Category: Gentoo

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.

This post may piss off a lot of people. I’m publishing what I have seen, that is all. If I’m wrong, I’m happy to be corrected. Daniel started this whole Gentoo thing. And while it was small, he led it. As it happens, Gentoo grew. And it grew quick and fast and beyond all expectations. It grew in size faster than it did in maturity. Yes, I say “it” because I refer to the entity of Gentoo: the collective consciousness of the Gentoo community of developers and users, if you will. The growth was unmanaged. That’s not a criticism, it’s just fact. I’m not sure how the growth could have been managed, to be honest, though I do know that we could have done a lot of things differently.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of talk all over the place about how Gentoo should be governed, how it should be led (if it should be led at all), what its goals are, and so on. And these are good questions, and great discussions to be had. One thing I’ve noticed (and perhaps even I am guilty of it) is the idealisation of the days gone by. To many of us, those were the “good old days.”

Let me put to rest any and all illusions. Those days were frustrating as hell as well. Someone might make a decision in their little sub-project, and then find out later that that decision got overridden by Daniel. A lot of bad blood came out of episodes like that. Hell, Daniel and I had numerous encounters like that. Anyway, there was a lot of back-talking and whispering and just downright frustration with this idea of “all the power in one place.”

Daniel was hip to the fact that the distro was outgrowing itself, so he did his best to evolve with it. He, with a few others, developed the metastructure project, and designated a bunch of “Top Level Projects” that made up the core components of Gentoo. To my recollection there were 6 of those. Each project already had a leader of sorts, and those leaders pretty much became the official advisory board to Daniel: a board of managers, I suppose. All decisions would be made by the board, but Daniel had the power of veto. This point is crucial, so remember it, kids, because we’ll return to it.

Well, that was not enough for some people (3 in particular that I know of for sure, from first-hand conversation and from first-hand confrontation). They idealised a more distributed power structure. Since then, one has changed his mind, one has disappeared entirely, and one is too busy to spend much time on Gentoo. There was a fourth, and he went off to form the Zynot foundation — as a “fork” of Gentoo. My thoughts on the idiocy (zydiocy?) of that episode are not for this posting, but I may expound on that in a later entry.

That’s just a bit of history. I’ll talk about the current state in the next post.

Flame away, if you must.

So, over the past few months, I’ve sent in numerous requests on bugzilla for various packages to be stabled across the different architectures that Gentoo supports. Mostly, they’ve been for xterm and gnucash. In most cases, the early responders to those bugs are the Gentoo Architecture Testers (Arch Testers, or ATs, for short).

These fine people are running stable profiled machines and this is what they do — they test packages that are candidates for stable and report. I’ve had bugs reported back to me through their efforts, and mostly they verify my requests, and make it easier for the architecture teams with commit access to change the keywords.

So, props and a major shout out to all the architecture testers out there in Gentoo land. Your efforts and work are very truly appreciated.

Well, Yahoo! officially broke the story today that 3M is buying my old employer, Brontes. That’s really good news for the people there, I think. And it’s certainly a tremendous opportunity for Dan. Just for the record, I had no idea this was coming, so I’m very surprised (and pleased!) about it. This means that for at least a little while, Gentoo will be running on 3M-owned servers 🙂

As Mike pointed out, Spider is no longer a Gentoo developer. Logically, this makes sense, because he has not done any development for Gentoo in a long time. However, Spider was one of the early pillars of the Gentoo project. He holds an especially poignant place in my heart, because he and I joined Gentoo at about the same time (followed closely by Matt Kennedy). And he and I were the ones responsible for Gentoo’s Great libpng Debacle of 2002. We were just three weeks old at the time, and we happily broke every user’s system. I have talked about this in other fora (I think -core mailing list), but I’ll do it publicly here.

When we screwed up, we realised pretty quickly what we’d done. We’d had the best of intentions, of course. For the record, we unmasked libpng-1.2 to replace libpng-1.0. That, of course, was an API change, and so everyone running anything that depended on libpng (think gnome, gimp, all of KDE) had a broken system. The KDE users got it the worst of all. To complicate matters, someone in the press had just finished installing her brand new Gentoo Linux system (1.0_rc6) with a brand spanking new KDE, and did her first update. Her dismay is probably archived on the -user mailing list somewhere.

Anyway, the point of this story is to echo what Spider said about those early days. We didn’t get beaten up. Users were irritated, but understanding. Our fellow developers were amused, and understanding. Daniel was unaware, but understanding once he found out. Spider, in his forward-thinking, had had an update script in files/ in place long before the unmasking, so the only thing was to inform the userbase about it, and their pain was automatically taken care of (albeit, their pain of waiting was not, but hey, they ran Gentoo). Me, I learned to be very very very very careful about bumping libraries.

And I learned that lesson (gasp!) without being called “stupid” or a “moron” or a member of “the peanut gallery” or any number of derogatory terms that get strewn about like so much confetti these days. Listen carefully, kids, to your Uncle Seemant: mistakes happen. We can choose to use them as tools for learning, or choose to use them as weapons against the people who made them. One is civil.

Spider was part of that civil culture. He turned me back onto Gnome after I’d fallen out of love with it (at the time he started, he’d amassed his own personal overlay with the next version of gnome — of course, at the time, we didn’t call them “overlays”).

I will miss Spider greatly. Even though, he wasn’t active for a long time, it was a personal comfort to me to know that my brother-in-arms was still a part of Gentoo. To me, he’s inextricably intertwined in Gentoo.

Spider, best of luck to you, and I hope that you’ll stick around.

Today marks exactly one month since I started my new job here at StreamBase. This is important for me, you see, because I got this job (I think) largely based on my experience setting up, running and being a part of Gentoo’s Developer Relations team. The thing is, I loved doing DevRel so much that when I had to do coding at my last job I didn’t feel as inspired. I mean, I loved that job and I loved the people there, but the best part of that job, to me, was getting Gentoo in there and making it be a part of their company. As it stands, Dan and Rajiv both work there, and I like to think I played a part in that. There are others who, over the years, did a few consulting gigs there too (and I like to think I played a part in those as well 🙂 ).

So anyway, the DevRel thing. I’m an evangelist now as my job, which is great, because I’m being paid to do something I truly enjoy. And in celebration, I made my first blog post for work today. It’s basically an invitation to watch a webcast on using SQL for Real Time applications (which is the business that StreamBase is in, sorta). So, for any of my 8 readers who are interested in what we do, and what Complex Event Processing is all about, and stuff, please come on by and watch the webinar. I’ll keep this space updated for when I make some more visible changes and things.

The elections have started. They will end on the 21st of October at midnight UTC. For the next two weeks I hope all the eligible members of the foundation will cast their votes. For eligiblenon-dev voters, the best way to do that is to email the election officials:

• codergeek42
• fmccor
• gustavoz
• nattfodd

It’s best to make sure they all get your email.

I won’t be making any campaign promises. Actually, I won’t be campaigning at all. Instead, I’d like to highlight the strengths of each of the nominees:

Renat is a budding law student. He has a knack for legalese: he wants to pour over documents and contracts and make sure Gentoo’s interests are well taken care of legally, with respect to copyrights, licenses, intellectual properties (no conspiracy theories, please, copyrights signify intellectual property in my eyes), etc. He has Gentoo’s best interests at heart.
Grant, I don’t even need to say much about. If you don’t know about him and what he does, you’ve been living in a rock since about 1998. Grant is probably Gentoo’s patriarch figure in the sense that he has the wisdom, the insight, the cool-headedness that it takes to be the lead of a large project such as this. Grant has never been mentioned as the lead, but spiritually, he definitely is: he advised every council, and he’s always been on the board of trustees. He doesn’t fight, he gets along with everyone, and he’s fair.
Paul was one of the architects of the original
metatructure project under Gentoo Linux. He was also named to Gentoo’s initial board, and re-voted last time. Now that he has more time, I think he’s in a position to serve Gentoo Foundation well. He has the insight and smarts to see the forest and the trees: he can very fairly evaluate things on technical merit and other merits — he sees the big picture very well.
Mike is a hidden hero. Mike has basically saved lives, without credit, for a long long time. Mine, especially. Through Gentoo’s many many metamorphoses over the years, Mike and I have ridden them, but he more gracefully than I. Some of those changes damned near killed me, and he saved my life in those. Mike cares so deeply about Gentoo that I can not even begin to express it. He is pragmatic and practical, and yet so very human about his approach to Gentoo (and the changes within).
Chris has already been doing the duties of his trustee-ship for a while now: he actively protects Gentoo’s intellectual properties, by spotting those who infringe upon it, and then stopping them. He’s not a bully and mean, but he’s firm and approaches people well. He also cares very deeply about Gentoo (and despite the fact that he and I have had very recent disagreements, please have no disillusions about my very great respect and admiration for him).
Stuart has a dream: he wants to gather Gentoo developers at conferences and conventions. In Gentoo, we’ve always talked about this sort of thing, but nobody has ever taken it on. This is a slightly controversial subject for some people, but I believe Stuart has some very strong points for this idea. I think it would be great to meet a lot of the Gentoo developers (and users!!) in person. I could go broke at such a thing, though, for the sheer number of beers that I’ve promised people over the years 🙂

well that’s it, ladies and gentlement, those are your trustees. My own strengths are that I am sometimes funny, sometimes serious, and I do care tremendously about this Gentoo, as though it is my own child. I can’t promise what I’ll do this year (except for put Renat, hopefully, in the driver’s seat for the legal stuff and help him organise and put it all away).

Now please, go vote your conscience.

Stefan,
yes we can avoid it in the future. We can start by not officially hosting anything with license violations.
As Stuart noted, licensing is critical to FOSS. And quite honestly, as a trustee, I would be 100% hypocritical if the Foundation discovered someone violating any of Gentoo’s licenses, if we continued to distribute the devmanual in its current form.

To briefly outline my thoughts:

1. The license violations — every contributor needs to be acknowledged on par with every other contributor
2. The document, if it is to be considered official, needs to actually be official:
   • Its sources need to be on Gentoo controlled infrastructure
   • Its branding should comply with Gentoo’s branding standards

Note that being official, means that Gentoo owns it. We do not own something that resides on some other server and whose access is restricted to everyone except the people in control of that server (who are not, for the most part, Gentoo developers). Also note that the branding issue solves the license violations.

So, despite the inconvenience, I believe it was a correct thing to remove the dns pointer to it, to limit Gentoo’s own liability in the license violation. The correct fix is to implement the items I listed above.

Flame on!

We’re going to be a few hours late on the voting, but it will be two weeks from the moment we start, regardless. I dropped the ball, and the date snuck up on me. I’m collecting a list of all the eligible voters right now, with help from KingTaco and antarus with those things. After that, I’ll get KingTaco to do the required stuff on woodpecker for the current eligible devs to vote. For eligible non-devs we’ll set up an email vote, where they’ll email the election officials their votes for counting. The nominees are posted on the gentoo-nfp mailing list. At the moment I’m still sorting out which ex-devs are eligible to vote.

I’m sorry for the delay. I’ll post an official note to gentoo-nfp with my apology and status etc.

Once in a while, you come across a a fantastic information piece that’s top-notch in presentation. This guy had me giggling at 1 in the morning, and I learned stuff from that post (which is why I was up in the first place).

You know, all this talk about communities and getting along got me thinking about something. By the way, that segue was sponsored anonymously. I would have to say that the community that really impresses me is Django. Their user mailing list is just top-notch as is their irc channel (#django on freenode). There’s a proliferation of blogs and sites out there with helpful guides and tips, and everyone (bar none) is always helpful.

Maybe the Django devs see it, maybe not, but from the outside, it’s loud and clear: the community they’ve built around django is a great community to participate in.

I’m building a site for my wife to use at her work. It’s basically to rehash the entire thing and put a CMS around it and make it easily manageable, etc etc. I’ll put the code up once I’m done for people to criticise and critique. No telling when that will happen, but I’d like to take this opportunity to thank: praetorian and tomaw on IRC, Chris Long on irc and email, Andy Dustman and Malcolm Tredinnick and drushell on the mailing lists, and wow, everyone on the irc channel and the blog sites (way too many to name, because it’s like everybody, basically).