Month: March 2007

Time passes so fast… Today is my fourth anniversary as a Gentoo developer. I’m using Gentoo on the PowerPC-platform since the 1.4-days in 2002, when I first heard about it. And as the PowerPC-installation was a big pain at that time, I helped out making it better and sent in some patches for ebuilds. After a very short time, Gerk made me a developer, so that I could commit the patches myself.

I think, it’s time to sum up my activities within Gentoo:

• PowerPC
  • Starting with patches for Mac-on-Linux (which is now more or less in Gentoo’s hand, as JoseJX adopted this project after more than one year of just laying around), I stabilised a lot of packages and worked on the installation instructions for the PowerPC documentation.
  • Later I helped out pvdabeel with the release, as he was short in time during his thesis-period; now I’m still the one who works on the release, but unfortunately with less time for the 2007.0-release.
  • I’m still the so-called Strategical Lead for Gentoo/PPC, but only as nobody else wants to do that job and that a Gentoo project needs such a position to fulfill the requirements for being an official project. This team really does not need both an operational and strategical lead. One position would be enough.
  • Genesi sponsored a Pegasos and an EFIKA. The Pegasos just built again the G4-release and I use it quite daily for testing PowerPC-packages, as this is my only strong PowerPC-machine left. I will spend more time with the EFIKA once I finished my diploma-thesis…
• Documentation/GWN
  • I helped out in the documentation team with translating into my native tongue. Some time later I became the leader of the German translation team and could bring the documentation into a good shape, but handed over this job to dertobi123 (who gave it to grahl last year).
  • Then I worked on some English documents and the XML/XSLT for the website generation. Mostly small tweaks for a better layout, but I added an XML-checker into CVS as some devs committed broken files and broke the whole webpage…
  • I made some contributions to the GWN and even assembled it completely for a couple of times in 2005 and 2006 when the GWN-editor plate was not available. But I did not want to do that job weekly and so I’m happy that wolf31o2 does it now.
• CVS and SVN server
  • Somehow our infrastructure-team learned in 2003 that I was working on a quite large CVS implementation during my part-time-job. And as there was no CVS maintainer for Gentoo I received access to the server and took care for it from then on. This is a job I still do, as it does not require much attention. It just works 🙂
  • In 2005 we added SubVersion for Gentoo own projects to this server. This was a quite hard job for me, as I was neither an SVN admin nor user, so I had to read quite a lot of the documentation. But trapni helped me a lot and in the end this is a service which also just runs and does not need much attention (beside the big server move we made two weeks ago).
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