* [gentoo-commits] gentoo commit in xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
@ 2009-07-30 12:54 David Abbott (dabbott)
0 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: David Abbott (dabbott) @ 2009-07-30 12:54 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-commits
dabbott 09/07/30 12:54:32
Added: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
Log:
Interview with robbat2
Revision Changes Path
1.1 xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
file : http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?rev=1.1&view=markup
plain: http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?rev=1.1&content-type=text/plain
Index: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
===================================================================
<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE news SYSTEM "/dtd/guide.dtd">
<news gentoo="yes" category="gentoo">
<!-- Enter your name here -->
<poster>dabbott</poster>
<!-- Date to be displayed -->
<date>2009-07-24</date>
<!-- Title of the news item - don't forget to change the date -->
<title>Interview Gentoo Developer Robin H. Johnson (robbat2)</title>
<body>
<!-- Alter to your liking -->
<p>
<b>Introduction:</b>
</p>
<p>
Today I have the pleasure of introducing to all of you, Robin H. Johnson
(robbat2) Gentoo Developer, Gentoo Trustee board member, head of the
infrastructure, without it working smoothly there would not be Gentoo as we
know it. Robin is also involved with helping out MySQL, LDAP, base-system, and
lots more.
</p>
<p>
Hi Robin, thanks for the interview.
</p>
<p>
Hi David, Thanks for asking me.
</p>
<dl><dt>
1) Is Gentoo your first open source project?
</dt> <dd>
No, my first full-scale involvement was as one of the phpMyAdmin developers,
starting in May 2001,about 2 months after it first moved onto SourceForge.
Prior to that it was just the occasional patches submitted back to projects I
was using as a Slackware user.
</dd><dt>
2) How long have you been a Gentoo user? </dt> <dd> According to bugzilla, my
first ever bug/comment was bug 14397, complaining that PHP was detecting GCC2
as a cross-compiler, on 2003-02-25. I wasn't a dev yet then, but it already
shows the debug path.
</dd><dt>
3) How did you come up with the nick (robbat2)?
</dt> <dd>
That comes down to an overly long and complicated story for this podcast, but
it involves multiplayer LAN flight sims, writing Quake 1 mods, a namespace
conflict on my older nick, and abusing DOS ASCII art.
</dd><dt>
4) What has your journey been like with Linux, and how did it start?
</dt> <dd>
Being given a RH6.2 CD1 CD (not the entire set), back in 1997, prior to having
any internet connection, still living in South Africa, and having it
accidentally wipe out my DOS machine, that I did Pascal programming on at the
time. Reinstall DOS, try again a couple of months later, when school was out,
find that the compilers worked, but there wasn't much point to it, go back to
DOS. Later on, when I first moved to Canada in January 1999, I realized that
having an always-on internet connection massively widened the realm of Linux
possibilities. I was going to go with RedHat again, having bought real pressed
media for $5 at a local Linux festival, but it turned out to be defective, and
I just downloaded slackware ISOs instead.
</dd><dt>
5) What motivated you to become a Gentoo Developer? </dt> <dd> Daniel Robbins
complained I was submitting too many patches and ideas, and that I might as
well join to commit them myself.
</dd><dt>
6) What aspects of Gentoo do you feel the developers and maintainers have got
right?
</dt> <dd>
This is interesting in the issue of the distribution vs. the
developers/maintainers. The distribution has got the degree of control down
very nicely, which is partly due to the developer demand to change stuff to be
the way they want it, but the degree of transparency is also much better than
the binary distributions I feel. I remember looking for RPM specfiles in the
past, and not being able to find them, to see what patches were being used, or
configure flags were being passed.
</dd><dt>
7) What is it about Gentoo you would like to see improved?
</dt> <dd>
Transparency in projects that are going on, but also in users paying attention
to what we are doing. However, if there's one single area, it's how slow we
move stuff to stable. I've complained before, but recent presentation by Scott
Shawcroft from OSCON showed just how bad it is. Our unstable tree is in great
shape, but our stable tree is worse than many of the major distros, esp Ubuntu
and Fedora.
</dd><dt>
8) What are some of the Projects within Gentoo that you enjoy contributing to?
</dt> <dd>
The infrastructure project is the most fun, as I enjoy the challenge involved
in cohesively managing 40+ disparate servers, scattered in 12 locations around
the world. The requirements of unique development to automate the work is also
fun.
</dd><dt>
9) Could you give me an overview of the Gentoo infrastructure?
</dt> <dd>
Nearly 50 percent of the infrastructure hardware is taken up by web
applications, because we have a lot of separation between web applications that
have a high security exposure. Admittedly some of the web services are a very
big deal for Gentoo, like our Bugzilla service, running on 4 machines sponsored
by the Dutch social network, Hyves. Very recently we've gotten new hardware for
Forums, sponsored by Gossamer Threads. The next largest slice after that is the
machines that provides rsync.gentoo.org service. Only then do we get down to
individual machines for purposes. There's some cases where having more hardware
as fail-over in case we lose a machine would be nice, but I think the place
that'd we would benefit the most presently would be a newer mail server
infrastructure, so that we can deploy heavier spam filtering.
</dd><dt>
10) Who helps you with the infrastructure? </dt> <dd> Lance (ramareth) was the
previous infrastructure lead, and Mike (kingtaco) is my present co-lead, but
he's a slacker most of the time. Shyam (fox2mike) started off in handling
mirrors, but is now up at handling some day-to-day infrastructure issues as
well. Solar helps out with stuff as well, but is mainly there in an advisory
role these days.
</dd><dt>
11) What is the process for someone to donate a server or set up an rsync mirror?
</dt> <dd>
If you'd like to set up your own rsync or source mirror, we offer complete
instructions linked from the very bottom of the Mirrors page on the website.
The 'gentoo-rsync-mirror' package also offers a sample configuration and
scripts for rsync mirrors. Most of our server donations are in the form of the
sponsor continuing to own the hardware, and hosting it at their own location.
Rackspace, power and bandwidth costs ultimately add up to much more than the
value of the hardware. We'd like to move into having more hardware that Gentoo
actually owns, but we need to secure more hosting (and possibly remote hands)
before that. In the meantime, for hosting a server for, contact the
infrastructure team, infra@gentoo.org, to set us up with access to the new
hardware, running on a LiveCD so that we can perform our cfengine-powered
install of the hardened system. If you've got IPMI or remote console (serial or
KVM), that's extremely useful as well.
</dd> <dt>
12) Is git in the future plans?
</dt> <dd>
With more hours in the day, it'll come sooner, but it's not a high priority
item. I passed out a few of the TODO items on my last status post to the
gentoo-scm mailing list. Of them, only WilliamH has done anything. One of the
upstream cvs2svn authors, mhagger, helped out significantly in performance
improvements, but those aren't fully baked yet, he'd like to find some time to
finish them, and possibly some sponsorship so he can put aside his dayjob to
work on them.
</dd><dt>
13) As a Gentoo Developer what are some of your accomplishments?
</dt><dd>
Over my time as a developer, a lot of the things I do seem to be because it was
broken, and nobody else cared about it at the time. That's how I came to be
the maintainer of qmail, PHP and MySQL back in my early developer days. In all
3 cases, I started the teams to maintain them. The MySQL team is the only one
of those not still in existence. The developers that joined have retired
before me, and MySQL has come back to me.
</dd><dt>
14) What applications would you like to see included within Gentoo?
</dt><dd>
There are a couple of more complex applications I've run into, that I'd like
packaged, but after attempting to do so myself, I can see why nobody else has
yet either. Most recently, was the Evergreen Library System, after I met some
of the local implementors at an unconference last year.
</dd><dt>
15) What are your thoughts on Sun acquiring Oracle and its effect on MySQL?
</dt> <dd>
(assuming you meant Oracle acquiring Sun). My views on the matter are
reasonably positive for both Sun and MySQL, due to Oracle's dependence on Java,
along with the spread of the original core MySQL employees to no longer work
for any of the 3 companies, and MySQL AB's recently renewed commitment to
having a fully open MySQL - they got rid of the split between MySQL-community
and MySQL-enterprise.
</dd><dt>
16) What open source software can you not live without at home and at work?
</dt> <dd>
I'd have to put VIM first on the list, it does wonders for productivity.
Similarly, Gentoo itself belongs there, as we rely critically on it for work
and also my personal systems.
</dd><dt>
17) Which open source programs would you like to see developed?
</dt><dd>
Less reliance and imitation of windows, we need to come up with new concepts of
software more. The Evergreen Library system is making good inroads for that
field, but it's extremely complex. The Radeon and Nvidia open source drivers
are making good but slow progress. There's a couple of ideas I've had floating
in my head, mainly for reimplementing software where I don't like any of the
existing options, but none of them are really radically new.
</dd><dt>
18) What resources have you found most helpful when troubleshooting within Gentoo?
</dt> <dd>
Don't underestimate the ability to take any code apart and inspect it, combined
with some form of debugging, if not gdb, then simply putting in your own print
statements.
</dd><dt>
19) Do you get to do much programming?
</dt> <dd>
A lot less than I used to, but still probably on the order of 100 lines of
code/week.
</dd><dt>
20) What would be your dream job?
</dt> <dd>
In some ways I'm very close to it already, as the lead developer nee
development manager and deep-problem sysadmin for IsoHunt.com. Our ruby
developers are like herding cats at times however, and I'd like to get more
time to work on problems of my own choice. It is already great in that I can
contribute to Gentoo during my work hours, as we are a 100% Gentoo shop for our
servers. I'd certainly consider doing more Gentoo stuff on a consulting basis
as well if the opportunity was available, as it tends to focus more on solving
interesting problems.
</dd><dt>
21) What can users do to improve Gentoo?
</dt> <dd>
Read the documentation and source code, and ask intelligent questions, ideally
with patches to at least roughly implement your ideas. Filing stable requests
for stuff that's been around long enough would also help a lot.
</dd><dt>
22) What are some of the ways LDAP is put to use in the real world.
</dt><dd>
Is Gentoo not the real world? Outside of Gentoo, it's mainly good as a large
hierarchal database, most often used as an address book and directory service
for authentication and control. It's not always secured very well however, a
fact that got me into trouble at one point during university - the userPassword
field for on the address book server at the main campus wasn't restricted at
all, you could query it from the public internet, even with Netscape's address
book functionality. They have since fixed it.
</dd><dt>
23) What users would you like to recruit to become Gentoo Developers?
</dt> <dd>
More developers focused on small sets of packages. Look at the Debian
maintainer system, they have more than a thousand maintainers, and their
bleeding edge stuff actually isn't that far behind. Some with interest in
backup applications or MySQL would go a long way to start.
</dd><dt>
24) Is the biggest hurdle in getting the users and developers working more
closely, the time it takes to build trust?
</dt> <dd>
Not the time that it takes to build trust, but the degree to which users don't
realize why their proposed (crazy) solutions won't work out as nicely as they
want. They say simply "re-enable FOO" that was disabled in the latest version
of something by upstream, without examining the causes as to why it was
disabled or no longer functions like it used to. Giving detailed, but relevant
information is highly useful as well. If it's a segfault, provide a backtrace
with debugging, and figure out what conditions you need to reproduce a problem,
not just your set of conditions, but what simple subset of changes trigger it.
</dd> <dt>
25) What are the specs of your current boxes?
</dt> <dd>
The 4 machines at home that run the most often:
</dd> <dt>
<b>curie</b>
</dt> <dd>
<ul>
<li>old old web and mail server</li>
<li>AMD Athlon w/ 1GB RAM</li>
<li>200GiB RAID1 disk</li>
</ul>
</dd> <dt>
<b>grubbs</b>
</dt> <dd>
<ul>
<li>development and testing server, will ultimately replace curie.</li>
<li>Core2 Q6600 w/ 5.8 GiB of RAM (odd number due to BIOS MTRR issues)</li>
<li>1.7TiB RAID5 disk</li>
<li>3TiB external eSATA RAID5 enclosure</li>
<li>LTO3 backup tape</li> </ul>
</dd> <dt>
<b>bohr</b>
</dt> <dd>
<ul>
<li>desktop machine</li>
<li>Core2 Q9550 w/ 16GiB RAM</li>
<li>1.3TiB RAID10 disk</li>
</ul>
</dd><dt>
<b>speedracer</b>
</dt> <dd>
<ul>
<li>1U server, in a local colocation facility</li>
<li>Asus RS120-E4/PA4</li>
<li>Core2 Q6600 w/ 8GiB RAM</li>
<li>2TiB RAID5 disk</li>
<li>Runs the Willikins bot for all of the Gentoo channels</li>
</ul>
</dd> <dt>
<b>ebadi</b>
</dt><dd>
<ul>
<li>old Asus W5F laptop</li>
<li>Core1 w/ 1.5GiB RAM</li>
<li>200GiB disk</li>
</ul>
</dd> <dd>
3ware RAID controllers on the non-laptop systems. Beyond these machines that
run most of the time, I've also got half a dozen embedded systems of different
architectures.
</dd><dt>
26) Did the Gentoo Developers played any tricks on you when you were a rookie,
new to the developer pool?
</dt><dd> None that I can recall, I wasn't on IRC a lot in the early days.
</dd><dt>
27) What gives you the most enjoyment within the Gentoo community?
</dt><dd>
Definitely the Infrastructure project.
</dd></dl>
<p> <e><mail link="dabbott"/> contributed the draft for this announcement.</e>
</p>
</body>
</news>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread
* [gentoo-commits] gentoo commit in xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
@ 2009-07-30 18:16 David Abbott (dabbott)
0 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: David Abbott (dabbott) @ 2009-07-30 18:16 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-commits
dabbott 09/07/30 18:16:08
Modified: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
Log:
converted to regular GuideXML version
Revision Changes Path
1.2 xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
file : http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?rev=1.2&view=markup
plain: http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?rev=1.2&content-type=text/plain
diff : http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?r1=1.1&r2=1.2
Index: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
===================================================================
RCS file: /var/cvsroot/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml,v
retrieving revision 1.1
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -u -r1.1 -r1.2
--- 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml 30 Jul 2009 12:54:32 -0000 1.1
+++ 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml 30 Jul 2009 18:16:08 -0000 1.2
@@ -1,26 +1,31 @@
-<?xml version='1.0'?>
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
-<!DOCTYPE news SYSTEM "/dtd/guide.dtd">
-
-<news gentoo="yes" category="gentoo">
-
-<!-- Enter your name here -->
-<poster>dabbott</poster>
-
-<!-- Date to be displayed -->
-<date>2009-07-24</date>
-
-<!-- Title of the news item - don't forget to change the date -->
+<!DOCTYPE guide SYSTEM "/dtd/guide.dtd">
+<!-- $HEADER: $ -->
+<guide>
<title>Interview Gentoo Developer Robin H. Johnson (robbat2)</title>
-<body>
-
-<!-- Alter to your liking -->
-
-<p>
-<b>Introduction:</b>
-</p>
+<author title="Author">
+ <mail link="dabbott"/>
+</author>
+
+<abstract>
+Interview with Robin H. Johnson (robbat2)
+</abstract>
+
+<!-- The content of this document is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license -->
+<!-- See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5 -->
+<license/>
+
+<version>1</version>
+<date>2009-07-30</date>
+
+<chapter>
+<title>Interview with Robin H. Johnson (robbat2)</title>
+<section>
+<title>Introduction</title>
+<body>
<p>
Today I have the pleasure of introducing to all of you, Robin H. Johnson
(robbat2) Gentoo Developer, Gentoo Trustee board member, head of the
@@ -28,7 +33,13 @@
know it. Robin is also involved with helping out MySQL, LDAP, base-system, and
lots more.
</p>
+</body>
+</section>
+<section>
+<title>Robin's Interview</title>
+
+<body>
<p>
Hi Robin, thanks for the interview.
</p>
@@ -37,27 +48,34 @@
Hi David, Thanks for asking me.
</p>
-<dl><dt>
+<dl>
+<dt>
1) Is Gentoo your first open source project?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
No, my first full-scale involvement was as one of the phpMyAdmin developers,
starting in May 2001,about 2 months after it first moved onto SourceForge.
Prior to that it was just the occasional patches submitted back to projects I
was using as a Slackware user.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
2) How long have you been a Gentoo user? </dt> <dd> According to bugzilla, my
first ever bug/comment was bug 14397, complaining that PHP was detecting GCC2
as a cross-compiler, on 2003-02-25. I wasn't a dev yet then, but it already
shows the debug path.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
3) How did you come up with the nick (robbat2)?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
That comes down to an overly long and complicated story for this podcast, but
it involves multiplayer LAN flight sims, writing Quake 1 mods, a namespace
conflict on my older nick, and abusing DOS ASCII art.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
4) What has your journey been like with Linux, and how did it start?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Being given a RH6.2 CD1 CD (not the entire set), back in 1997, prior to having
any internet connection, still living in South Africa, and having it
accidentally wipe out my DOS machine, that I did Pascal programming on at the
@@ -68,14 +86,17 @@
possibilities. I was going to go with RedHat again, having bought real pressed
media for $5 at a local Linux festival, but it turned out to be defective, and
I just downloaded slackware ISOs instead.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
5) What motivated you to become a Gentoo Developer? </dt> <dd> Daniel Robbins
complained I was submitting too many patches and ideas, and that I might as
well join to commit them myself.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
6) What aspects of Gentoo do you feel the developers and maintainers have got
right?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
This is interesting in the issue of the distribution vs. the
developers/maintainers. The distribution has got the degree of control down
very nicely, which is partly due to the developer demand to change stuff to be
@@ -83,25 +104,31 @@
the binary distributions I feel. I remember looking for RPM specfiles in the
past, and not being able to find them, to see what patches were being used, or
configure flags were being passed.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
7) What is it about Gentoo you would like to see improved?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Transparency in projects that are going on, but also in users paying attention
to what we are doing. However, if there's one single area, it's how slow we
move stuff to stable. I've complained before, but recent presentation by Scott
Shawcroft from OSCON showed just how bad it is. Our unstable tree is in great
shape, but our stable tree is worse than many of the major distros, esp Ubuntu
and Fedora.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
8) What are some of the Projects within Gentoo that you enjoy contributing to?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
The infrastructure project is the most fun, as I enjoy the challenge involved
in cohesively managing 40+ disparate servers, scattered in 12 locations around
the world. The requirements of unique development to automate the work is also
fun.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
9) Could you give me an overview of the Gentoo infrastructure?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Nearly 50 percent of the infrastructure hardware is taken up by web
applications, because we have a lot of separation between web applications that
have a high security exposure. Admittedly some of the web services are a very
@@ -113,16 +140,19 @@
as fail-over in case we lose a machine would be nice, but I think the place
that'd we would benefit the most presently would be a newer mail server
infrastructure, so that we can deploy heavier spam filtering.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
10) Who helps you with the infrastructure? </dt> <dd> Lance (ramareth) was the
previous infrastructure lead, and Mike (kingtaco) is my present co-lead, but
he's a slacker most of the time. Shyam (fox2mike) started off in handling
mirrors, but is now up at handling some day-to-day infrastructure issues as
well. Solar helps out with stuff as well, but is mainly there in an advisory
role these days.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
11) What is the process for someone to donate a server or set up an rsync mirror?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
If you'd like to set up your own rsync or source mirror, we offer complete
instructions linked from the very bottom of the Mirrors page on the website.
The 'gentoo-rsync-mirror' package also offers a sample configuration and
@@ -136,9 +166,11 @@
hardware, running on a LiveCD so that we can perform our cfengine-powered
install of the hardened system. If you've got IPMI or remote console (serial or
KVM), that's extremely useful as well.
-</dd> <dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
12) Is git in the future plans?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
With more hours in the day, it'll come sooner, but it's not a high priority
item. I passed out a few of the TODO items on my last status post to the
gentoo-scm mailing list. Of them, only WilliamH has done anything. One of the
@@ -146,60 +178,76 @@
improvements, but those aren't fully baked yet, he'd like to find some time to
finish them, and possibly some sponsorship so he can put aside his dayjob to
work on them.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
13) As a Gentoo Developer what are some of your accomplishments?
-</dt><dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Over my time as a developer, a lot of the things I do seem to be because it was
broken, and nobody else cared about it at the time. That's how I came to be
the maintainer of qmail, PHP and MySQL back in my early developer days. In all
3 cases, I started the teams to maintain them. The MySQL team is the only one
of those not still in existence. The developers that joined have retired
before me, and MySQL has come back to me.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
14) What applications would you like to see included within Gentoo?
-</dt><dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
There are a couple of more complex applications I've run into, that I'd like
packaged, but after attempting to do so myself, I can see why nobody else has
yet either. Most recently, was the Evergreen Library System, after I met some
of the local implementors at an unconference last year.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
15) What are your thoughts on Sun acquiring Oracle and its effect on MySQL?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
(assuming you meant Oracle acquiring Sun). My views on the matter are
reasonably positive for both Sun and MySQL, due to Oracle's dependence on Java,
along with the spread of the original core MySQL employees to no longer work
for any of the 3 companies, and MySQL AB's recently renewed commitment to
having a fully open MySQL - they got rid of the split between MySQL-community
and MySQL-enterprise.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
16) What open source software can you not live without at home and at work?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
I'd have to put VIM first on the list, it does wonders for productivity.
Similarly, Gentoo itself belongs there, as we rely critically on it for work
and also my personal systems.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
17) Which open source programs would you like to see developed?
-</dt><dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Less reliance and imitation of windows, we need to come up with new concepts of
software more. The Evergreen Library system is making good inroads for that
field, but it's extremely complex. The Radeon and Nvidia open source drivers
are making good but slow progress. There's a couple of ideas I've had floating
in my head, mainly for reimplementing software where I don't like any of the
existing options, but none of them are really radically new.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
18) What resources have you found most helpful when troubleshooting within Gentoo?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Don't underestimate the ability to take any code apart and inspect it, combined
with some form of debugging, if not gdb, then simply putting in your own print
statements.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
19) Do you get to do much programming?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
A lot less than I used to, but still probably on the order of 100 lines of
code/week.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
20) What would be your dream job?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
In some ways I'm very close to it already, as the lead developer nee
development manager and deep-problem sysadmin for IsoHunt.com. Our ruby
developers are like herding cats at times however, and I'd like to get more
@@ -208,15 +256,19 @@
servers. I'd certainly consider doing more Gentoo stuff on a consulting basis
as well if the opportunity was available, as it tends to focus more on solving
interesting problems.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
21) What can users do to improve Gentoo?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Read the documentation and source code, and ask intelligent questions, ideally
with patches to at least roughly implement your ideas. Filing stable requests
for stuff that's been around long enough would also help a lot.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
22) What are some of the ways LDAP is put to use in the real world.
-</dt><dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Is Gentoo not the real world? Outside of Gentoo, it's mainly good as a large
hierarchal database, most often used as an address book and directory service
for authentication and control. It's not always secured very well however, a
@@ -224,17 +276,21 @@
field for on the address book server at the main campus wasn't restricted at
all, you could query it from the public internet, even with Netscape's address
book functionality. They have since fixed it.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
23) What users would you like to recruit to become Gentoo Developers?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
More developers focused on small sets of packages. Look at the Debian
maintainer system, they have more than a thousand maintainers, and their
bleeding edge stuff actually isn't that far behind. Some with interest in
backup applications or MySQL would go a long way to start.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
24) Is the biggest hurdle in getting the users and developers working more
closely, the time it takes to build trust?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Not the time that it takes to build trust, but the degree to which users don't
realize why their proposed (crazy) solutions won't work out as nicely as they
want. They say simply "re-enable FOO" that was disabled in the latest version
@@ -243,38 +299,48 @@
information is highly useful as well. If it's a segfault, provide a backtrace
with debugging, and figure out what conditions you need to reproduce a problem,
not just your set of conditions, but what simple subset of changes trigger it.
-</dd> <dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
25) What are the specs of your current boxes?
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
The 4 machines at home that run the most often:
-</dd> <dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
<b>curie</b>
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
<ul>
<li>old old web and mail server</li>
<li>AMD Athlon w/ 1GB RAM</li>
<li>200GiB RAID1 disk</li>
</ul>
-</dd> <dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
<b>grubbs</b>
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
<ul>
<li>development and testing server, will ultimately replace curie.</li>
<li>Core2 Q6600 w/ 5.8 GiB of RAM (odd number due to BIOS MTRR issues)</li>
<li>1.7TiB RAID5 disk</li>
<li>3TiB external eSATA RAID5 enclosure</li>
<li>LTO3 backup tape</li> </ul>
-</dd> <dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
<b>bohr</b>
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
<ul>
<li>desktop machine</li>
<li>Core2 Q9550 w/ 16GiB RAM</li>
<li>1.3TiB RAID10 disk</li>
</ul>
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
<b>speedracer</b>
-</dt> <dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
<ul>
<li>1U server, in a local colocation facility</li>
<li>Asus RS120-E4/PA4</li>
@@ -282,31 +348,41 @@
<li>2TiB RAID5 disk</li>
<li>Runs the Willikins bot for all of the Gentoo channels</li>
</ul>
-</dd> <dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
<b>ebadi</b>
-</dt><dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
<ul>
<li>old Asus W5F laptop</li>
<li>Core1 w/ 1.5GiB RAM</li>
<li>200GiB disk</li>
</ul>
-</dd> <dd>
+</dd>
+<dd>
3ware RAID controllers on the non-laptop systems. Beyond these machines that
run most of the time, I've also got half a dozen embedded systems of different
architectures.
-</dd><dt>
+</dd>
+<dt>
26) Did the Gentoo Developers played any tricks on you when you were a rookie,
new to the developer pool?
-</dt><dd> None that I can recall, I wasn't on IRC a lot in the early days.
-</dd><dt>
+</dt>
+<dd>
+None that I can recall, I wasn't on IRC a lot in the early days.
+</dd>
+<dt>
27) What gives you the most enjoyment within the Gentoo community?
-</dt><dd>
+</dt>
+<dd>
Definitely the Infrastructure project.
-</dd></dl>
+</dd>
+</dl>
<p> <e><mail link="dabbott"/> contributed the draft for this announcement.</e>
</p>
</body>
-
-</news>
+</section>
+</chapter>
+</guide>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread
* [gentoo-commits] gentoo commit in xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
@ 2009-07-30 18:20 David Abbott (dabbott)
0 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: David Abbott (dabbott) @ 2009-07-30 18:20 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-commits
dabbott 09/07/30 18:20:10
Modified: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
Log:
removed contributed comment
Revision Changes Path
1.3 xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
file : http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?rev=1.3&view=markup
plain: http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?rev=1.3&content-type=text/plain
diff : http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?r1=1.2&r2=1.3
Index: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
===================================================================
RCS file: /var/cvsroot/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml,v
retrieving revision 1.2
retrieving revision 1.3
diff -u -r1.2 -r1.3
--- 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml 30 Jul 2009 18:16:08 -0000 1.2
+++ 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml 30 Jul 2009 18:20:10 -0000 1.3
@@ -379,9 +379,6 @@
</dd>
</dl>
-<p> <e><mail link="dabbott"/> contributed the draft for this announcement.</e>
-</p>
-
</body>
</section>
</chapter>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread
* [gentoo-commits] gentoo commit in xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
@ 2009-08-01 7:42 Joshua Saddler (nightmorph)
0 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Joshua Saddler (nightmorph) @ 2009-08-01 7:42 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-commits
nightmorph 09/08/01 07:42:37
Modified: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
Log:
add news announcement, item for robbat2's interview by dabbott
Revision Changes Path
1.4 xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
file : http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?rev=1.4&view=markup
plain: http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?rev=1.4&content-type=text/plain
diff : http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml?r1=1.3&r2=1.4
Index: 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
===================================================================
RCS file: /var/cvsroot/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml,v
retrieving revision 1.3
retrieving revision 1.4
diff -u -r1.3 -r1.4
--- 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml 30 Jul 2009 18:20:10 -0000 1.3
+++ 20090724-robbat2-interview.xml 1 Aug 2009 07:42:37 -0000 1.4
@@ -18,14 +18,14 @@
<license/>
<version>1</version>
-<date>2009-07-30</date>
+<date>2009-08-01</date>
<chapter>
<title>Interview with Robin H. Johnson (robbat2)</title>
<section>
<title>Introduction</title>
-
<body>
+
<p>
Today I have the pleasure of introducing to all of you, Robin H. Johnson
(robbat2) Gentoo Developer, Gentoo Trustee board member, head of the
@@ -33,13 +33,13 @@
know it. Robin is also involved with helping out MySQL, LDAP, base-system, and
lots more.
</p>
+
</body>
</section>
-
<section>
<title>Robin's Interview</title>
-
<body>
+
<p>
Hi Robin, thanks for the interview.
</p>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread
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