Month: October 2006

Emanuele officially announced his retirement from the project last night. Real life duties are catching up with him, and he’s suffered a loss of motivation within Gentoo, and so he’s decided to move on. This saddens me greatly, because in his short career at Gentoo, he did some pretty amazing things: he cleaned up xterm, he set the clean up of kerberos into motion (which my long time readers will note is something I utterly failed at), and posted various and miscellaneous fixes all over the place (I’ll link to his CIA stats when that site comes back for me).

Anyway, there’s a trend of developers leaving or wanting to leave due to a loss of motivation. I hope it stops soon, because I’m getting sick of writing all these farewell blog entries — I prefer to write welcome messages.

So, any of you kerberos using Gentoo readers, please talk to me about how we can continue Emanuele’s good work in that area. I’m very very fortunate that Thomas pays attention to our xterm bugs, but Emanuele helped him too.

Mood: sad/slightly discouraged.

I remember xmms as well. I used to use it a lot. In fact, it used to be one of my favourite applications. I was even friends with one of the upstream devs (I used to maintain Gentoo’s ebuild for it for a while). Well, two years ago or so, upstream decided that the xmms2 project was sexier. I even got a glimpse of an early version of xmms2, and I was slightly less than impressed. For one, they moved to a different build system that didn’t play well with portage and me at the time (that may have changed by now). For two, they moved to a client/server model. Now I had to fire up two things to listen to music.

In retrospect, however, the XMMS upstream devs were being quite forward-looking. For example, they were the first project I’d heard of that was using dbus to communicate and send messages. All this happened before Gnome 2 came out, by the way. However, XMMS (1) was dead to them. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it. As a result, our patchset for it started to grow like mad.

In that light, I can completely understand Diego’s sentiment and his desire to extricate xmms from the tree (or shall I say, exorcise it from the tree?). My only complaint would the method behind his madness, as it were. As popular as xmms is out there, I think Diego did a disservice to its users, by not warning them in advance of this happening. Luis had barely announced his retirement from the project, when xmms and its plugins got masked for removal.

In the interim, Luis has decided to just go on vacation instead of quit. When he returns, he will contemplate exactly how to take care of XMMS. My guess is that he’ll stick to his original plan of putting the thing into an overlay.

So, to the users out there who are in some way pissed off, please consider a few things. While a lot of devs may agree with you, and certainly everyone sympathises with you about the loss of a favourite package, please consider that we don’t want to become the upstream maintainers for packages. The removal bug has become a place for random users to insult Gentoo developers, which really does not help anyone.

There are two ways to help yourselves and the community:

• take over the xmms code and become the new upstream
• embrace audacious

aybe you’re not talented enough to start hacking on xmms. That’s ok. But then let it go, please. The power you do have is in helping the audacious hackers to fix bugs in the code. You think it takes up too much memory? Well, then, report that upstream! Talk the audacious developer, who seems to me to want to go out of his way to improve the audacious experience!

Please, though, enough with the “you developers have your heads up your asses” comments. The problem is a simple one: we don’t have the time and the resources to become the upstream maintainers and resurrect a dead package.

You know, Dan left Gentoo a few months ago. And he was another who left with a whisper rather than a bang. Dan (danarmak) was already a developer when I joined. At the time, I couldn’t stand KDE. I was a fluxbox user. A few months prior to my joining, Dan had basically become Gentoo’s KDE team. He took care of all the version bumps, he made the decision (a very good one, by the way) to have the /usr/qt and /usr/kde directories in which to house the installations of Qt and KDE, respectively.

He was the classic ideal developer. He tested relentlessly, he made patches, he shot bugs, he communicated with upstream to ensure fixes and patches went back and forth. He helped people on the mailing lists, on IRC, via private email. Dan always made you feel like he maintained KDE just for you. He’s an incredibly nice person. Incredibly nice. Talking to Dan always put a smile on my face and cheered me up. (I only hope to have had a similar effect of him for a fraction of that).

You know how you love the concept of eclasses? The idea behind eclasses is that you don’t have to duplicate code. You just shove it into eclasses, inherit them in your ebuild, and you have access to them. That’s how come Ciaran was able to make the excellent versionator eclass, and how Bart Verwilst (verwilst) (another old time dev) made the flag-o-matic eclass. The first eclasses, people, were the KDE eclasses. That’s right, kids, danarmak invented the very concept. A month into my joining, I’d tried (and loved!) KDE, thanks to Dan. During one of those nights, Dan asked me if I would like to see “object orientation in bash”. Boy, did I! He pointed me at the kde eclasses (portage didn’t have native support yet). What an exciting idea! Granted, it’s not *real* object orientation, but I don’t have to preach the concept of eclasses to you, really. (I will, if you argue too much, in a future post).

Shortly thereafter, I took over the perl ebuilds because they were lagging and bugs were piling up. Well, I asked Dan if these eclasses would help ease the burden of perl module maintenance. He agreed they would. I presented the case to Daniel Robbins, and he liked it. Now, not only KDE, but also dev-perl were using eclasses. So Daniel threw in native support into portage itself.

And that, kids, is how come my closing dev-perl bugs for perl module updates became a mass influx of bugs for more perl modules, because people just used the eclass (and had to code nothing, basically). That led to the idea of g-cpan, which attracted Michael Cummings to the project to make g-cpan a reality, which led to him being our Perl team. That, in a nutshell, is how KDE led to Perl.

That, in a nutshell, is one snapshot of one small set of contributions that Dan Armak made to Gentoo. Two years ago, Dan went on hiatus because duty called: he was obliged to join the Israeli military for a tenure. That tenure is almost up, but he might be called again. Dan decided to leave Gentoo, because he just didn’t know where life would take him in the next few years.

Well, I’m here to say that I have a candle burning for him to return. As far as I’m concerned, Dan Armak will always be welcome back to Gentoo.

PS Thanks to spb for inspiring me to write this article. It was one of the easiest I’ve ever written.

A few developers were retired from the Gentoo project in the last couple of weeks. I’d like to acknowledge those people here for a moment.

First up: Sascha (cybersystem). Sascha was 14 when he first joined Gentoo. He was immediately put in charge of our mailing lists and went on to set up our jabber system and maintained a few packages. At the time he and Jon were the youngest developers on our roster. And, I make no secret — they were both exceedingly trustworthy and dependable. Sascha and I became friends during his tenure here, though his interests had begun to diverge out of gentoo a couple of years ago. I’m sad to see him go, but I believe him to be full of potential, and I know he’ll meet with only success in all his ventures.

Next up: Brandon Low (lostlogic). Lolo and the third person below (wait for it!) joined Gentoo at around the same time in mid 2002. They both attended the same school (IIT — that’s the one in Illinois, not in India), in the same year. They were friends, and during the years they became my friends as well. Lolo did many many many things during his time year, but he might be best remembered as the kernel maintainer for a while (gentoo-sources and for those whose memory goes back enough: lolo-sources!). I think lolo felt increasingly out of place in the growing ecosystem in Gentooland (not unlike a lot of us), and he started focusing on his interests outside of Gentoo, but within the linux community (he’s still active on LKML, I believe). Again, my best wishes to him, and hope for nothing but success for him.

Finally: Nicholas Jones (carpaski). Carpaski took over portage maintenance from Daniel Robbins back in 2002. Before then, he had been sending patches to Daniel relentlessly for various fixes and enhancements. Finally, Daniel handed carpaski the reins to portage and let him be. Carpaski did very very well with it. He even expanded the team to include Jason Stubbs and Marius Mauch. to whom he delegated portage related tasks. Together, the three of them figured out plans for portage maintenance as well as next-generation development. Due to time and real-life constraints (like working for a living), carpaski eventually became a silent member of the portage team. He was elected to the Board of Trustees last year. He was on the initial board as well, when Daniel created it. Nick finally retired from Gentoo once his tenure on the Board ended. Nick, wherever you are, I hope you’re well and I wish only the best for you as well.

These three were good friends to me, they were my confidants, and they are very talented people. I’ll be watching their progress in the next months and years, and I will always be here for them.

Good luck, gentlemen.

Well, I did what I said I’d do last night. I started drinking the epsom salts mixture. Let me warn you, the damned stuff is bitter. Pretty nasty. The only way to do it (you have to drink three-quarters of a cup) is to throw the stuff back. Just chug it. If you sip some water right afterwards, the water tastes sweet. So that’s pretty good, and a sip is enough to remove the taste.

At about 10:20 or so I squeezed one and a half grapefruits (a little over half a cup, a little under three-quarters of a cup) into a jar. I added a half cup of that olive oil (organic, cold-pressed, extra virgin) into the grapefruit juice (or maybe the other way ’round, I don’t remember exactly), and then shook the stuff vigorously to mix. It wound up fairly liquid. Again, the secret is to chug the stupid thing. It didn’t taste bad — a little sweet. Grapefruits are usually notoriously bitter on my tongue, but not last night. There was a hint of olive flavour though.

Right after chugging (I chugged at the bed), I lay down on my right hand side and fell asleep. Conveniently, when I side sleep, I do it on my right. I thought I felt contractions or something, but I think I was just imagining it. I slept fairly comfortably, actually. I woke up at 5, as usual, but went right to back to sleep again. I woke up at 6 as well, but by then I was feeling a little nauseated. And the flavour of olive oil kept wafting up in my breath. A little icky, that. At about 8 I got up and had another drink of the epsom salts drink. By 9:15, I started what would be the first of many forays into the, um, office.

ICKY BIT WARNINGL So, here’s the thing. They say you’ll see pea green stones or something floating at the top. Well, they don’t lie. There were thousands through the day. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t expel any big stones. I guess we’ll see in the upcoming months whether this stuff is real or just boogaboo. I’ll have my verification blood test this week (the whole gluten thing). And then the week after will be another liver cleansing, though I won’t fast for that. I will drink the apple juice, but life will go on as normal.

I’ll keep you all posted on how the next cleansing goes, and how the blood test goes next week.

Thanks for reading me, everybody 🙂

Follow how I got here in the in the first place

Edit: added navigation

So let’s catch up quickly. Daniel started Gentoo, he led it, Gentoo grew and attracted all sorts, including (and especially?) those who would rather see Daniel not in power. I have a theory: some of those people who lobbied for distributed power structures were actually after being in control for themselves. It was certainly true of Zach (he admitted as much). To be honest, it was sort of true with me, as well. There were times when I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Daniel to step aside for a while and let me drive things. There, I admit it 🙂

Anyway, the momentum for distributed power started building (I believe largely due to back water conversations rather than any largely shared sense of unhappiness). After that, there was little choice left for Daniel but to relent. So Gentoo Technologies, Inc. gave way to Gentoo Foundation, and the Gentoo Managers gave way to the Gentoo Council. And of course, Daniel gave way to the Board of Trustees (13 in number). Various proposals happened in between, of course, to not let any one entity have too much power. So managers had to be neutered in order to be on the council (a note about this later).

And this brings us to the status quo for the last couple of years. Nobody allowed to “have” a vision for Gentoo. Actually, I think many people have visions for their projects, very few have a vision for the distribution itself. And of those, nobody has the power/blessing to see that vision through. There’s a big power vacuum, a complete state of anarchy. Democracy has brought to us that everyone can have a voice. Thus people believe that they should shout, no matter whether they make sense or not.

The new thinking is that the Council itself should have a head (told you we would come back to that point). Part of the thinking is that the anarchy is good. It hasn’t destroyed us, that’s for sure. Maybe the dictatorship did almost destroy us. I don’t know, to be honest. What I do know is that it’s a lot more agonising these days, with endless discussion on endless discussion because of endless discussions about endless tangential points to the original endless discussions, ad nauseum. At least when the buck stops, you can feel a little bitter but at least you know it’s done, and you can move on.

The point of bitterness for me is that two of those three who first advocated the idea of socialism/democracy to Daniel in the first place only succeeded in substituting one problem for another, and then not bothering with trying to fix either problem. I believe the best direction for Gentoo is to split itself into a core with overlays, as I’ve mentioned before in other posts.

The beauty about the old days that most people seem to miss for some reason was the size of the Gentoo development community. It was as efficient and friendly as it was precisely because of the kind of intimacy that is inherent in a small group. And in all honesty, that sort of happens already, because people tend to only care about the projects in which they have direct involvement — be it the amd64 architecture, science packages, clustering, gnome, whatever. Most of those devs lose nothing by having their own out-of-portage overlays. Hell most people with @gentoo.org could probably even keep that address (or a derivative like @contrib.gentoo.org maybe, who knows).

The core group of devs would be people who make packages and programmes that are crucial to a running Gentoo: baselayout, kernel and sys-*. Even portage itself should be in an overlay — with a party on the core team to determine the requirements for acceptance as an officially sanctioned package manager.

Things would work, because overlays could be given a lot more independence and a lot more visibility. Right now they are all overshadowed by what’s in the tree already. Instead, overlays would create competition, and thus increase the quality of submissions. The barriers to entry in our current system are high. Overlays reduces those. Anyone can enter — it’ll take a lot more quality and skill to be accepted as official (requirements to be determined).

Those are my thoughts. I’ve tried not to slander anyone, but feel free to take issue with me.