoo, if those users then come to the Gentoo bugzilla, it takes time away from the people working on that Bugzilla to deal with actual bugs, because they have to get through the mess of bugs, which aren’t related to software that they’re using.

JP What are the future plans for Gentoo?

MK Currently, as we don’t have any strong leadership, there aren’t any global future plans, besides just continuing to release two cds every year, improving quality assurance in the tree. But for the projects that I’m working with, which is the Forums and User Relations. On the Forums we’re currently designing a new search engine, which should help decrease the amount of duplicate threads and allow people to find information more easily. And with User Relations we’ve got many new things, we’ve got a planet-like system for Gentoo users, so I’m not sure if you’re aware of Planet Gentoo?

JP Yes, I’ve actually subscribed to it.

MK That’s an aggregate of all the Gentoo developers’ blogs. But there’s also planet Larry, named after Larry the Cow, Gentoo’s mascot, which is an aggregate of user’s blogs and any user who uses Gentoo and whether they write about: Gentoo specific topics or just anything that goes. They can get themselves accepted into that and then other users and developers will read that and it will form a sort of community of users.

JP Cool. Now, if we can just go back to the leadership issue for a minute, this is something as I was saying before. Amongst the growing pains, Debian is sort of struggling with this at the moment, do they need a benevolent dictator like Linus and the kernel or should they continue the community system. What is happening on Gentoo at the moment?

MK There was recently a thread on the development mailing list, which was a discussion about whether we need to increase the amount of democracy, so that everybody votes on everything, and that there are no sort of issues that a few people decide on. And then there are other people who think that we need to simply elect leaders who then make all the strong decisions for us. And they would form a sort of benevolent dictator like Linus or Patrick from Slackware – another example of a successful benevolent dictator.

JP So what was the reaction to that suggestion?

MK Well, about ninety threads followed on from it and so far nothing has actually happened because of it and it’s just sort of just died as a discussion.

JP Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about Gentoo? What’s happening on the local scene and how are you trying to encourage more people to get into it?

MK Well, I’m hopefully soon going to be creating a web site for Gentoo Australia. And from that hopefully I will be able to get some numbers about where people are using Gentoo and my mission will be to create a mini-conf at linux.conf.au, if I can. So hopefully I’ll be able to attract the International Gentoo developers, as well as fitting all the Australian Gentoo developers and a large number of the Australian Gentoo users to come along so that we can have something there. Cause I remember from linux.conf.au that GNOME had a mini-conf and I think Debian did as well and maybe Ubuntu too.

JP Cool. Well, it sounds like you guys, and you especially, are starting to get right into this community building. So what I might do, is I might catch up with you a little bit later on. Are you planning on heading up to the linux.conf.au 2007?

MK Well, I’m not quite sure yet if I’m gonna be able to head up there, but if I can, I’ll try to make it.

JP Well, alright thank you very much Mark for your time and I’ll catch up with you later.

MK Thanks for having me.