[gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Mike Frysinger]

This is your monthly friendly reminder !  Same bat time (typically the
2nd Thursday once a month), same bat channel (#gentoo-council @
irc.freenode.net) !

If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
Gentoo dev list to see.

Keep in mind that every resubmission to the council for review must
first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum) before
being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days before the
meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be notified at
least 14 days before the meeting itself.

For more info on the Gentoo Council, feel free to browse our homepage:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Henrik Brix Andersen]

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On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 05:30:01AM +0000, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> Gentoo dev list to see.

I would like GLEP 45 [1] - GLEP date format - to be discussed and
voted on.

Regards and a Happy New Year,
Brix

[1]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0045.html
-- 
Henrik Brix Andersen <brix@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Metadistribution | Mobile computing herd

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kalin KOZHUHAROV]

Henrik Brix Andersen wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 05:30:01AM +0000, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> 
>>If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
>>vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
>>Gentoo dev list to see.
> 
> 
> I would like GLEP 45 [1] - GLEP date format - to be discussed and
> voted on.
> 

> [1]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0045.html
I am not a full time dev, so I cannot vote, but I am for this change.
For the last several years I have been fighting with all possible software and OSes and even
appliancies to implement/display/store ISO-8601 dates.

I realized how good it is since I came to Japan which uses ore or less the same date format.

2006-01-02T13:10+0900

Kalin.
-- 
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|[ ______________________ ]|

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lance Albertson]

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Mike Frysinger wrote:

> If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> Gentoo dev list to see.

Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now.
Looking back at the last two years, what are the major
changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has
been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder
about any ground breaking enhancements.

Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd
like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006
and beyond. You don't need to come up with goals by this meeting if you
haven't had time, but at least by the February meeting. Each group can
have their own goals, but we lack any overall binding goals or
direction. We've brought on numerous devs in the past year, and I have
yet to see a huge improvement in QA or anything else. Numbers aren't
everything. If anything, it makes it harder to maintain good QA.

There's a lot of people out there frustrated with Gentoo because of the
lack of QA and direction. Package foo changes a bunch of config
locations, package bar gets upgraded and causes a bunch of QA
nightmares. At least from an admin point of view, Gentoo has gotten
harder to maintain. Granted, thats a question for Gentoo itself. Who
exactly are we catering to? Power users? New users? We can't satisfy
everyone out there and need to draw a line of how much we'll devote to
keeping the new user from destroying their system, etc.

I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating
lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we
could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're
at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I
think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be
better than distroA or distroB.

Ok, thats all my ranting for today. Hopefully I didn't start off the
next world flamewar :-)

Cheers-

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc>
Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

ramereth/irc.freenode.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lares Moreau]

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On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:14 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now.
> Looking back at the last two years, what are the major
> changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has
> been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder
> about any ground breaking enhancements.
> 
> Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd
> like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006
> and beyond. You don't need to come up with goals by this meeting if you
> haven't had time, but at least by the February meeting. Each group can
> have their own goals, but we lack any overall binding goals or
> direction. We've brought on numerous devs in the past year, and I have
> yet to see a huge improvement in QA or anything else. Numbers aren't
> everything. If anything, it makes it harder to maintain good QA.
> 
> There's a lot of people out there frustrated with Gentoo because of the
> lack of QA and direction. Package foo changes a bunch of config
> locations, package bar gets upgraded and causes a bunch of QA
> nightmares. At least from an admin point of view, Gentoo has gotten
> harder to maintain. Granted, thats a question for Gentoo itself. Who
> exactly are we catering to? Power users? New users? We can't satisfy
> everyone out there and need to draw a line of how much we'll devote to
> keeping the new user from destroying their system, etc.
> 
> I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating
> lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we
> could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're
> at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I
> think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be
> better than distroA or distroB.
> 
> Ok, thats all my ranting for today. Hopefully I didn't start off the
> next world flamewar :-)
> 
> Cheers-

I have been involved with many Volunteer organisations over the last
couple years. Not all computer related.  Something Gentoo is notably
missing is a Mission Statement. IMO a Mission statement acts as a beacon
on the horizon, allowing us to have a gauge against which to measure our
progress. In the process of discussing and generating this statement the
issues mentioned above, can be ironed out and/or flamed about.

-Lares

-- 
Lares Moreau <lares.moreau@gmail.com>  | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org
lares/irc.freenode.net                 |
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lance Albertson]

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Lares Moreau wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:14 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:

> I have been involved with many Volunteer organisations over the last
> couple years. Not all computer related.  Something Gentoo is notably
> missing is a Mission Statement. IMO a Mission statement acts as a beacon
> on the horizon, allowing us to have a gauge against which to measure our
> progress. In the process of discussing and generating this statement the
> issues mentioned above, can be ironed out and/or flamed about.

A mission statement only goes so far. The underlying leadership has to
make sure that statement is upheld and kept alive. Too many folks have a
mission statement, but no one ever remembers what it is or abides by it.

I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's
sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo.
It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I
view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying
"lets strive to do this". The main problem is, too many people fear
about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this
could ever happen. This person would be in constant contact of all the
groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could
suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two
projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the
workload. Stuff like that essentially. We need a good visionary. If such
a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be
that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a
subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them
to keep those other duties.

Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this...

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc>
Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

ramereth/irc.freenode.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Patrick Lauer]

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On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> A mission statement only goes so far. The underlying leadership has to
> make sure that statement is upheld and kept alive. Too many folks have a
> mission statement, but no one ever remembers what it is or abides by it.
I guess there isn't one driving force behind Gentoo - we have many 
differing opinions on things like QA, handling of bugs, ...

It's just that usually Gentoo gets the least in your way when you're
trying 
to do something :-)

> I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's
> sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo.
There was this Robbins guy ... remember him? ;-)
> It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I
> view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying
> "lets strive to do this". The main problem is, too many people fear
> about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this
> could ever happen. 
I wonder if any single person would be accepted?
After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far
as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve
the issues.
> This person would be in constant contact of all the
> groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could
> suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two
> projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the
> workload. Stuff like that essentially.
Communication ... should happen anyway, but it seems to get more and
more 
difficult. Another layer of bureaucracy won't help that ...
>  We need a good visionary. If such
> a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be
> that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a
> subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them
> to keep those other duties.
... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think
> Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this...
Maybe a bit idealistic, but I mostly agree :-)

Patrick
-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lares Moreau]

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On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 20:03 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> > A mission statement only goes so far. The underlying leadership has to
> > make sure that statement is upheld and kept alive. Too many folks have a
> > mission statement, but no one ever remembers what it is or abides by it.
> I guess there isn't one driving force behind Gentoo - we have many 
> differing opinions on things like QA, handling of bugs, ...
> 
> It's just that usually Gentoo gets the least in your way when you're
> trying 
> to do something :-)
> 
> > I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's
> > sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo.
> There was this Robbins guy ... remember him? ;-)
> > It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I
> > view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying
> > "lets strive to do this". The main problem is, too many people fear
> > about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this
> > could ever happen. 
> I wonder if any single person would be accepted?
> After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far
> as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve
> the issues.
> > This person would be in constant contact of all the
> > groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could
> > suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two
> > projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the
> > workload. Stuff like that essentially.
> Communication ... should happen anyway, but it seems to get more and
> more 
> difficult. Another layer of bureaucracy won't help that ...
> >  We need a good visionary. If such
> > a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be
> > that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a
> > subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them
> > to keep those other duties.
> ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think
> > Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this...
> Maybe a bit idealistic, but I mostly agree :-)

Upon doing some reading about what _exactly_ Gentoo council does, it
seems to me that Gentoo Council is an operations board.  I think what
Patrick and Lance are getting at (correct me if I'm wrong) is that we
need to have some form of Governance board. A board that doesn't worry
about implementation details; a board that gives a long term vision to
our project.

I am a big believer is having a common goal to unite all people who work
with an organization.  I'm sorry If I am repeating myself, but I feel
this is an issue that is vital to the continued success of Gentoo.

-Lares
-- 
Lares Moreau <lares.moreau@gmail.com>  | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org
lares/irc.freenode.net                 |
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lance Albertson]

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Patrick Lauer wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> 
>>A mission statement only goes so far. The underlying leadership has to
>>make sure that statement is upheld and kept alive. Too many folks have a
>>mission statement, but no one ever remembers what it is or abides by it.
> 
> I guess there isn't one driving force behind Gentoo - we have many 
> differing opinions on things like QA, handling of bugs, ...
> 
> It's just that usually Gentoo gets the least in your way when you're
> trying 
> to do something :-)

See, thats the exact problem we have. Its too opinionated with no ground
rules. Nothing ever gets done, and flame wars just go on. Sure we have
the council, but minor things shouldn't have to wait on the council to
meet each month. Such a person would only have one vote on the council
IF it were ever decided they even had a vote on there. (Perhaps a tie
breaker type of thing, though I think we already have an odd number of
council members)

>>I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's
>>sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo.
> 
> There was this Robbins guy ... remember him? ;-)

Of course, but that was then, this is now. We can't play by the same
rules as when Daniel was around.

>>It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I
>>view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying
>>"lets strive to do this". The main problem is, too many people fear
>>about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this
>>could ever happen. 
> 
> I wonder if any single person would be accepted?
> After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far
> as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve
> the issues.

That's what I fear might be the only solution because of the
indecisiveness we are as a group.

>>This person would be in constant contact of all the
>>groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could
>>suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two
>>projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the
>>workload. Stuff like that essentially.
> 
> Communication ... should happen anyway, but it seems to get more and
> more 
> difficult. Another layer of bureaucracy won't help that ...

Its not another layer of bureaucracy. Its the bonding part of the
communication that will help. We can't assume that everyone will
communicate everything they need to. This person would ensure they got
in contact with every group regularly. They won't govern what those
groups do, just summarize and report back to the council who has the
authority.

>> We need a good visionary. If such
>>a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be
>>that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a
>>subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them
>>to keep those other duties.
> 
> ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think

Possibly, I mean look at what happened to Daniel. Of course, there were
other reasons going on, but I do realize such a position would be
demanding. Why else do CEOs get paid the big bucks in the corporations?
:) (Since they essentially do the same type of work).

>>Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this...
> 
> Maybe a bit idealistic, but I mostly agree :-)

Yeah, maybe so :-)

Reflecting on this more, I see that most of the council members are a
very important part of the active Gentoo development model (toolchain,
etc). They need to keep those roles active as much as possible, then
help on the council. I guess I view this person as a sole chairmen of
the board that just focuses on council type duties and roles. I think
the current council has lots of great people, but they're all busy with
their subprojects and can't take on a role like this. We really need a
single voice to bind everything together, but doesn't have total control
like Daniel did.

Hopefully I'm making sense...

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lance Albertson]

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Lares Moreau wrote:

> Upon doing some reading about what _exactly_ Gentoo council does, it
> seems to me that Gentoo Council is an operations board.  I think what
> Patrick and Lance are getting at (correct me if I'm wrong) is that we
> need to have some form of Governance board. A board that doesn't worry
> about implementation details; a board that gives a long term vision to
> our project.

No, we don't need yet another board for this. Just a single voice.
Operating everything by a committee will get us no where but more
bureaucracy and headaches. See my previous email about where this person
would fit in.

> I am a big believer is having a common goal to unite all people who work
> with an organization.  I'm sorry If I am repeating myself, but I feel
> this is an issue that is vital to the continued success of Gentoo.

Yup, I agree there. I think Gentoo is dying a slow death right now
because of the lack of vision in the past few years. Thus why I brought
this topic up because I'd like to see us move forward with progress.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Grobian]

On 02-01-2006 20:03:54 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> > I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's
> > sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo.

Or call it proper hierarchy.  Management.  Probably all evil words, in
this context, but they for sure apply.

> > It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I
> > view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying
> > "lets strive to do this". The main problem is, too many people fear
> > about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this
> > could ever happen. 
> I wonder if any single person would be accepted?

If it isn't one person, then you would need to find two persons or even
more that are completely aligned and have the same visions.  Since
leaders usually are charismatic and controversial where necessary to
achieve their goals, it is hard to find two that don't get conflicts,
stalling any vision to become a mission.

> After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far
> as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve
> the issues.

...or only resolve the ones that you care about.  Your first sentence
forms the basis of the problem, IMHO.

> > This person would be in constant contact of all the
> > groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could
> > suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two
> > projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the
> > workload. Stuff like that essentially.
> Communication ... should happen anyway, but it seems to get more and
> more difficult. Another layer of bureaucracy won't help that ...

Call it "bureaucrazy", or whatever you like.  I think it has nothing
to do with bureaucracy at all.  It's just a matter of having
communication on a high level, in order to get an overall view of
Gentoo.  IIRC this is one of the tasks of the council, to align teams
somehow, for example.

> >  We need a good visionary. If such
> > a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be
> > that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a
> > subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them
> > to keep those other duties.
> ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think

Depends on the person.  Lance is just putting a lot of Mintzberg and
probably (work) experience on the table to apply it to Gentoo.
But ok, fine, if that's the case, gives a nice refresh rate :) (j/k)

> > Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this...

Well, you're not alone for sure ;)  However, the amount of measures to
take, why and what are a bit of an open question to me.  I do, however,
share your concerns of a missing 'Mission Statement'.  It is a commonly
known problem and primary point of concern (ie. Heene).


-- 
Fabian Groffen
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Patrick Lauer]

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On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 20:49 +0100, Grobian wrote:
> On 02-01-2006 20:03:54 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> > > I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's
> > > sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo.
> Or call it proper hierarchy.  Management.  Probably all evil words, in
> this context, but they for sure apply.
Well ... it's like every dev has a special title - Gentoo/MIPS gcc senior integration specialist and stuff like that ;-)
Doesn't resolve the communication / hierarchy issues, but makes us all
feel warm and fuzzy inside.
(I know I'm a bit evil here, but ...) what I think is needed is more
communication. Not more "discussing", trolling, yelling etc. etc. but
general info. Quite some time ago I tried to get some info from all
subprojects what they had been doing - security and docs replied, then a
bit later I think Alt and Toolchain gave a short "we're not dead yet".
If all projectss could agree to deliver a "mission statement", progress
report or whatever you wish to call it every $TIMEUNIT (3 months? 6
months?) it'd be really nice ... (and would make the GWN really exciting
*nudge nudge wink wink*)

> If it isn't one person, then you would need to find two persons or even
> more that are completely aligned and have the same visions.  Since
> leaders usually are charismatic and controversial where necessary to
> achieve their goals, it is hard to find two that don't get conflicts,
> stalling any vision to become a mission.
To extrapolate from that ... council etc. are incapable of doing "real work"? ;-)
Or in other words, a person is smart, people are dumb

> > After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far
> > as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve
> > the issues.
> 
> ...or only resolve the ones that you care about.  Your first sentence
> forms the basis of the problem, IMHO.
There are ways to get people to do what you want, but they are quite limited.
For example for QA reasons you can make people fix their ebuilds, but
that's about the limit of influence you can have right now.

> Call it "bureaucrazy", or whatever you like.  I think it has nothing
> to do with bureaucracy at all.  It's just a matter of having
> communication on a high level, in order to get an overall view of
> Gentoo.  IIRC this is one of the tasks of the council, to align teams
> somehow, for example.
I don't know if the council is the right group to get project progress
reports collected, but the point stands - communication is good :-) 

> > ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think
> 
> Depends on the person.  Lance is just putting a lot of Mintzberg and
> probably (work) experience on the table to apply it to Gentoo.
> But ok, fine, if that's the case, gives a nice refresh rate :) (j/k)
<troll> I say we put ciaran first to that job ... </troll>

> > > Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this...
> 
> Well, you're not alone for sure ;)  However, the amount of measures to
> take, why and what are a bit of an open question to me.  I do, however,
> share your concerns of a missing 'Mission Statement'.  It is a commonly
> known problem and primary point of concern (ie. Heene).
I guess we should decide on a problem before solving it :-)
Is the problem the lack of a mission statement? I don't see the need for
that, we all have our own definitions what a Gentoo is and why it's
cool. Trying to get that defined will be really tricky (and I predict a
smallish flamewar)

We already have a mission statement - to produce the best software
distribution, ever ;-)
Wether it should be Linux only, GNU-based or a metadistribution is a
rather touchy subject, so please try to keep the discussion
civilized ...

wkr,
Patrick
-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Grobian]

On 02-01-2006 21:12:03 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> > If it isn't one person, then you would need to find two persons or even
> > more that are completely aligned and have the same visions.  Since
> > leaders usually are charismatic and controversial where necessary to
> > achieve their goals, it is hard to find two that don't get conflicts,
> > stalling any vision to become a mission.
> To extrapolate from that ... council etc. are incapable of doing "real
> work"? ;-) Or in other words, a person is smart, people are dumb

Your words here.  I don't follow your logic, and I don't see where your
statement comes from.  I want to make explicit that -- in any case -- I
didn't mean my words like that.

> > > > Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this...
> > > Maybe a bit idealistic, but I mostly agree :-)
> > 
> > Well, you're not alone for sure ;)  However, the amount of measures to
> > take, why and what are a bit of an open question to me.  I do, however,
> > share your concerns of a missing 'Mission Statement'.  It is a commonly
> > known problem and primary point of concern (ie. Heene).
> I guess we should decide on a problem before solving it :-)
> Is the problem the lack of a mission statement? I don't see the need for
> that, we all have our own definitions what a Gentoo is and why it's
> cool. Trying to get that defined will be really tricky (and I predict a
> smallish flamewar)

I reinserted your first response.  It looks like you changed your mind
inbetween to me, and that you probably don't agree 'mostly' anymore?

> We already have a mission statement - to produce the best software
> distribution, ever ;-)
> Wether it should be Linux only, GNU-based or a metadistribution is a
> rather touchy subject, so please try to keep the discussion
> civilized ...

Lance mentioned something about what he sees is a niche where Gentoo
does quite well.  "Produce the best software distribution, ever" sounds
a bit vague to me.  That's why I agree with Lance for now.  Maybe after
a little research, trial and error period it turns out to be better to
keep the target vague.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lance Albertson]

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Grobian wrote:
> On 02-01-2006 21:12:03 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote:

>>We already have a mission statement - to produce the best software
>>distribution, ever ;-)
>>Wether it should be Linux only, GNU-based or a metadistribution is a
>>rather touchy subject, so please try to keep the discussion
>>civilized ...
> 
> 
> Lance mentioned something about what he sees is a niche where Gentoo
> does quite well.  "Produce the best software distribution, ever" sounds
> a bit vague to me.  That's why I agree with Lance for now.  Maybe after
> a little research, trial and error period it turns out to be better to
> keep the target vague.

Yeah, if we're content to being a hobbyist distro, then that mission
statement will work. But, the technology behind Gentoo has far broader
benefits for various things. Especially with the recent work of the alt
related subprojects, embedded, etc ... its changing. Like for me, I
would love to use the portage technology to build packages for solaris
machines I maintain at work. We have a build system currently, but its
nothing like portage. Gentoo is more than just Linux now and we should
have goals that fit that. When I say "we have a niche we're perfect at",
I'm mainly referring to the source-based nature of our OS. There isn't
another distro out there that does it as well as us and we should
improve on that fact. Let the other distros get better at being
binary-based.

Anyways, thats my thoughts.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chandler Carruth]

Lance Albertson wrote:
> Yeah, maybe so :-)
>
> Reflecting on this more, I see that most of the council members are a
> very important part of the active Gentoo development model (toolchain,
> etc). They need to keep those roles active as much as possible, then
> help on the council. I guess I view this person as a sole chairmen of
> the board that just focuses on council type duties and roles. I think
> the current council has lots of great people, but they're all busy with
> their subprojects and can't take on a role like this. We really need a
> single voice to bind everything together, but doesn't have total control
> like Daniel did.
>
> Hopefully I'm making sense..
As perhaps a good way of thinking of this, the common term used in 
commitees (as I have interacted with them in various beaurocratic 
situations) is a "non-voting chair". This person would organize, 
schedule, direct, communicate, and facilitate the work of the committee, 
to allow the voting members to more effectively handle the issues 
arising for the committee. The voting members need not take on much of a 
workload to vote and serve on the committee because most (if not all) of 
the time consuming tasks and aspects of the committee are handled by a 
non-voting chair. Simultaneously, the singular nature of the chair is 
less of a concern because they are non-voting. The lack of a vote checks 
their singular power, while still allowing them to very efficiently 
organize and direct information in and out of the committee. *shrug* I'm 
not entirely sure that I agree or disagree with this solution, but 
wanted to give an example of what (I think?) Lance is getting at here.

That said, I do think _some_ direction needs to be given to the project, 
although how best to achieve it is quite fuzzy to me. Lance's 
proposition does have potential, but I worry over the competence and 
dedication of the individual to fill that role.

-Chandler Carruth, yet another gentoo user.
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Andrew Muraco]

Chandler Carruth wrote:

> Lance Albertson wrote:
>
>> Yeah, maybe so :-)
>>
>> Reflecting on this more, I see that most of the council members are a
>> very important part of the active Gentoo development model (toolchain,
>> etc). They need to keep those roles active as much as possible, then
>> help on the council. I guess I view this person as a sole chairmen of
>> the board that just focuses on council type duties and roles. I think
>> the current council has lots of great people, but they're all busy with
>> their subprojects and can't take on a role like this. We really need a
>> single voice to bind everything together, but doesn't have total control
>> like Daniel did.
>>
>> Hopefully I'm making sense..
>
> As perhaps a good way of thinking of this, the common term used in 
> commitees (as I have interacted with them in various beaurocratic 
> situations) is a "non-voting chair". This person would organize, 
> schedule, direct, communicate, and facilitate the work of the 
> committee, to allow the voting members to more effectively handle the 
> issues arising for the committee. The voting members need not take on 
> much of a workload to vote and serve on the committee because most (if 
> not all) of the time consuming tasks and aspects of the committee are 
> handled by a non-voting chair. Simultaneously, the singular nature of 
> the chair is less of a concern because they are non-voting. The lack 
> of a vote checks their singular power, while still allowing them to 
> very efficiently organize and direct information in and out of the 
> committee. *shrug* I'm not entirely sure that I agree or disagree with 
> this solution, but wanted to give an example of what (I think?) Lance 
> is getting at here.

I'm not sure if this would apply, but in the US Government System, the 
supreme courts are basicly a committee (or council, which ever word you 
like better), the "leader" (Chief Justice) of the supreme court doesn't 
have any extra power, but has extra duties, and has senority over the 
other Justices. Perhaps a situation like that would the Gento Council, 
or maybe it should stay in the Justice System.

wkr,
Andrew
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Patrick Lauer]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2045 bytes --]

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 15:03 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> > Lance mentioned something about what he sees is a niche where Gentoo
> > does quite well.  "Produce the best software distribution, ever" sounds
> > a bit vague to me.  That's why I agree with Lance for now.  Maybe after
> > a little research, trial and error period it turns out to be better to
> > keep the target vague.
> 
> Yeah, if we're content to being a hobbyist distro, then that mission
> statement will work. But, the technology behind Gentoo has far broader
> benefits for various things. Especially with the recent work of the alt
> related subprojects, embedded, etc ... its changing. Like for me, I
> would love to use the portage technology to build packages for solaris
> machines I maintain at work.
While I do agree with you here there's still the problem that each and
every one of us has his (or her or its) own idea what "we" should do.

Some want the ricer flags and tweakability.
Others want to see one package manager to rule them all.
Then there's the "because we can" group.
The enterprise-oriented persons.

I wonder ... can we have one precise mission statement without
alienating a big part of our user base? 


>  We have a build system currently, but its
> nothing like portage. Gentoo is more than just Linux now and we should
> have goals that fit that.
I guess some people would like to disagree there. (Not me, I like that
whole "metadistribution thingy, it's the way to world domination)
>  When I say "we have a niche we're perfect at",
> I'm mainly referring to the source-based nature of our OS. There isn't
> another distro out there that does it as well as us and we should
> improve on that fact. Let the other distros get better at being
> binary-based.
Why would one prevent the other from happening? 
Maybe someone finds an elegant way for "Binary Gentoo" ... should we
stop that person because it conflicts with a weird mission statement?

-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 10:52:43PM +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> 
> I wonder ... can we have one precise mission statement without
> alienating a big part of our user base? 

To copy another opensource group's mission statement,
	"Total World Domination"

Hey, it's been working for them so far, and I don't think they would
mind it if it was copied by others :)

thanks,

greg k-h
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Hash: SHA1

Lance Albertson wrote:
| Mike Frysinger wrote:
|
|
|>If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
|>vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
|>Gentoo dev list to see.
|
|
| Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now.
| Looking back at the last two years, what are the major
| changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has
| been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder
| about any ground breaking enhancements.
|
| Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd
| like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006
| and beyond. You don't need to come up with goals by this meeting if you
| haven't had time, but at least by the February meeting. Each group can
| have their own goals, but we lack any overall binding goals or
| direction. We've brought on numerous devs in the past year, and I have
| yet to see a huge improvement in QA or anything else. Numbers aren't
| everything. If anything, it makes it harder to maintain good QA.

Why don't we start at a smaller level and see where we get? In other
words, we can build the big picture goals from where our projects and
subprojects are going.

Now that projects can be freely created, I see no reason that any herd
or any developer in Gentoo cannot be part of a project. Each project
could come up with its goals and directions, and we could see how (or
whether) they fit together.

Thanks,
Donnie
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Thierry Carrez]

Lance Albertson wrote:

> Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now.
> Looking back at the last two years, what are the major
> changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has
> been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder
> about any ground breaking enhancements.
> 
> Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd
> like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006
> and beyond. [...]

Yes, the Gentoo Council can / should set some global goals for 2006, and
should probably discuss about this in the January meeting so that they
can be set in stone by the February meeting.

That said, we weren't elected as "managers" but as "global visioners",
so we don't really have any power to force people to do some work in an
area in which they don't want to. We can say "it would be good to reach
that" then follow progress using the regular meetings, but we can't make
it happen just by saying it must be done.

One example of such point is the portage signing thing, which the
council already set as a global goal and for which is follows progress
at every meeting, but we can see that doesn't mean a lot of work is
done. We still need a group to coordinate such goals, much like what the
security team does with security bugs (call the right people at the
right time rather than doing any committing work). That's what I called
the "MetaBug taskforce" in various metastructure proposals. If we don't
have people that want to form (and work in) such a group then we can set
as many global goals as we want and follow as much progress as we
want... it won't get us very far.

In brief, we need the team to coordinate such goals, even more than we
need global goals.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (Koon)
Gentoo Linux Security & Gentoo Council Member
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Grant Goodyear]

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Henrik Brix Andersen wrote: [Sun Jan 01 2006, 05:35:26PM CST]
> On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 05:30:01AM +0000, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> > vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> > Gentoo dev list to see.
> 
> I would like GLEP 45 [1] - GLEP date format - to be discussed and
> voted on.

I doubt that GLEP 45 really needs a vote by the full council.  The lead
GLEP editor's decision should probably suffice for something this
trivial.  (Recall that the GLEP process is that the GLEP author let's
the GLEP editors know when a GLEP is ready to go up for approval, and
that it is generally the editors who work out precisely who needs to
approve the thing.)

I'll happily approve GLEP 45, with the exception that I don't know how
to implement part of it.  The GLEP Last-Modified string is autogenerated
from CVS, so it's not in the yyyy-mm-dd format that the GLEP requires.
Help?

Thanks,
g2boojum
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Grant Goodyear]

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Lance Albertson wrote: [Mon Jan 02 2006, 12:14:05PM CST]
> Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now.
> Looking back at the last two years, what are the major
> changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has
> been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder
> about any ground breaking enhancements.

Assuming that we can ever get GLEP 42 out the door, I think that will
constitute ground-breaking.  There has actually been a considerable
amount of progress on the Portage front, as well, although not all of
the new stuff is out yet.  Similarly, the slowly-rolling website
redesign is truly on the verge of being released.  We also have had
excellent modular X11 support for some time now, and it appears that
gcc-4.x support is doing quite well, too.  

Oh, and we've also retired an amazing number of no-longer-active devs,
so I don't know if it's actually true that we've added numbers.

> I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating
> lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we
> could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're
> at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I
> think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be
> better than distroA or distroB.

Okay, so you're not happy with Gentoo's direction, but what are you
actively doing to change it?  (Other than starting this discussion, that
is?)  I don't mean that question as an attack, although it may well
appear that way.  It's also not directed at you, since others have 
made similar comments.  Instead, I'm suggesting that the reason that Gentoo
lacks a leadership position right now is that, at least where Gentoo is
concerned, effective leadership generally means an individual who is
putting in a _lot_ of hard work writing code and implementing changes.
That's one of the reasons that drobbins could be effective--he had the
time to extend portage, work on the website to fit his vision, and make
sweeping changes to the tree.  In that respect, I would argue that
Gentoo's most leader-like person right now is vapier, because he's a dev who
actively enacts wide-ranging changes.  Similarly, flameeyes, ciaranm,
and the portage team all deserve credit for having a significant impact
on where Gentoo has been going recently.  (Yes, I also realize that
people may not agree with some of what those devs have been
doing, but they have been out there getting their hands dirty, and it
makes a huge difference.)  

*Shrug*  My feeling is that Gentoo is not advancing all that quickly
right now, but that it's being maintained fairly well.  More
importantly, we still ensure that people _can_ make sweeping changes, if
they want to put in the work to do so.  I'm actually fairly confident
about Gentoo having a decent future.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Simon Stelling]

Hi,

Lares Moreau wrote:
> need to have some form of Governance board. A board that doesn't worry
> about implementation details; a board that gives a long term vision to
> our project.

This sounds very scary to me. Perhaps that's because I'm not sure how 
detailed such a plan would be. If our goal is...

* "Make Gentoo the best distro 0n 73h p14n37"
   I can only say "what a lame marketing."

* "Make Gentoo the most customizable distro"
   I'm pretty sure some users with silly ideas will ask us to implement
   the feature/whatever. If we reject their idea, they come up with
   something like "But Gentoo is all about customisation!!!111".
   (Actually, I was already confronted with such a situation in a
   real-world meeting, it was pretty annoying.)
   Also, this might not be where everybody wants to go.

* "Let's implement $foo with $bar."
   Oh well, then we already have implementational details, which don't
   belong into a 'general goal'.

> I am a big believer is having a common goal to unite all people who work
> with an organization.  I'm sorry If I am repeating myself, but I feel
> this is an issue that is vital to the continued success of Gentoo.

If you replace 'organization' with 'project', I agree. There should be 
something like a common goal. However, I don't think Gentoo has to have 
one single goal. I'm pretty sure everybody of us has his own ideas where 
Gentoo should go and his own motivations which make him contribute. So 
why make generalisations? Just as an example:

Taken from the project listing page:

  The developer relations Project is an effort to recruit, train, and 
manage developers for Gentoo's development structure.

Now let's have a look at the three possible goals I stated above.

* "Make the best distro 0n 73h p14n37"
   Obviously devrel's goal somehow supports this, as you can assume that
   people spend more time on Gentoo-related work if there is a good
   climate, but do you really need a global goal for such a trivial
   thing? I don't think so.

* "Make Gentoo the most customizable distro"
   I can't see how devrel contributes anything to this goal. Oh, wait a
   sec, it doesn't contribute anything to Gentoo's goal? Let's drop it!
   </sarcasm>

* "Let's implement $foo with $bar."
   See above.

My point is, either you have to generalize each project's goal to a real 
triviality or you have to define a goal which doesn't match some 
project's goals. Conclusion: Let it be.

Regards,

-- 
Simon Stelling
Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Co-Lead
blubb@gentoo.org
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Sven Vermeulen]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3053 bytes --]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 12:14:05PM -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd
> like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006
> and beyond. 

I couldn't agree more, yet I'm afraid Gentoo has grown too large to do this
efficiently. Many ideas are easily marked as WONTFIX (due to resource
restrictions), CANTFIX (since it would mean a rewrite of Portage) or
WORKSFORME (when /your/ way works). And when a proposal makes it to the
mailinglist, only a small number of developers is interested in
participating. The majority doesn't care, and a vocal minority tries
everything in its power to prevent the project from succeeding.

What could Gentoo bring out as a global goal for 2006 which isn't part of a
single Gentoo project? Things like "Have an automated installer" (Installer
Project), "Document enterprise usage of Gentoo" (Documentation Team), "Port
Gentoo to ReactOS" (Gentoo/ALT), "Introduce signing of all Portage Tree
files" (Portage Team), ... are all great accomplishments if they succeed
(note: some of the above are hypothetical, in case you are wondering :) but
only span one project.

In my opinion, all projects should bring out global goals for themselves.
The Gentoo Global Goals for 2006 would then be an overview of those goals.
Yet the Gentoo Council doesn't bring any input here.

There are some interesting ideas on the Gentoo Forums that aren't situated
in any of the current projects, such as "Top-100 Feature Requests" [1], "Gentoo
Binary profile" [2], "Gentoo Knowledge Base" [3], "USE-flag triggered
software installation" [4], etc.

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

[1] A site where the community can vote (one vote per bugzilla account?) on
    feature requests (or bugs), could be integrated in bugzilla if that's
    possible, but can also be a separate site where the feature request is
    formed dynamically (wiki?) or by discussion (forum).
[2] A profile that freezes CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/CHOST/USE/... and uses a build
    server to build binary packages for that binary-package profile. The
    project should not focus on the end result itself but rather on how all
    this is accomplished using Gentoo and how companies and organisations
    can easily implement a similar environment
[3] Something like Microsoft's KB where common issues are well explained,
    resolutions documented and where a good search mechanism is in place to
    help find the right solution. Would require moderation so that solutions
    are correct. Could provide dual solutions: one community-written (open
    wiki), one developers accepted (moderated wiki).
[4] Setting a USE flag triggers the installation of some recommended
    software so that novices don't need to search for the right software.
    Fex: USE="kde cdr" -> kde-meta + k3b 

-- 
  Gentoo Foundation Trustee          |  http://foundation.gentoo.org
  Gentoo Council Member  

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Simon Stelling wrote:
| My point is, either you have to generalize each project's goal to a real
| triviality or you have to define a goal which doesn't match some
| project's goals. Conclusion: Let it be.

Not necessarily. I just wrote on my blog [1] about this, and got a
constructive comment [2], which I'll talk a little about.

Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of Gentoo
and increase its usability.

This goal would involve a number of projects:

- - Releng would work to ensure that installing Gentoo is as easy as 
possible.
- - The documentation team would continue working to make its docs easy to
follow and find.
- - The installer project (as part of releng) will continue making Gentoo
faster/easier to install.
- - The portage team could conduct usability studies of portage (perhaps
with the help of openusability.org?).
- - Similar goes for some GUI / curses interfaces to configuration files
and portage itself, such as porthole, ufed, etc.
- - Others

Thanks,
Donnie

1. http://www.livejournal.com/users/spyderous/68149.html
2.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/spyderous/68149.html?thread=117301#t117301
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Sven Vermeulen]

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On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 06:21:39PM +0100, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> There are some interesting ideas on the Gentoo Forums that aren't situated
> in any of the current projects, such as "Top-100 Feature Requests" [1], "Gentoo
> Binary profile" [2], "Gentoo Knowledge Base" [3], "USE-flag triggered
> software installation" [4], etc.
[...]

(Sorry, pressed "send" too soon).

However, having such proposals is great, but they need to be worked out by
one or more users and formed into a GLEP. Such GLEPs can then be discussed
on the mailinglist and sent for "approval" to the Gentoo Council.

Now this is where the Gentoo Council comes in: its role is to /advise/
Gentoo's development, not regulate. If GLEPs come occasionally, there is
barely any reason not to positively advise to implement GLEP. After all, if
there are issues with it they would either be broken down during the
mailinglist discussions, or they are broken down when the teams themselves
refuse to implement them.

When several GLEPs require (immediate) attention, the Council will try to
advise where the priorities should be placed (which GLEP goes first).

When several GLEPs interfere with each other, the Council will try to advise
which GLEP is most beneficial for Gentoo and its community.

Some people hope to see the Council as a regulating body. Forget it,
developers are the brains that lead Gentoo's evolution, voluntary work is the 
blood that keeps Gentoo rolling, the community is the heart for which
we all work. As such, there is no single regulating body.

And as much as I hope to see a select few bring bright ideas, coördinate
projects and make everyone's work easier, I have seen too many attempts that
kill bright ideas to know far from everyone would be happy with such a
situation.

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Gentoo Foundation Trustee          |  http://foundation.gentoo.org
  Gentoo Council Member  

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:28:24 -0800 Donnie Berkholz
<spyderous@gentoo.org> wrote:
| Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of
| Gentoo and increase its usability.

That goal is silly and oxymoronic. Reduced learning curve decreases
usability.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
| On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:28:24 -0800 Donnie Berkholz
| <spyderous@gentoo.org> wrote:
| | Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of
| | Gentoo and increase its usability.
|
| That goal is silly and oxymoronic. Reduced learning curve decreases
| usability.

I disagree. I see that something _could_ become less usable as people
remove more and more features to make it easier to learn, but that's
certainly not a requirement.

As the saying goes, make the common tasks easy and the uncommon ones
possible. Making common tasks easier doesn't necessarily decrease
usability of the whole.

Thanks,
Donnie
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lares Moreau]

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On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 18:19 +0100, Simon Stelling wrote:
> My point is, either you have to generalize each project's goal to a real 
> triviality or you have to define a goal which doesn't match some 
> project's goals. Conclusion: Let it be.

Maybe we are looking at this problem the wrong way.  Instead of trying
to have Gentoo be the distro, perhaps Gentoo can be thought of as a
provider of infrastructure and tools to allow 'sub-distros' to flourish.

THere are many projects which now are trying to pull Gentoo in many
different directions, such as bianary distro vs. enterprise distro.  If
we remove "Gentoo as distro" from out thinking and replace it with
"Gentoo as provider of tools and infrastucture", These two seemingly
contradictory goals can each flourish in their own way.

Haveing sub-distros, lack of a better term, is not new to Gentoo.
Hardened has their own LiveCD, profile and tools.  I feel this can be
nurtured. Allowing the Binanary group to move in one direction, and
'tweakers' in an other, and die-hard security people in yet another,
while not severely conficting with each other.


Maybe what we need is a clearer definition of what each herd does?  I am
considering writing a GLEP about this, having each herd answer three
questions periodicly (say 6mths).
 - What do we want to do?
 - How are we going to get there?
 - How to we measure success?
and /maybe/ add a section about current devs and AT/HTs.
Just a thought.

-- 
Lares Moreau <lares.moreau@gmail.com>  | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org
lares/irc.freenode.net                 |
Gentoo x86 Arch Tester                 |               ::0 Alberta, Canada
Public Key: 0D46BB6E @ subkeys.pgp.net |          Encrypted Mail Preferred
Key fingerprint = 0CA3 E40D F897 7709 3628  C5D4 7D94 483E 0D46 BB6E

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 09:28 -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
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> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Simon Stelling wrote:
> | My point is, either you have to generalize each project's goal to a real
> | triviality or you have to define a goal which doesn't match some
> | project's goals. Conclusion: Let it be.
> 
> Not necessarily. I just wrote on my blog [1] about this, and got a
> constructive comment [2], which I'll talk a little about.
> 
> Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of Gentoo
> and increase its usability.

The problem here is that the two don't necessarily correlate.  They
*can* but many times they don't.

A common thing I have heard about the comparison between Windows and
Linux is this:

In Windows, it is easy to learn how to do the simple things, and
extremely hard to do the complex things, if possible, at all.

In Linux, it is hard to learn how to do the simple things, yet it gets
easier to use the system as one uses it more and more.

As a prime example, I strongly believe that making Gentoo "as easy as
possible" can only come about by reducing its usability.  If there is a
large number of choices, no matter how well documented, it isn't easy
for a beginner.  The only way I can see to make installing Gentoo "as
easy as possible" is by removing choice and functionality to the point
of it being a few clicks of the mouse and everything being done for you.
The problem is that anything that is stated generally can be taken to an
extreme.  If you say "as easy as possible" then I think unattended
identical installations for all Gentoo machines.  After all, what's
easier than that?

I would *never* agree to this, nor force any member of any project that
I am a part of to participate in such an endeavour, so you now already
have at least one person opposed to it.  Would action be taken against
me?  Who knows.  The point is that we do not get paid.  You cannot force
volunteers to do things they do not want to do.

There are workable solutions to this problem, but none that I see as
very effective for us.

For one, we could leave things alone.  This works fairly well for a
project even as large as ours.  Sure, there are people out there that
think that this doesn't work, but the truth is that they might be
looking to have Gentoo become something that it is not.

Second, we could "fire" most of the developers and move to a paid
developer pool.  This would ensure that developers would do what they're
told.

Third, we could come up with some form of enforcement (CEO, council,
whatever) capable of "firing" developers that stray too far from the
proposed Gentoo goals.  This will quickly bring back the "cabal" screams
and will probably result in the very quick diminishing of the Gentoo
developer pool.

I think part of the problem is that many people are forgetting exactly
what Gentoo really is.  Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux.  Gentoo
is not anything more than a loosely bound group of developers all doing
their own thing in a collaborative and collective manner.  You cannot
use corporate thinking to manage such a beast.  We don't have mission
statements.  We don't have road maps.  We don't have quarterly earnings
and market projections.  We simply exist.  The only way we can give
Gentoo a direction is by restricting what we, as developers, are allowed
to do.  The only real restrictions we have right now are "be civil" and
"don't break stuff".  Anything beyond that is inhibiting one of our
greatest strengths, our individuality and individual ideas.

Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to
implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly
harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement
so not allowed?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Simon Stelling]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Not necessarily. I just wrote on my blog [1] about this, and got a
> constructive comment [2], which I'll talk a little about.
> 
> Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of Gentoo
> and increase its usability.

Sounds like a good idea, but as Ciaran already said, 'low learning 
curve' and 'great usability' are just opposite things. Also, it is 
*very* vague.

> This goal would involve a number of projects:
> 
> - - Releng would work to ensure that installing Gentoo is as easy as 
> possible.

This is very vague too. Easy for who? Easy for a user who is too lazy to 
read docs and doesn't have any experience or easy for a sysadmin with 
plenty of experience trying to setting up Gentoo on a cluster with >100 
boxes? I think this makes it pretty clear that there is not simply one 
implementation referring to one idea, but I'm afraid that these 'goals' 
could be misused to force a common direction instead of having multiple 
efforts addressing the same idea in different ways.

> - - The portage team could conduct usability studies of portage (perhaps
> with the help of openusability.org?).

'to conduct usability studies' sounds great, but it's IMHO not much 
more. I don't need studies to point out annoying things from a user 
perspective, I'm a user myself. Sure, feedback is good, but we already 
get feedback, in the form of bug reports.

> - - Others

How do e.g. arches fit into this scheme? Yeah, sure, they make Gentoo 
easier to use because they keyword stuff. Great. I'm really glad 
somebody tells me why I am doing the stuff I've been doing for more than 
a year.

So, the 'easy to learn/use' goal might be a goal that quite some 
projects already are trying to attain, but it really isn't *THE* goal 
for Gentoo, is it?

-- 
Simon Stelling
Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Co-Lead
blubb@gentoo.org
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Chris Gianelloni wrote:
| As a prime example, I strongly believe that making Gentoo "as easy as
| possible" can only come about by reducing its usability.  If there is a
| large number of choices, no matter how well documented, it isn't easy
| for a beginner.  The only way I can see to make installing Gentoo "as
| easy as possible" is by removing choice and functionality to the point
| of it being a few clicks of the mouse and everything being done for you.
| The problem is that anything that is stated generally can be taken to an
| extreme.  If you say "as easy as possible" then I think unattended
| identical installations for all Gentoo machines.  After all, what's
| easier than that?
|
| I would *never* agree to this, nor force any member of any project that
| I am a part of to participate in such an endeavour, so you now already
| have at least one person opposed to it.  Would action be taken against
| me?  Who knows.  The point is that we do not get paid.  You cannot force
| volunteers to do things they do not want to do.

This isn't about forcing you to do things a certain way. It's about if
somebody asked you to make Gentoo easier to learn and use, what would
you do as part of releng? How would you do it?

Perhaps you would have to make some sort of choice of usability over
easy to learn, or vice versa. That's your decision. The council would
just suggest what it would like to see happen to Gentoo.

You're focusing too much on forcing people to do this or that. Why
wouldn't you want to make Gentoo easier to use, or learn how to use?
That's my question.

Thanks,
Donnie
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Simon Stelling wrote:
| Donnie Berkholz wrote:
|> - - Releng would work to ensure that installing Gentoo is as easy as
|> possible.
|
|
| This is very vague too. Easy for who? Easy for a user who is too lazy to
| read docs and doesn't have any experience or easy for a sysadmin with
| plenty of experience trying to setting up Gentoo on a cluster with >100
| boxes? I think this makes it pretty clear that there is not simply one
| implementation referring to one idea, but I'm afraid that these 'goals'
| could be misused to force a common direction instead of having multiple
| efforts addressing the same idea in different ways.

I'm guessing that the vast majority of our users have Gentoo installed
on one or a few computers, and are typical hobbyists. That's who I would
target with making things easier, while trying to avoid regressions in
the other cases.

That could certainly use some research though.

|
|> - - The portage team could conduct usability studies of portage (perhaps
|> with the help of openusability.org?).
|
|
| 'to conduct usability studies' sounds great, but it's IMHO not much
| more. I don't need studies to point out annoying things from a user
| perspective, I'm a user myself. Sure, feedback is good, but we already
| get feedback, in the form of bug reports.

OK, but you're one user. Maybe you are very unusual and 99 out of 100
other Gentoo users would do things totally differently.

| How do e.g. arches fit into this scheme? Yeah, sure, they make Gentoo
| easier to use because they keyword stuff. Great. I'm really glad
| somebody tells me why I am doing the stuff I've been doing for more than
| a year.
|
| So, the 'easy to learn/use' goal might be a goal that quite some
| projects already are trying to attain, but it really isn't *THE* goal
| for Gentoo, is it?

Who said we can only have one goal?

Thanks,
Donnie
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lance Albertson]

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Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Lance Albertson wrote: [Mon Jan 02 2006, 12:14:05PM CST]
> 
>>Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now.
>>Looking back at the last two years, what are the major
>>changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has
>>been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder
>>about any ground breaking enhancements.
> 
> 
> Assuming that we can ever get GLEP 42 out the door, I think that will
> constitute ground-breaking.  There has actually been a considerable
> amount of progress on the Portage front, as well, although not all of
> the new stuff is out yet.  Similarly, the slowly-rolling website
> redesign is truly on the verge of being released.  We also have had
> excellent modular X11 support for some time now, and it appears that
> gcc-4.x support is doing quite well, too.  
> 
> Oh, and we've also retired an amazing number of no-longer-active devs,
> so I don't know if it's actually true that we've added numbers.

All of those of course are true. I guess I'm thinking more in the large
picture of things. Retiring non-active devs isn't something I'd exactly
call 'ground breaking' :-). I know there are things being worked on now
that will probably be in that category. I was mainly looking at the long
term flow of ground breaking progress we've made. Sure, we've made lots
of great improvements, but I'm concerned that we have too many
subprojects all working in their little world and no one really looking
over the whole project making sure things flow together well. There's no
one out there who's responsibility is to track all these subprojects and
make sure things are flowing right.

>>I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating
>>lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we
>>could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're
>>at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I
>>think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be
>>better than distroA or distroB.
> 
> 
> Okay, so you're not happy with Gentoo's direction, but what are you
> actively doing to change it?  (Other than starting this discussion, that
> is?)  I don't mean that question as an attack, although it may well
> appear that way.  It's also not directed at you, since others have 
> made similar comments.  Instead, I'm suggesting that the reason that Gentoo
> lacks a leadership position right now is that, at least where Gentoo is
> concerned, effective leadership generally means an individual who is
> putting in a _lot_ of hard work writing code and implementing changes.
> That's one of the reasons that drobbins could be effective--he had the
> time to extend portage, work on the website to fit his vision, and make
> sweeping changes to the tree.  In that respect, I would argue that
> Gentoo's most leader-like person right now is vapier, because he's a dev who
> actively enacts wide-ranging changes.  Similarly, flameeyes, ciaranm,
> and the portage team all deserve credit for having a significant impact
> on where Gentoo has been going recently.  (Yes, I also realize that
> people may not agree with some of what those devs have been
> doing, but they have been out there getting their hands dirty, and it
> makes a huge difference.)  

Sigh, I get the impression that you think I wrote this email just to
start another long drawn out debate. I know what you're talking about
above and I somewhat agree on what you're saying there. We all have our
limited amount of time and energy to work on things. There are days I
wish I could just devote 100% of my time to Gentoo to improve those
areas I want to. But sadly, I cannot do that so this is my one attempt
at getting a feel for our group to see where they see us going. If I had
more time and energy, I would try to do more active things.

> *Shrug*  My feeling is that Gentoo is not advancing all that quickly
> right now, but that it's being maintained fairly well.  More
> importantly, we still ensure that people _can_ make sweeping changes, if
> they want to put in the work to do so.  I'm actually fairly confident
> about Gentoo having a decent future.

I have no worries about people actually getting things done. What I'm
concerned about is that there's no true direction of where things will
go. Everyone has their own way of doing something, without any kind of
proper overall plan. I know the GLEP system is designed to help with
that (which is it). I'm looking at more of overall direction in Gentoo,
not specific things. We all have different opinions on how things should
be done and nothing ever seems to be totally decided on. Sure we have
the council, but I really haven't seen any direction from them on where
Gentoo should go. We have debates on the mailing lists that seem to
never go anywhere. Is everything that's debated on there needing to go
through a GLEP, or how do such things get decided with a final say?

I dunno, I just get the impression that people fear having a goal to
work on and would rather just let things work out in a random way (like
they have been for a while now). I'm not wanting to take the fun out of
this, but I feel more structure and less redtape would help make us move
forward faster and better.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Lance Albertson wrote:
| All of those of course are true. I guess I'm thinking more in the large
| picture of things. Retiring non-active devs isn't something I'd exactly
| call 'ground breaking' :-). I know there are things being worked on now
| that will probably be in that category. I was mainly looking at the long
| term flow of ground breaking progress we've made. Sure, we've made lots
| of great improvements, but I'm concerned that we have too many
| subprojects all working in their little world and no one really looking
| over the whole project making sure things flow together well. There's no
| one out there who's responsibility is to track all these subprojects and
| make sure things are flowing right.

Shouldn't that be the council's job?

| I dunno, I just get the impression that people fear having a goal to
| work on and would rather just let things work out in a random way (like
| they have been for a while now). I'm not wanting to take the fun out of
| this, but I feel more structure and less redtape would help make us move
| forward faster and better.

More structure and less red tape ... How do those two work together? I
feel like they're connected -- a more structured organization will have
more bureaucracy and more red tape.

Thanks,
Donnie
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lares Moreau]

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On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 12:35 -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> More structure and less red tape ... How do those two work together? I
> feel like they're connected -- a more structured organization will have
> more bureaucracy and more red tape.

To me red tape means that there are odd and peculiar steps in the
process. Make the tape clearly defined, and have no exceptions; everyone
plays by the same rules, no back doors.

Perhaps - more structure with easy-to-use tape - would be a better way
of phrasing it.
-- 
Lares Moreau <lares.moreau@gmail.com>  | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org
lares/irc.freenode.net                 |
Gentoo x86 Arch Tester                 |               ::0 Alberta, Canada
Public Key: 0D46BB6E @ subkeys.pgp.net |          Encrypted Mail Preferred
Key fingerprint = 0CA3 E40D F897 7709 3628  C5D4 7D94 483E 0D46 BB6E

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Grant Goodyear]

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Lance Albertson wrote: [Tue Jan 03 2006, 02:09:43PM CST]
> Sure, we've made lots of great improvements, but I'm concerned that we
> have too many subprojects all working in their little world and no one
> really looking over the whole project making sure things flow together
> well. There's no one out there who's responsibility is to track all
> these subprojects and make sure things are flowing right.

That's quite true.  Of course, I would argue that it's true because
nobody has volunteered to do that job.  Of course, there'd be no real
authority with that sort of position, since if devs don't want to work
on a project they probably will not do so, so all that could really be done
would be to have a group of people tracking the various projects and
encouraging or cajoling progress.  That said, having either an informal
or formal group in that role could still be quite useful.

> Sigh, I get the impression that you think I wrote this email just to
> start another long drawn out debate. 

No, I actually think you wrote this e-mail to voice your concerns, and
that your motives are pure.  *Shrug*  

> I have no worries about people actually getting things done. What I'm
> concerned about is that there's no true direction of where things will
> go. Everyone has their own way of doing something, without any kind of
> proper overall plan. I know the GLEP system is designed to help with
> that (which is it). I'm looking at more of overall direction in Gentoo,
> not specific things. We all have different opinions on how things should
> be done and nothing ever seems to be totally decided on. Sure we have
> the council, but I really haven't seen any direction from them on where
> Gentoo should go. We have debates on the mailing lists that seem to
> never go anywhere. Is everything that's debated on there needing to go
> through a GLEP, or how do such things get decided with a final say?

I agree with many of these statements, but I disagree to what extent
there's an actual problem here.  Yes, there is little real "direction"
to Gentoo.  I think that's a reality of having a mid-life volunteer
distribution.  Our devs choose the parts of the distro that are fun for
them to work on, and consequently it is difficult to motivate people to
work towards any particular plan if that plan involves "not-fun" things.
As such, the best way to get something decided with a final say is to 
provide not just an idea, but a working implementation.  Then it's easy,
since either the implementation is good enough, or it is not.  That sets
the bar rather high, though, so the second best method is to have a
strong advocate who's willing to keep slogging away at an idea.

> I dunno, I just get the impression that people fear having a goal to
> work on and would rather just let things work out in a random way (like
> they have been for a while now). I'm not wanting to take the fun out of
> this, but I feel more structure and less redtape would help make us move
> forward faster and better.

I really don't believe that fear of goals is much of a problem.  I think
the problem, instead, is a lack of sufficiently exciting goals, and a
concomitant lack of people sufficiently motivated to shepherd those
goals to a successful conclusion.

I think I'll stop here, since I'm not expressing my thoughts all that
well.  *Sigh*

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Grant Goodyear]

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Chris Gianelloni wrote: [Tue Jan 03 2006, 12:17:06PM CST]
> I think part of the problem is that many people are forgetting exactly
> what Gentoo really is.  Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux.  Gentoo
> is not anything more than a loosely bound group of developers all doing
> their own thing in a collaborative and collective manner.  You cannot
> use corporate thinking to manage such a beast.  We don't have mission
> statements.  We don't have road maps.  We don't have quarterly earnings
> and market projections.  We simply exist.  The only way we can give
> Gentoo a direction is by restricting what we, as developers, are allowed
> to do.  The only real restrictions we have right now are "be civil" and
> "don't break stuff".  Anything beyond that is inhibiting one of our
> greatest strengths, our individuality and individual ideas.

[remainder snipped]

Well, that was said much better than I managed.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Henrik Brix Andersen]

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On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 10:05:03AM -0600, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> I doubt that GLEP 45 really needs a vote by the full council.  The lead
> GLEP editor's decision should probably suffice for something this
> trivial.  (Recall that the GLEP process is that the GLEP author let's
> the GLEP editors know when a GLEP is ready to go up for approval, and
> that it is generally the editors who work out precisely who needs to
> approve the thing.)

I see.

> I'll happily approve GLEP 45, with the exception that I don't know how
> to implement part of it.  The GLEP Last-Modified string is autogenerated
> from CVS, so it's not in the yyyy-mm-dd format that the GLEP requires.
> Help?

Well, CVS doesn't use neither yyyy-mm-dd nor the currently used
format, so the conversion must be done in a commit-hook or
similar.

Perhaps our friendly neighbor Infra knows where this is done?

Regards,
Brix
-- 
Henrik Brix Andersen <brix@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Metadistribution | Mobile computing herd

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 11:06:37PM +0100 or thereabouts, Henrik Brix Andersen wrote:
> Well, CVS doesn't use neither yyyy-mm-dd nor the currently used
> format, so the conversion must be done in a commit-hook or
> similar.
> 
> Perhaps our friendly neighbor Infra knows where this is done?

It just uses the standard $Date: $ CVS mojo.  Nothing special going on
here.  The format it generates is definitely machine parseable, though it
isn't internationalized.

If internationalization is a primary goal of the GLEP, then I'd suggest
simply changing the Last-Modified field to a manual one and having folks
input it directly.  If the primary goal is simply to make sure machines can
parse the date, then I'd say it meets that goal already.

I'd really rather avoid using custom hooks or anything that hacks CVS at
all.  It's our most critical application, so we try to be extra cautious
about making changes that aren't absolutely necessary.

If there's another way to do this (i.e. manual entry) then I'd rather go
that route and see how it works before looking at hacking on cvs.

--kurt

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Henrik Brix Andersen]

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On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 10:37:31PM +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> If internationalization is a primary goal of the GLEP, then I'd suggest
> simply changing the Last-Modified field to a manual one and having folks
> input it directly.  If the primary goal is simply to make sure machines can
> parse the date, then I'd say it meets that goal already.

The primary goal of GLEP 42 is i18n.

> I'd really rather avoid using custom hooks or anything that hacks CVS at
> all.  It's our most critical application, so we try to be extra cautious
> about making changes that aren't absolutely necessary.

Fair enough.

> If there's another way to do this (i.e. manual entry) then I'd rather go
> that route and see how it works before looking at hacking on cvs.

That's up to the GLEP editors, I guess...

Regards,
Brix
-- 
Henrik Brix Andersen <brix@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Metadistribution | Mobile computing herd

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Greg KH]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 03:58:57AM +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni
> wrote:
> > Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux.  Gentoo is not anything more than
> > a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a
> > collaborative and collective manner.  You cannot use corporate thinking
> > to manage such a beast.  We don't have mission statements.  We don't have
> > road maps.  We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections.  We
> > simply exist.  
> 
> Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
> decline.

Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline?

> > Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to
> > implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly
> > harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement
> > so not allowed?
> 
> Yes, absolutely.  

We need a mission statement first :)

thanks,

greg k-h
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni
wrote:
> Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux.  Gentoo is not anything more than
> a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a
> collaborative and collective manner.  You cannot use corporate thinking
> to manage such a beast.  We don't have mission statements.  We don't have
> road maps.  We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections.  We
> simply exist.  

Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
decline.

> Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to
> implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly
> harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement
> so not allowed?

Yes, absolutely.  

--kurt

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 07:57:06PM -0800 or thereabouts, Greg KH wrote:
> > Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
> > decline.
> 
> Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline?

Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO, leader,
boss, manager, etc.  (you know, all those corporate-type words that raise
the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.)

Right now, Gentoo is this gigantic, obese amoeba that just sort of sits in
one place.  Different parts of it try to go in different directions, with
the net result being that the whole body never goes anywhere.  We haven't
done anything interesting or innovative over the last...year?  two years?
We have no effective leadership whatsoever.  We spend far too much time
arguing amongst ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common
goal.  

We should appoint one person to lead the project.  Make sure that person
knows WTF they're doing, are respected by the right developers, has a good
vision for Gentoo and then let them make decisions.  Expect people to
adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other
opportunities for their creative outlet.

That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up.
S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the
strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out
where the best direction is for it to proceed.  They should then be
responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes
according to this direction.  Folks who disagree with the vision will be
able to go their own direction and start their own projects.  That's the
beauty of the GPL. 

Anyway, I have no illusions of this idea ever being implemented in the
current Gentoo environment.  /shrug.  It was a good ride.

--kurt

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Andrew Muraco]

Lares Moreau wrote:

>On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 18:19 +0100, Simon Stelling wrote:
>  
>
>>My point is, either you have to generalize each project's goal to a real 
>>triviality or you have to define a goal which doesn't match some 
>>project's goals. Conclusion: Let it be.
>>    
>>
>
>Maybe we are looking at this problem the wrong way.  Instead of trying
>to have Gentoo be the distro, perhaps Gentoo can be thought of as a
>provider of infrastructure and tools to allow 'sub-distros' to flourish.
>
>THere are many projects which now are trying to pull Gentoo in many
>different directions, such as bianary distro vs. enterprise distro.  If
>we remove "Gentoo as distro" from out thinking and replace it with
>"Gentoo as provider of tools and infrastucture", These two seemingly
>contradictory goals can each flourish in their own way.
>
>Haveing sub-distros, lack of a better term, is not new to Gentoo.
>Hardened has their own LiveCD, profile and tools.  I feel this can be
>nurtured. Allowing the Binanary group to move in one direction, and
>'tweakers' in an other, and die-hard security people in yet another,
>while not severely conficting with each other.
>
>
>Maybe what we need is a clearer definition of what each herd does?  I am
>considering writing a GLEP about this, having each herd answer three
>questions periodicly (say 6mths).
> - What do we want to do?
> - How are we going to get there?
> - How to we measure success?
>and /maybe/ add a section about current devs and AT/HTs.
>Just a thought.
>  
>

I like your idea of having gentoo not being a distro, but moreso a 
collection of tools. Mostly because gentoo's method of dealing with 
problems (problems that binary distros tend to have, like keeping 
software uptodate) are handled in a way thats just a tad more managable, 
plus when multiple repo support gets added, its just another way that 
gentoo can be customized and reflavored.

+1 for that thinking

Tux
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Alec Warner]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 07:57:06PM -0800 or thereabouts, Greg KH wrote:
> 
>>>Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
>>>decline.
>>
>>Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline?
> 
> 
> Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO, leader,
> boss, manager, etc.  (you know, all those corporate-type words that raise
> the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.)
> 
> Right now, Gentoo is this gigantic, obese amoeba that just sort of sits in
> one place.  Different parts of it try to go in different directions, with
> the net result being that the whole body never goes anywhere.  We haven't
> done anything interesting or innovative over the last...year?  two years?
> We have no effective leadership whatsoever.  We spend far too much time
> arguing amongst ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common
> goal.

 I think some people have attempted things that are interesting or
innovative, although they may not have gotten off of the ground quite
yet.  I think for instance, that Stuart's webapp-config project is a
good idea, and while I also think his first attempt sucked, that perhaps
in the future it could be a great tool, especially for large virtual
host places.  I think it sucks that he has gotten the flack from it here.

The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the
graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that
is being worked on.  I think many distributions lack tools in this area
and we can be interesting and helpful here.

The Portage project has some cool stuff coming up.  I realize that the
2.X codebase scares a lot of people away due to it's nature but recently
there has been a lot more active development in features and planning.
Plus there is code in the savior branch to do some "interesting" things :)

> <snip>
> adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other
> opportunities for their creative outlet.
This sounds to me like "if they don't like it then send them on their
merry way"  which is kind of a bad attitude IMHO.  If they are working
on something it usually is because they are interested.  You can't
really say "well your interest is useless so work on something else
instead" and expect them to comply.  If they are either going to work on
something they enjoy and contribute to Gentoo or do nothing at
all...well I'll take the former :)

> 
> That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up.
> S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the
> strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out
> where the best direction is for it to proceed.  They should then be
> responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes
> according to this direction.  Folks who disagree with the vision will be
> able to go their own direction and start their own projects.  That's the
> beauty of the GPL.

If this Gentoo project fails/falters (like you seem to think it is
heading) you are free to do the same, form your own project with it's
own set of rules and leader if you so choose.

> 
> Anyway, I have no illusions of this idea ever being implemented in the
> current Gentoo environment.  /shrug.  It was a good ride.
> 
> --kurt

I would agree overall that inter-project communication is lacking in
many areas.  I also think that people are uncompromising.  Everyone is
over-worked, everyone has no time, if you want thing X done, get
cracking...etc... I don't think that is an especially healthy attitude
to getting larger/cooler things accomplished.  If there is an entity
that can help "persuade" projects to listen to one another that would be
 great, but in the end what can you really do?

Partially I ( as currently still a user at this point ) would like to
see a bit more project management.  I see that webapps posted a monthly
meeting reminder to -dev, but how many projects really have meetings
that often?  Do they accomplish anything?  Should we have someone that
tries to attend most meetings to make sure things are going smoothly, or
going at all?  Do we need to have slacking projects that get killed off
by the council as well as "slacker" council members?

More things to consider ;)

Alec Warner (antarus)
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-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 12:39:05AM -0500 or thereabouts, Alec Warner wrote:
>  I think some people have attempted things that are interesting or
> innovative, although they may not have gotten off of the ground quite
> yet.

That's the problem.  Lots of folks have great ideas.  Our execution sucks,
though.  We also have projects working against each other (or, at least,
not in step with each other) 

> The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the
> graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that
> is being worked on.  

I agree, but it's been "in development" for...I dunno..almost two years now
I think and it's still not released.  I'm not slamming the -installer team
-- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does point to our
inability to execute.

> The Portage project has some cool stuff coming up.  I realize that the
> 2.X codebase scares a lot of people away due to it's nature but recently
> there has been a lot more active development in features and planning.

Again, lots of talk, some code, but nothing we can point to and say, "look!
see that?  We did that!!" and be proud of it.

> Plus there is code in the savior branch to do some "interesting" things :)

> > adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other
> > opportunities for their creative outlet.
> This sounds to me like "if they don't like it then send them on their
> merry way"  which is kind of a bad attitude IMHO.  

This is a harsher way of saying it, but yes, it's exactly what I mean.  I
couldn't disagree more strongly that it's a bad attitude, however.

> You can't really say "well your interest is useless so work on something
> else instead" and expect them to comply.

No, but you can say, "this is the direction we've decided to go in.  We'd
love to have you as part of the team, but if you want to go a different
direction, please take a copy of the source code, along with our blessings
and we wish you the best of luck."

It's great to tinker and experiment with new things, but at some point,
those tinkerings will have interdependencies on other parts of the project.
People will need/want features added to <foo> in order for them to be able
to continue.  If those features don't adhere to the overall direction that
has been chosen for the project, then they're taking time and resources
away from that direction, regardless of who does the actual coding.

--kurt

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Corey Shields]

On Wednesday 04 January 2006 21:39, Alec Warner wrote:
>  I think some people have attempted things that are interesting or
> innovative, although they may not have gotten off of the ground quite
> yet.  I think for instance, that Stuart's webapp-config project is a
> good idea, and while I also think his first attempt sucked, that perhaps
> in the future it could be a great tool, especially for large virtual
> host places.  I think it sucks that he has gotten the flack from it here.
>
> The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the
> graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that
> is being worked on.  I think many distributions lack tools in this area
> and we can be interesting and helpful here.
>
> The Portage project has some cool stuff coming up.  I realize that the
> 2.X codebase scares a lot of people away due to it's nature but recently
> there has been a lot more active development in features and planning.
> Plus there is code in the savior branch to do some "interesting" things :)

Bingo.  Bingo. Bingo.

Where is the centralized vision that everyone is working together here that 
people not directly related to each project will buy in to and therefore do 
what they can to see it succeed?  Where is the collaboration between groups 
to make it happen?  I think this has already been hashed out enough, but your 
points can be drawn back to that.  Portage team is running in one direction, 
webapps another, GLI a third direction (while kicking anyone who wishes to 
run with them in the nuts).  In any structured environment I have worked in, 
you have a heirarchy where everyone, down to the grunts, know where they are 
heading as an organization, why they are heading that way, and what they can 
do to help.  Even though groups work on differing things, they know how those 
things are directly affecting the end goal (mission statement, whatever)

Right now, Gentoo has it's cliques that come up with their own things, and to 
get assistance from another clique you're gonna have to have some ties or 
work real hard to sell your idea to them.  It's too flat of a model to work 
for any real innovation, else, as Kurt pointed out, we would have seen some 
cool stuff in the past couple of years.

> If this Gentoo project fails/falters (like you seem to think it is
> heading) you are free to do the same, form your own project with it's
> own set of rules and leader if you so choose.

Gentoo won't fail..  I don't believe that is what Kurt or Lance are saying.  I 
think the point was that Gentoo is not moving at the typical pace of OSS 
development, and we believe that it is the organizational structure that is 
holding it back.

> Partially I ( as currently still a user at this point ) would like to
> see a bit more project management.  I see that webapps posted a monthly
> meeting reminder to -dev, but how many projects really have meetings
> that often?  Do they accomplish anything?  Should we have someone that
> tries to attend most meetings to make sure things are going smoothly, or
> going at all?  Do we need to have slacking projects that get killed off
> by the council as well as "slacker" council members?

Thanks for your comments..   As for management, anyone who reads "Five 
Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni[1] will see all of the problems 
that Gentoo has, as well as the potential Gentoo has if it worked well.

Cheers,

-C

[1] - 
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787960756/104-9660666-9133512?v=glance&n=283155
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Daniel Ostrow]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 762 bytes --]

[snip]

> Thanks for your comments..   As for management, anyone who reads "Five
> Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni[1] will see all of the problems
> that Gentoo has, as well as the potential Gentoo has if it worked well.

[/snip]

OK granted it is a shameless plug, but this book is so on point that I 
finished it in one night. Not to say that that is any major accomplishment 
it's a pretty short book. But it basically lays out in black and white what 
is wrong with the way things are, and what could be done better. It really 
was rather frightening how very much like Gentoo the small 'Board of 
Directors' in this book is.

-- 
Daniel Ostrow
Gentoo Foundation Board of Trustees
Gentoo/{PPC,PPC64,DevRel}
dostrow@gentoo.org

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Donnie Berkholz]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Kurt Lieber wrote:
| On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 12:39:05AM -0500 or thereabouts, Alec Warner
wrote:
|>The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the
|>graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that
|>is being worked on.
|
|
| I agree, but it's been "in development" for...I dunno..almost two
years now
| I think and it's still not released.  I'm not slamming the -installer team
| -- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does point to our
| inability to execute.

It's actually had a 0.1 and 0.2 release. See
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/.

Thanks,
Donnie
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 04:31:30 +0000 Kurt Lieber <klieber@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| We haven't done anything interesting or innovative over
| the last...year?

Codswallop. We've done lots of large, innovative changes. You've just
not been paying enough attention to have seen them, and the people
doing the changes haven't been going around screaming about it from the
rooftops.

If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start by
looking into how we can make it easier for developers to advertise what
they've been doing.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Brian Harring]

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On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 10:05:52PM -0800, Corey Shields wrote:
> Where is the centralized vision that everyone is working together here that 
> people not directly related to each project will buy in to and therefore do 
> what they can to see it succeed?

We've had centralized visions for a long while.  Recall use/slot deps?

See them available anywhere?

Vision ofr an installer?  Yes, underway now, but the centralized vision 
really didn't do jack for actually acquring folk to work on it, did 
it (feel free to chime in agaffney since it's effectively yours now a 
days).


> Where is the collaboration between groups 
> to make it happen?

How many projects actually require collaboration amongst multiple 
groups to pull it off?  Yes, if it's infra related we're stuck waiting 
on you guys to move, but where else is the intricate dependencies 
between groups y'all seem to be seeing?

Don't get me wrong, there *are* dependencies between groups (everyone 
reliant on toolchain fex).  What I'm getting at is that the angle of 
blaming communication for lack of progress is daft- the issue isn't 
lack of communication, it's lack of _actual_ work being done.


> Portage team is running in one direction, 
> webapps another, GLI a third direction (while kicking anyone who wishes to 
> run with them in the nuts).

Examples would be lovely.


> In any structured environment I have worked in, 
> you have a heirarchy where everyone, down to the grunts, know where they are 
> heading as an organization, why they are heading that way, and what they can 
> do to help. Even though groups work on differing things, they know how those 
> things are directly affecting the end goal (mission statement, whatever)
>
> Right now, Gentoo has it's cliques that come up with their own things, and to 
> get assistance from another clique you're gonna have to have some ties or 
> work real hard to sell your idea to them.  It's too flat of a model to work 
> for any real innovation, else, as Kurt pointed out, we would have seen some 
> cool stuff in the past couple of years.
>
> > If this Gentoo project fails/falters (like you seem to think it is
> > heading) you are free to do the same, form your own project with it's
> > own set of rules and leader if you so choose.
> 
> Gentoo won't fail..  I don't believe that is what Kurt or Lance are saying.  I 
> think the point was that Gentoo is not moving at the typical pace of OSS 
> development, and we believe that it is the organizational structure that is 
> holding it back.

Actually, here's where I'm going to get lynched- (both for bringing up 
anon* after pissing y'all off by asking about it less then 24 hours 
previously, and stepping on other toes).

Typical foss project is optimized for one thing, and one thing alone- 
maximal usage of available resources.  It has to be *easy* for folks 
to contribute whatever time they have- this means eliminating as much 
menial/manual work as possible.

Immediate access to most current source so they can raid it and patch 
it, rather then splitting against an old version, then the maintainer 
forward porting the patch to head fex is a huge issue.  It wastes both 
the maintainer's time and the random patch submitters time having to 
juggle between revisions.

Further, foss has something of a rapid release cycle.  We're actively 
trying to move in the opposite direction if you consider the actual 
implication of trying to widen the unstable keywording gap- I'm not 
stating QA is bad, what I'm stating is that QA explicitly requires 
delays built in (whether via multiple reviews by devs, or letting the 
changes sit for a while).

End result of it is that it takes longer to get stuff out, with the 
result waterfalling across the tree- cool nifty package x that has 
bleeding edge dep y, with dep y sitting due to QA concerns for 
example.

I've not yet actually touched on communication/sync'ing up between 
volunteers either- that's further delays.  For example, you've got 
crazy/nifty feature X that must be glep'd.  You've got realistically a 
wait of a month before it's worth starting the actual work for it.

Yes, a month.  Reason being that glep can be ixnayed, thus those with 
half a brain aren't going to do work that could be shot down, they're 
likely going to wait till the proposal is accepted *then* start the 
work.

Probably pissing a selection of people off here (pardon, deal), but 
the point is that this notion that introducing more communication/sync 
up points isn't going to accomplish anything.  Yes, it's required, but 
foss is not your typical business work place (thank god).

Why has gentoo gotten slower as it's gotten larger?  Because the lone 
wolf developer has less bullshit to deal with, they can just hammer 
towards their goal.  Introduce more folk into it, waste more of their 
time syncing up with each other, more time of those who see their 
goal, know how to get their, having to run it past everyone who wants 
to be know what's afoot.

Essentially, the more required sync up/communication built into how 
things are done, the more bound you are to the slowest folk.  Can only 
run go as fast as your slowest member effectively.


> > Partially I ( as currently still a user at this point ) would like to
> > see a bit more project management.  I see that webapps posted a monthly
> > meeting reminder to -dev, but how many projects really have meetings
> > that often?  Do they accomplish anything?  Should we have someone that
> > tries to attend most meetings to make sure things are going smoothly, or
> > going at all?  Do we need to have slacking projects that get killed off
> > by the council as well as "slacker" council members?
> 
> Thanks for your comments..   As for management, anyone who reads "Five 
> Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni[1] will see all of the problems 
> that Gentoo has, as well as the potential Gentoo has if it worked well.

Not trying to stick it to you, but I think what you're pointing at as 
good is fundamentally the issue here- more process tagged into gentoo 
isn't going to help anything, just push us further towards 
debianization (something that's bugged me for the last 18 months I 
might add).

What I've seen with gentoo is bluntly, wasted resources (bit 
intentional in some cases).  We've been progressing more towards 
keeping everyone in the loop rather then letting folks spring on ahead 
and get things done (sometimes with a bit of a mess in the process).

Note I said 'intentional'; seems like people have been pushing for 
gentoo as a whole to slow down (note the enterprise 
concerns/complaints that hit the ml every 6 months for example).

Dunno.  Maybe it's all a ramble, maybe you think I'm a loon, but final 
point I'm going to make is that pushing for a global solution (whether 
a BDFL or board or committee) totally is missing the actual issue- 
that individuals get things done, the larger the # of folks involved 
in progressing towards something the slower they're going to move.

Adding artifical sync ups/communications is a step towards slowing 
things down further, not speeding things up.

Central vision, mission statements, etc, that crap, doesn't 
actually accomplish anything; if someone is working towards something, 
someone is working towards it.  Extra beuracray/cruft doesn't 
translate to code however, nor does it really enable faster production 
of code.

~harring


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Tom Martin]

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On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 06:31:42 +0000
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 04:31:30 +0000 Kurt Lieber <klieber@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> | We haven't done anything interesting or innovative over
> | the last...year?
> 
> Codswallop. We've done lots of large, innovative changes. You've just
> not been paying enough attention to have seen them, and the people
> doing the changes haven't been going around screaming about it from
> the rooftops.
> 
> If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start by
> looking into how we can make it easier for developers to advertise
> what they've been doing.

planet.g.o?

-- 
Tom Martin, http://dev.gentoo.org/~slarti
AMD64, net-mail, shell-tools, vim, recruiters
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 12:09:09 +0000 Tom Martin <slarti@gentoo.org> wrote:
| > If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start
| > by looking into how we can make it easier for developers to
| > advertise what they've been doing.
| 
| planet.g.o?

No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say
rather than the truth of what's going on.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 03:58 +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni
> wrote:
> > Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux.  Gentoo is not anything more than
> > a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a
> > collaborative and collective manner.  You cannot use corporate thinking
> > to manage such a beast.  We don't have mission statements.  We don't have
> > road maps.  We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections.  We
> > simply exist.  
> 
> Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
> decline.

Strange, most indicators that I've seen are showing that we're still
gaining users and developers hand over fist.

> 
> > Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to
> > implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly
> > harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement
> > so not allowed?
> 
> Yes, absolutely.

No offense, but I have a feeling that you're in the wrong place, then.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 19:57 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 03:58:57AM +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni
> > wrote:
> > > Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux.  Gentoo is not anything more than
> > > a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a
> > > collaborative and collective manner.  You cannot use corporate thinking
> > > to manage such a beast.  We don't have mission statements.  We don't have
> > > road maps.  We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections.  We
> > > simply exist.  
> > 
> > Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
> > decline.
> 
> Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline?

Pander to the "enterprise" crowd, of course.  You know, take away all of
the stuff that makes Gentoo what it is and slow down development with
more committees, peer review boards, and meetings.  We need to all take
a step back and make sure that we're all a part of the "big picture" for
Gentoo.  You know, subscribe to the group think.

Personally, I *love* the fact that the Hardened team has differing goals
from Release Engineering.  I also don't see how our goals could ever
really be guided by a single vision.  That doesn't keep us from working
together to each accomplish our individual goals.

> > > Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to
> > > implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly
> > > harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement
> > > so not allowed?
> > 
> > Yes, absolutely.  
> 
> We need a mission statement first :)

Our mission: To seek out new life and civilization, and to bring Gentoo
to them, by force, if necessary.  *grin*

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Dan Meltzer]

Here are my random two cents

On 1/5/06, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 19:57 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 03:58:57AM +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni
> > > wrote:
> > > > Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux.  Gentoo is not anything more than
> > > > a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a
> > > > collaborative and collective manner.  You cannot use corporate thinking
> > > > to manage such a beast.  We don't have mission statements.  We don't have
> > > > road maps.  We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections.  We
> > > > simply exist.
> > >
> > > Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
> > > decline.
> >
> > Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline?
>
> Pander to the "enterprise" crowd, of course.  You know, take away all of
> the stuff that makes Gentoo what it is and slow down development with
> more committees, peer review boards, and meetings.  We need to all take
> a step back and make sure that we're all a part of the "big picture" for
> Gentoo.  You know, subscribe to the group think.
>
> Personally, I *love* the fact that the Hardened team has differing goals
> from Release Engineering.  I also don't see how our goals could ever
> really be guided by a single vision.  That doesn't keep us from working
> together to each accomplish our individual goals.
>

Apparently it does.  How many huge threads have you seen lately that
accomplished nothing?  How many threads have people started with great
ideas, only to give up in disgust because people cause a huge fuss
about small details, and nothing ever gets accomplished?  Quite a few.

> > > > Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to
> > > > implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly
> > > > harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement
> > > > so not allowed?
> > >
> > > Yes, absolutely.
> >
> > We need a mission statement first :)
>
> Our mission: To seek out new life and civilization, and to bring Gentoo
> to them, by force, if necessary.  *grin*
>
> --
> Chris Gianelloni
> Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
> x86 Architecture Team
> Games - Developer
> Gentoo Linux
>
> --
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 04:31 +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 07:57:06PM -0800 or thereabouts, Greg KH wrote:
> > > Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
> > > decline.
> > 
> > Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline?
> 
> Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO, leader,
> boss, manager, etc.  (you know, all those corporate-type words that raise
> the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.)

You mean the same thing that we *had* that caused the loss of quite a
few good developers and drove many people away from Gentoo before they
ever even learned of its values.  Sounds like an excellent plan.

> Right now, Gentoo is this gigantic, obese amoeba that just sort of sits in
> one place.  Different parts of it try to go in different directions, with
> the net result being that the whole body never goes anywhere.  We haven't
> done anything interesting or innovative over the last...year?  two years?
> We have no effective leadership whatsoever.  We spend far too much time
> arguing amongst ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common
> goal.

This is what I don't get.  So what if Gentoo is an amoeba?  Does it
really matter?  Would you rather that we dropped Gentoo/ALT, Hardened,
Embedded, and anything else interesting just so we can focus on a "core
technology" of some sort?  Remember that we are not out to make money.
We are a not-for-profit for a reason.  We don't have to answer to
investors and shareholders.

Another thing that I see people fail to really comprehend is what
exactly "interesting and innovative" can we do?  I would have thought
that the introduction of our Gentoo Linux Installer would qualify.  What
about the Hardened LiveCD?  Gentoo's Knoppix-style CD?  All of the
working going into Gentoo for Mac OS X and Gentoo/BSD?  The extension of
the embedded/uclibc stuff to many more architectures?

It seems as if just because something doesn't tickle the fancy of the
Linux World Expo corporate types it isn't important.

> We should appoint one person to lead the project.  Make sure that person
> knows WTF they're doing, are respected by the right developers, has a good
> vision for Gentoo and then let them make decisions.  Expect people to
> adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other
> opportunities for their creative outlet.

Fine.  I vote for vapier.  So next time he tells you to touch his wang,
you better damn well listen.  ;]

> That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up.

Gentoo doesn't want to be anything.  Gentoo is not a thing.  Gentoo is a
*collection* of over 300 individuals.  We are not some corporate entity
where individualism is destroyed for the corporate party line.

Honestly, it sounds to me like that is what you want.

I welcome you to fork Gentoo to do this.  I'll be glad to assist you in
any way that I can without giving up my ideas for where I want to take
my projects within Gentoo.  I respect that you should do the same,
rather than hijack the distribution as a whole for your own purposes.

> S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the
> strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out
> where the best direction is for it to proceed.  They should then be
> responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes
> according to this direction.  Folks who disagree with the vision will be
> able to go their own direction and start their own projects.  That's the
> beauty of the GPL.

So booting developers that have a technical reason for doing something
different should be the norm?

> Anyway, I have no illusions of this idea ever being implemented in the
> current Gentoo environment.  /shrug.  It was a good ride.

I'm glad to hear that.  It really sounds like you are interested in
turning Gentoo into some worthless shell of what it is currently.  Sure,
it'll have "added value" and "perceived worth" to the corporate drones,
but any room for innovation and creativity will have been completely
stifled by group think and yes men.  Using your own example, you and
anyone willing to work under such conditions are more than welcome to
fork Gentoo.  After all, you can use all of our work as you wish.
That's the beauty of the GPL.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Henrik Brix Andersen]

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On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:36:09AM -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> Personally, I *love* the fact that the Hardened team has differing goals
> from Release Engineering.  I also don't see how our goals could ever
> really be guided by a single vision.  That doesn't keep us from working
> together to each accomplish our individual goals.

Hear hear.

./Brix
-- 
Henrik Brix Andersen <brix@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Metadistribution | Mobile computing herd

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 23:33 -0500, Andrew Muraco wrote:
> I like your idea of having gentoo not being a distro, but moreso a 
> collection of tools. Mostly because gentoo's method of dealing with 
> problems (problems that binary distros tend to have, like keeping 
> software uptodate) are handled in a way thats just a tad more managable, 
> plus when multiple repo support gets added, its just another way that 
> gentoo can be customized and reflavored.
> 
> +1 for that thinking

I have to completely agree.  I see Gentoo as what it is, according to
our own web page.  We are a meta-distribution.  We are a collection of
tools and services that can be customized to be what you want it to be.
That does not imply limiting what we can and cannot do in any way.

If I wanted to make an arm-only source-based hardened distribution
utilizing uclibc entirely, I could do so utilizing only the work that
has been put into our portage tree.

The problem seems to be that there are certain people who want things to
happen, but can't drum up the manpower to do so.  Rather than work
harder at drumming up support, they wish to instead create a system
where our *volunteer* developers are *forced* to do what they want.

I'm sorry, but screw that.

You guys are more than welcome to go apply at Red Hat or Novell.  Hey, I
hear SCO is still distributing Linux, too.  They'll gladly give you the
mission statements and "direction" that you so desire.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 06:00 +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 12:39:05AM -0500 or thereabouts, Alec Warner wrote:
> >  I think some people have attempted things that are interesting or
> > innovative, although they may not have gotten off of the ground quite
> > yet.
> 
> That's the problem.  Lots of folks have great ideas.  Our execution sucks,
> though.  We also have projects working against each other (or, at least,
> not in step with each other)

Cite examples.

> > The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the
> > graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that
> > is being worked on.  
> 
> I agree, but it's been "in development" for...I dunno..almost two years now
> I think and it's still not released.  I'm not slamming the -installer team
> -- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does point to our
> inability to execute.

Really?  I seem to remember a nice news story with 2005.1's release
about an Installer LiveCD for x86.  I also remember one for 2005.1-r1
for both x86 and amd64.  For 2006.0, the Installer will be considered
the default method for installing Gentoo on x86, and possibly even amd64
(if they want).  I also was planning on producing at least one more
LiveCD for another architecture for 2006.0...

> > The Portage project has some cool stuff coming up.  I realize that the
> > 2.X codebase scares a lot of people away due to it's nature but recently
> > there has been a lot more active development in features and planning.
> 
> Again, lots of talk, some code, but nothing we can point to and say, "look!
> see that?  We did that!!" and be proud of it.

Funny.  I can.  --newuse.  That alone has been one of the best features
in portage in a long, long time.  I find it absolutely amazing, as
before it was a nightmare to maintain Gentoo.  Of course, this
"nightmare" was during your glory period of innovation.

> > You can't really say "well your interest is useless so work on something
> > else instead" and expect them to comply.
> 
> No, but you can say, "this is the direction we've decided to go in.  We'd
> love to have you as part of the team, but if you want to go a different
> direction, please take a copy of the source code, along with our blessings
> and we wish you the best of luck."

Sounds like you'd rather take Gentoo back a few years to the days before
Hardened/Embedded/Alt.  I guess we really should just be "Gentoo Linux"
and ignore all of the progress and work that has been made in all of
these other areas simply because it doesn't fit with your goals.  I'd
like to also propose that we drop support for sparc, mips, sh, m68k,
s390, arm, and alpha, since they detract from our main goals of
providing amd64/ppc/x86 releases.  After all, who really uses those
"other" arches anyway but a bunch of guys that never have good ideas or
improve quality of the distribution as a whole and constantly distract
us away from getting anything constructive done?

> It's great to tinker and experiment with new things, but at some point,
> those tinkerings will have interdependencies on other parts of the project.

So what?

> People will need/want features added to <foo> in order for them to be able
> to continue.  If those features don't adhere to the overall direction that
> has been chosen for the project, then they're taking time and resources
> away from that direction, regardless of who does the actual coding.

So if I were to add some great new whiz-bang feature to portage that
would only be used in building releases for Hardened, it is a waste of
time even if I do all of the coding myself simply because that might not
be the overall direction where we are heading?

Dude, pass the pipe.  I want some of what you're smoking.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 07:49:21 -0500 Dan Meltzer
<parallelgrapefruit@gmail.com> wrote:
| Apparently it does.  How many huge threads have you seen lately that
| accomplished nothing?  How many threads have people started with great
| ideas, only to give up in disgust because people cause a huge fuss
| about small details, and nothing ever gets accomplished?  Quite a few.

Most of them get somewhere, eventually. They'd get there a bit faster
if we booted you, Duncan, Nathan and Alec from the lists, but I guess
the cost of doing that wouldn't be worth the gain. Sure, the odd thread
ends up going nowhere, but that's usually when the original idea isn't
implementable.

Look at the news GLEP, for example. Half the replies are worthless
drivel from morons. The remainder is extremely useful input. The GLEP
in its original form wouldn't have worked -- heck, I knew that when I
posted it for review. But it's getting there, and after another round
or two we'll end up with something that will work first time when it's
implemented. Better to spend a bit of time now having an extended
technical discussion (which differs from a flamefest, but only when you
look closely) than to go ahead and screw up the tree...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Andrew Gaffney]

Corey Shields wrote:
> GLI a third direction (while kicking anyone who wishes to 
> run with them in the nuts).

What is your problem with the installer project? Over the past year or so, there 
have been *2* people that complained about us treating them badly. The first 
person was the genux guy. While he may not have deserved it then, I think most 
of us can agree that he deserved it now :P The second complaint was from a 
person that definitely deserved what he got. He was harassing us trying to use 
the GPL to *force* us to give him the spec files used to generate the 
experimental X LiveCD. We wouldn't give it to him because 1) we didn't have it 
(wolf31o2 did), and 2) it would not work with the released version of catalyst.

What you don't see is the interaction with releng and the portage folks, the 
people that are building their own CDs with the installer, the patches and 
suggestions we accept from people who have used the installer, etc. Unless 
you're actually going to do some research into our project before bitching about 
it, please pick another project to harass.

-- 
Andrew Gaffney                            http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer                                   Installer Project
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 07:18:40 -0600 Andrew Gaffney <agaffney@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| What is your problem with the installer project? Over the past year
| or so, there have been *2* people that complained about us treating
| them badly.

Hrm, have the arch teams really left you in peace for an entire year
now?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Andrew Gaffney]

Kurt Lieber wrote:
> I agree, but it's been "in development" for...I dunno..almost two years now
> I think and it's still not released.  I'm not slamming the -installer team
> -- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does point to our
> inability to execute.

If you're not going to do some basic research before you go spouting off, then 
shut up. The installer has had *2* releases so far (0.1 released with 2005.1 and 
0.2 with 2005.1-r1). There were announcements in the GWN, on the -installer and 
-dev MLs, and even on Slashdot! Have you been under a damn rock?

-- 
Andrew Gaffney                            http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer                                   Installer Project
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 06:00:42 +0000 Kurt Lieber <klieber@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| I agree, but it's been "in development" for...I dunno..almost two
| years now I think and it's still not released.  I'm not slamming the
| -installer team -- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does
| point to our inability to execute.

Hm. So how long has it taken to get anon SVN up and running?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 22:05 -0800, Corey Shields wrote:
> Where is the centralized vision that everyone is working together here that 
> people not directly related to each project will buy in to and therefore do 
> what they can to see it succeed?  Where is the collaboration between groups 
> to make it happen?  I think this has already been hashed out enough, but your 
> points can be drawn back to that.  Portage team is running in one direction, 
> webapps another, GLI a third direction (while kicking anyone who wishes to 
> run with them in the nuts).  In any structured environment I have worked in, 
> you have a heirarchy where everyone, down to the grunts, know where they are 
> heading as an organization, why they are heading that way, and what they can 
> do to help.  Even though groups work on differing things, they know how those 
> things are directly affecting the end goal (mission statement, whatever)

Here's what I find funny.  I work on a project whose main goal is to
work with the other projects to get our releases out the door.  We
coordinate with *every* arch team, along with hardened, embedded, and
infrastructure.  We coordinate with many herds and the portage team.
What exactly would adding some level of indirection via "middle
management" or even some "CEO" add us?  Not a thing.  All it would do is
add one giant bottleneck to our work, reducing productivity.

> Right now, Gentoo has it's cliques that come up with their own things, and to 
> get assistance from another clique you're gonna have to have some ties or 
> work real hard to sell your idea to them.  It's too flat of a model to work 
> for any real innovation, else, as Kurt pointed out, we would have seen some 
> cool stuff in the past couple of years.

...or just ask nicely.  It's amazing how people really downplay the
powerful nature of civility.

> > If this Gentoo project fails/falters (like you seem to think it is
> > heading) you are free to do the same, form your own project with it's
> > own set of rules and leader if you so choose.
> 
> Gentoo won't fail..  I don't believe that is what Kurt or Lance are saying.  I 
> think the point was that Gentoo is not moving at the typical pace of OSS 
> development, and we believe that it is the organizational structure that is 
> holding it back.

Who exactly are you comparing us to here?  Mozilla?  Gnome?  KDE?

I see tons of claims but no examples.  Show me the numbers.

Not to mention we *just* reorganized.  The Council has had how many
meetings now?  How exactly can you tell the capability of a structure
that hasn't even been in existence long enough to have any valid data to
compare against?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Andrew Gaffney]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 07:18:40 -0600 Andrew Gaffney <agaffney@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> | What is your problem with the installer project? Over the past year
> | or so, there have been *2* people that complained about us treating
> | them badly.
> 
> Hrm, have the arch teams really left you in peace for an entire year
> now?

I haven't heard a thing from the arch teams, unless, of course, you consider 
yourself to be 2 entire arch teams. All I've heard from you is how the installer 
sucks, python/parted doesn't fit in an initrd, nfs sucks so nfsroot for netboot 
is out of the questions, etc. The only semi-constructive thing you've even given 
me is "rewrite the whole thing in ash".

-- 
Andrew Gaffney                            http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer                                   Installer Project
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 07:49 -0500, Dan Meltzer wrote:
> > Personally, I *love* the fact that the Hardened team has differing goals
> > from Release Engineering.  I also don't see how our goals could ever
> > really be guided by a single vision.  That doesn't keep us from working
> > together to each accomplish our individual goals.
> >
> 
> Apparently it does.  How many huge threads have you seen lately that
> accomplished nothing?  How many threads have people started with great
> ideas, only to give up in disgust because people cause a huge fuss
> about small details, and nothing ever gets accomplished?  Quite a few.

Sure, and how many are going on in the background without so much as a
peep because people are working together?  Take *any* Gentoo release and
you'll see that an awful lot of work gets done without flame wars and
name calling.  Sometimes bad things happen.  Most of the time,
everything goes as planned.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:51:39AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> This is what I don't get.  So what if Gentoo is an amoeba?  Does it
> really matter?  Would you rather that we dropped Gentoo/ALT, Hardened,
> Embedded, and anything else interesting just so we can focus on a "core
> technology" of some sort?  Remember that we are not out to make money.
> We are a not-for-profit for a reason.  We don't have to answer to
> investors and shareholders.

Gentoo will cease to be relevant if we continue as-is.  Maybe not tomorrow
or next month, but within a couple of years, we'll be Just Another
Slackware.  Personally, I don't want that.  If other folks do, then that's
OK.  

> I welcome you to fork Gentoo to do this.  I'll be glad to assist you in
> any way that I can without giving up my ideas for where I want to take
> my projects within Gentoo.  I respect that you should do the same,
> rather than hijack the distribution as a whole for your own purposes.

"my own purposes" are simply that Gentoo remains relevant.  I think it has
some great ideas and a great core technology.  I'd hate to see for all that
to be relegated to some hobbyist distro that people tinker around on but
nobody takes seriously.

Maybe you have a different vision for Gentoo.  If so, I respect that, but
please don't accuse me of trying to hijack anything.  I expressed an
opinion and you took my words and twisted them against me.  This is a
perfect example of why Gentoo's never going to go anywhere.  We fight too
much amongst ourselves. 

--kurt

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 14:22 +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:51:39AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > This is what I don't get.  So what if Gentoo is an amoeba?  Does it
> > really matter?  Would you rather that we dropped Gentoo/ALT, Hardened,
> > Embedded, and anything else interesting just so we can focus on a "core
> > technology" of some sort?  Remember that we are not out to make money.
> > We are a not-for-profit for a reason.  We don't have to answer to
> > investors and shareholders.
> 
> Gentoo will cease to be relevant if we continue as-is.  Maybe not tomorrow
> or next month, but within a couple of years, we'll be Just Another
> Slackware.  Personally, I don't want that.  If other folks do, then that's
> OK.

What makes you think this?  What empirical evidence do you have that
proves that Gentoo is dying?  All I see is more and more people using
Gentoo for more and more things.  Sure, Gentoo is no longer the talk of
the town that it used to be, but that's going to happen with any
distribution as it comes to age.  It gets replaced in the news by the
new kid on the block that is the flavor of the week.  Then again, I
don't see what's wrong with Slackware, so perhaps I simply can't follow
your train of thought.

> > I welcome you to fork Gentoo to do this.  I'll be glad to assist you in
> > any way that I can without giving up my ideas for where I want to take
> > my projects within Gentoo.  I respect that you should do the same,
> > rather than hijack the distribution as a whole for your own purposes.
> 
> "my own purposes" are simply that Gentoo remains relevant.  I think it has
> some great ideas and a great core technology.  I'd hate to see for all that
> to be relegated to some hobbyist distro that people tinker around on but
> nobody takes seriously.

Who doesn't take us seriously?  For that matter, who does?  You want to
be taken seriously?  Spend money on marketing Gentoo.

The only real issue I see with Gentoo's market penetration is that we
don't have the mind share necessary to continue to grow at the pace that
we once did.  This is due to not only our reaching a certain critical
mass, but also because of relative newcomers such as Ubuntu that will
always pull a certain group of people.  Once the next new hotness comes
out, those same people will jump the Ubuntu ship to whatever that new
flavor of the week happens to be.  This is a pretty constant and
continual cycle within Linux.  Again, I see you focusing solely on the
Linux aspect of Gentoo.

So what is Gentoo to you?  Portage?  Gentoo Linux?

> Maybe you have a different vision for Gentoo.  If so, I respect that, but
> please don't accuse me of trying to hijack anything.  I expressed an
> opinion and you took my words and twisted them against me.  This is a
> perfect example of why Gentoo's never going to go anywhere.  We fight too
> much amongst ourselves.

Really, I don't have any vision for Gentoo and I like it that way.  I
work to improve Gentoo.  If that ends in Gentoo becoming the premiere
distribution for the enterprise, or simply the best distribution for
basing your own distribution from, I don't care.  I work on Gentoo
because I enjoy it, not because I ever expected it to "go anywhere" at
all.  Yes, I twisted your words against you.  I'll freely admit it.  Why
did I do it?  I did it simply to prove a point.  I am attempting to show
that what you are proposing is not very well thought out and really
reads to many people, not just myself, as "You should play ball my way,
or get off the court."  Whether that was what you intended or not, that
is how it reads at least to me.  I can now see that your intentions are
not quite what you originally implied, so I do apologise for it only
insofar as where I have misrepresented you, but my statements still
stand in all other regards.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Thursday 05 January 2006 13:24, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say
> rather than the truth of what's going on.
planet.gentoo.org/universe ?
I have yet to see anything, from rants to personal notes, that didn't got 
there (for what I've wrote).

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Stuart Herbert]

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On 1/5/06, Kurt Lieber <klieber@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Maybe you have a different vision for Gentoo.  If so, I respect that, but
> please don't accuse me of trying to hijack anything.  I expressed an
> opinion and you took my words and twisted them against me.  This is a
> perfect example of why Gentoo's never going to go anywhere.  We fight too
> much amongst ourselves.


Hear hear.

I feel that one of the causes of this is that not enough of us know each
other well enough.  We only ever manage to get a handful of developers in
the same place at the same time.

Something useful that the trustees & council could do is to organise an
annual Gentoo developer conference.  Yes it will cost - but surely one
function of a layer of management is to find budgets? :)


Best regards,
Stu

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Stuart Herbert]

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On 1/5/06, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> So what is Gentoo to you?  Portage?  Gentoo Linux?
>
>From www.gentoo.org:

Page title: "Gentoo Linux - Gentoo Linux News"

"We produce Gentoo Linux, a special flavor of Linux that can be
automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or
need.  Extreme performance, configurability, and a top-notch user and
developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience."

The "about us" page also calls us "Gentoo Linux" at every term.

We're still claiming to be a Linux distro.

Best regards,
Stu

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Lance Albertson]

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Chris Gianelloni wrote:

> Really, I don't have any vision for Gentoo and I like it that way. 

Amazing words to come from Gentoo's release manager. We might as well
call our releases 'maintenance updates' then if thats the case.

I give up on this whole thread. I was hoping people would see past the
automatic "OMG!! We can't have a leader because it would restrict what I
can do!" mentality. But apparently that isn't the case here. Yes, we
didn't have the best experience with previous attempts at having some
kind of a leader. And automatically thinking that it'll turn into a
corporate bureaucratic mess is also incorrect. If you can open up your
mind and see past those automatic assumptions and see the value it would
be amazing.

Anyways, as I said. I give up on this getting anywhere.

-- 
Lance Albertson <ramereth@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc>
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Thursday 05 January 2006 15:59, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> Page title: "Gentoo Linux - Gentoo Linux News"
Yeah ok, let me end up these holidays, and I'll prepare a written request to 
change the Linux part in something else (Land if you want to keep the L, or 
I'll try to find a name we can use)... we deserve it as Gentoo/FreeBSD is at 
a level not so far from Gentoo Linux, and Gentoo for Mac OSX is still going 
on.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 08:07:14AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> Sounds like you'd rather take Gentoo back a few years to the days before
> Hardened/Embedded/Alt.  I guess we really should just be "Gentoo Linux"
> and ignore all of the progress and work that has been made in all of
> these other areas simply because it doesn't fit with your goals.  

I've never stated any specific goals.  I've simply said we should have
some.  Please stop putting words in my mouth.  

> I'd like to also propose that we drop support for sparc, mips, sh, m68k,
> s390, arm, and alpha, since they detract from our main goals of providing
> amd64/ppc/x86 releases.  After all, who really uses those "other" arches
> anyway but a bunch of guys that never have good ideas or improve quality
> of the distribution as a whole and constantly distract us away from
> getting anything constructive done?

straw man argument. Maybe the best direction for gentoo is focusing on
embedded, maybe it's focusing on x86, maybe it's dropping Linux entirely
and moving over to OpenSolaris and building tools around that.  I never
stated any opinions in this area so why are you trying to state them for
me? 

It's pathetic that we, as a distribution, cannot have a civil discussion of
any kind.

--kurt

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Patrick Lauer]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 09:42 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> 
> > Really, I don't have any vision for Gentoo and I like it that way. 
> Amazing words to come from Gentoo's release manager. We might as well
> call our releases 'maintenance updates' then if thats the case.
I guess we're at a point where many parts "just work" - I still have 
some ideas where Gentoo could be improved, but if Chris doesn't and
prefers to do some cat-herding I support him in his lack of vision ;-)

After all, without some level of QA / "managment" all those visions will
end in half-assed prototypes that almost work, but don't do much.
The mundane tasks of keeping the wheels greased so that others can
experiment around shouldn't be dismissed like that ...

> I give up on this whole thread. I was hoping people would see past the
> automatic "OMG!! We can't have a leader because it would restrict what I
> can do!" mentality. But apparently that isn't the case here.
You know as well as I do that any leader will only have a nominal
position
and most devs will just do what they want, bypassing such a person 
whenever necessary. So for now we should focus on how to coordinate our
goals - if we agree that a "leader" is needed, why not, but we should
find out if that is even needed. 
>  Yes, we
> didn't have the best experience with previous attempts at having some
> kind of a leader. And automatically thinking that it'll turn into a
> corporate bureaucratic mess is also incorrect. If you can open up your
> mind and see past those automatic assumptions and see the value it would
> be amazing.
But it's already getting too bureaucratic ;-)
It's getting more and more difficult to get things done, more and more 
people / groups / herds to wait on to decide "obvious" things.

> Anyways, as I said. I give up on this getting anywhere.
That's the spirit. (just kidding, but it is kinda funny)

I noticed that Gentoo seems to have this cycle where all 3 months or so
the same theme comes up, causes a long discussion and then goes nowhere.
And then stuff does happen - maybe it's not obvious, but we're not yet
Debian ;-)

For example - our baselayout supports UML and vServer (almost fully)
native. Most of you won't see that, but to those that do it's something
that's really nice. 

wkr,
Patrick

-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 17:20:09 +0100 Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>
wrote:
| It's getting more and more difficult to get things done, more and
| more people / groups / herds to wait on to decide "obvious" things.

Hrm, it is? Seems to me that it's no worse that it used to be. It's
just that the stalling points are in different areas.

As for obvious... For any problem there's at least one solution that is
both obvious and wrong...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On 01 Jan 2006 05:30:01 Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org> wrote:
| If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
| vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
| Gentoo dev list to see.

Could you discuss adopting one of the clauses I proposed in the "RFC:
disallowing multiple votes per person in council meetings" thread?

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=113467833000002&r=1&w=2

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 09:42 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> 
> > Really, I don't have any vision for Gentoo and I like it that way. 
> 
> Amazing words to come from Gentoo's release manager. We might as well
> call our releases 'maintenance updates' then if thats the case.

Why not?  Does it really matter?  They *are* maintenance updates.  That
still doesn't change the fact that it is a "release" of some sort.  Our
release media are simply better versions of past media.  They offer more
hardware support and hopefully fewer bugs, but there isn't exactly a
whole lot else going on with them.

Even the new Installer LiveCD images that we are moving towards is
nothing more than a slow evolution from our current InstallCD/PackageCD
setup.  It is a natural progression more than a huge leap.  Sure, it
makes things much easier on new users, but it isn't exactly
revolutionary.

I also am not so presumptuous to say that what I do within Release
Engineering specifically impacts on what you guys do in infra on a day
to day basis, or what the portage team does, or what hardened does.  We
all have our own directions.  When our paths overlap, we cooperate.
When they do not, we stay the hell out of each other's hair.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 15:51 +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 08:07:14AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > Sounds like you'd rather take Gentoo back a few years to the days before
> > Hardened/Embedded/Alt.  I guess we really should just be "Gentoo Linux"
> > and ignore all of the progress and work that has been made in all of
> > these other areas simply because it doesn't fit with your goals.  
> 
> I've never stated any specific goals.  I've simply said we should have
> some.  Please stop putting words in my mouth.

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 03:58 +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote: 
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni
> wrote:
> > Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to
> > implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly
> > harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement
> > so not allowed?
> 
> Yes, absolutely.

That says to me exactly what I stated that you said.  Whether that was
your intention or not, I honestly do not know.  However, I am not
putting words into your mouth, I am simply restating what you are saying
after my interpretation of it.

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 04:31 +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up.
> S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the
> strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out
> where the best direction is for it to proceed.  They should then be
> responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes
> according to this direction.  Folks who disagree with the vision will be
> able to go their own direction and start their own projects.  That's the
> beauty of the GPL.

Right here you are explicitly stating that *everyone* should follow the
party line.  How exactly is what I have said false when your own words
say it?

"Play ball or go home" comes to mind.

At any rate, I had already apologized for the impression that you were
given of me putting words into your mouth, however the continued attacks
afterwards have made me reconsider and decide to go back and quote your
*actual* words to keep from causing any confusion on the matter.

> > I'd like to also propose that we drop support for sparc, mips, sh, m68k,
> > s390, arm, and alpha, since they detract from our main goals of providing
> > amd64/ppc/x86 releases.  After all, who really uses those "other" arches
> > anyway but a bunch of guys that never have good ideas or improve quality
> > of the distribution as a whole and constantly distract us away from
> > getting anything constructive done?
> 
> straw man argument. Maybe the best direction for gentoo is focusing on
> embedded, maybe it's focusing on x86, maybe it's dropping Linux entirely
> and moving over to OpenSolaris and building tools around that.  I never
> stated any opinions in this area so why are you trying to state them for
> me? 

...and at what point in that paragraph did I say that you said any of
it?  Also, I'm finding it hilarious to notice that a fellow native
English-speaking American is unable to recognize good ol' sarcasm in its
simplest form.

> It's pathetic that we, as a distribution, cannot have a civil discussion of
> any kind.

We have them all the time.  We also have flame wars all the time.  It's
simply a matter of doing business with over 300 people with a vested
interest and countless numbers of users, all with differing opinions.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Stuart Herbert]

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On 1/5/06, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> That says to me exactly what I stated that you said.  Whether that was
> your intention or not, I honestly do not know.  However, I am not
> putting words into your mouth, I am simply restating what you are saying
> after my interpretation of it.


For the life of me, I can't see how that quote of Kurt's you used there
backs up your statement in any way, shape, or form.

If you feel that it does, I believe there's been a major misunderstanding
there.

Best regards,
Stu

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Patrick Lauer]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 16:33 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 17:20:09 +0100 Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> | It's getting more and more difficult to get things done, more and
> | more people / groups / herds to wait on to decide "obvious" things.
> 
> Hrm, it is? Seems to me that it's no worse that it used to be. It's
> just that the stalling points are in different areas.
Hmmm ... I get the impression that there are more stalling points

> As for obvious... For any problem there's at least one solution that is
> both obvious and wrong...
Exactly :-) But I guess many among us have become a bit disillusioned and 
try to stay away from what is perceived as useless trolling and silly 
infights. So things either stall in discussion or get implemented with
the "obvious" flawed approach (early webapp-config and portage are good
examples) and then take a long time to become "fixed". There's still a 
lot of good stuff happening, but as someone else said in this thread,
"we suck at execution" :-(

Patrick
-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Aron Griffis]

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Hi Lance,

You started this thread by proposing that: (1) Gentoo is lacking
a direction/goal, (2) this is supported by the lack of ground breaking
enhancements in the past couple of years.  Later in the thread you
proposed that (3) the solution may be to appoint a single person to
provide a global goal/direction for the project.

Looking first at 1 and 2, I think your assumption that ground-breaking
enhancements are dependent on direction/goal is false.  IMHO any
single project within Gentoo can bring ground-breaking enhancements to
the distribution without being given prior direction from a higher
authority.  The places where Gentoo needs improvement are generally
well-known, and any developer has the power to bring a design and
implementation to the table.  The problem here isn't a lack of
direction, it's a lack of action, particularly in the areas that *you*
consider ground-breaking.  What in particular would you like to see?

So, keeping in mind that any developer can bring a plan to the table,
my understanding of the council is this: In cases where a plan
requires broader changes, the role of the council is to make sure that
the plan makes sense in the context of Gentoo, where "context" is
defined as history, philosophy, and the collection of goals defined by
the other projects.  It is not the role of the council to cook up the
plan, that can be done by any developer(s), including council members
if they have any brilliant ideas. ;-)

Finally, looking at 3, that statement depends on the relationship
between direction/goal and ground-breaking enhancements.  If that
relationship does not exist, then 3 is moot: Appointing a single
individual to lead the project will not have an effect of generating
ground-breaking enhancements.

Personally, I agree with Grant's and Chris's comments in this thread.
There have been some positive changes in the past couple years, and
there are people working hard to bring more about.  Hopefully we're
cultivating an environment where the next major enhancement is just
around the corner.  What will it be?  I'm in favor of leaving that to
the individual projects to determine.

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Michael Cummings]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 09:42 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> 
> > Really, I don't have any vision for Gentoo and I like it that way. 

I know you meant this as sarcasm - but i'd second that. I originally
favored just calling them snapshots since that's all the iso's were - a
snapshot of the tree on day X.

~mcummings


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 11:37:32AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> That says to me exactly what I stated that you said.  

Then it's apparent we're not communicating well.  I'll leave it at that,
thank you for sharing your opinions and put this thread to bed.

--kurt

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Michael Cummings]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 16:46 +0100, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> On Thursday 05 January 2006 15:59, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> > Page title: "Gentoo Linux - Gentoo Linux News"
> Yeah ok, let me end up these holidays, and I'll prepare a written request to 
> change the Linux part in something else (Land if you want to keep the L, or 
> I'll try to find a name we can use)... we deserve it as Gentoo/FreeBSD is at 
> a level not so far from Gentoo Linux, and Gentoo for Mac OSX is still going 
> on.
> 
I ask about the use of the phrase "Gentoo Linux" once upon ago, and I
think it was either grant or doug (heck, maybe it was the elusive
spider ;) that pointed out that there is "Gentoo Linux" - that's where
you install the kernel, baselayout, etc., and that's the part that can
never be dropped, and there's "Gentoo the MetaDistribution" which
includes the linux, but also includes the various ports. But in the end
- we still produce gentoo linux and adapt ourselves to other's os' (or
them to us as the case may be) as we can. i feel like i'm starting to
ramble, but the point is that first and foremost we are a linux distro
(would you put portage on slack? ubuntu? mandriva?) who also wears the
hat of a metadistro - the distinction being in the system built with
gentoo and the system built from gentoo...

~mcummings

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Greg KH]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:56:30AM -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> 
> You guys are more than welcome to go apply at Red Hat or Novell.

Some of us already work for companies that produce other Linux
distributions or support the companies that do. :)

thanks,

greg k-h
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Thursday 05 January 2006 16:46, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> Yeah ok, let me end up these holidays, and I'll prepare a written request
> to change the Linux part in something else

You should also contact the folks working on the gentoo.org redesign. While 
there was a bit of fuss about the infinity symbol, I always wondered why no 
one lost a word against the "Linux" below, given that we claim to provide a 
meta-distribution.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Aron Griffis]

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Hi Kurt,

Kurt Lieber wrote:	[Wed Jan 04 2006, 11:31:30PM EST]
> > Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline?
> 
> Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO,
> leader, boss, manager, etc.  (you know, all those corporate-type
> words that raise the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.)

I think there is a Post Hoc fallacy happening here: A happened before
B, therefore A must be causing B.  In the case at hand: A = loss of
leader, B = lack of progress.  While A might be the cause of B, it is
dangerous to jump to that conclusion without more than the sequence as
support.

I don't think I can solidly refute the possibility of a relationship,
but here is some food for thought:

First, Gentoo's developers are not going to follow a leader's
direction unless they sincerely agree with it.  Since we're all
volunteers, the only cooperative work we're going to see is when
people agree with a goal.  Therefore it doesn't matter whether you
name somebody "our leader" or if they're just another developer,
either way they're going to have to convince people to play along.
Our current model already allows for centralized leadership via
meritocracy: any developer can step up to the plate and be king for
the day, they just have to have a good idea and convince others to go
along with it.  

Second, I think the factualness of B is in question.  A few people
have brought up examples of progress being made within Gentoo.  The
problem here appears to be that the progress being made is not in the
same areas where some people are looking.  Which brings up the
question: How is Gentoo falling short in your eyes?  Are you certain
that those specific areas are related to the non-existence of a boss?

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Curtis Napier]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 12:09:09 +0000 Tom Martin <slarti@gentoo.org> wrote:
> | > If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start
> | > by looking into how we can make it easier for developers to
> | > advertise what they've been doing.
> | 
> | planet.g.o?
> 
> No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say
> rather than the truth of what's going on.
> 


Censored? Please expand on this, how is it censored? I thought we were 
allowed to put anything Gentoo related we want to in our Gentoo blog?
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 17:04 -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 12:09:09 +0000 Tom Martin <slarti@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > | > If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start
> > | > by looking into how we can make it easier for developers to
> > | > advertise what they've been doing.
> > | 
> > | planet.g.o?
> > 
> > No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say
> > rather than the truth of what's going on.
> > 
> 
> 
> Censored? Please expand on this, how is it censored? I thought we were 
> allowed to put anything Gentoo related we want to in our Gentoo blog?

I dare you to say something about how Genesi sucks and your Pegasos is a
piece of junk... :P

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Thursday 05 January 2006 23:04, Curtis Napier wrote:
> > No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say
> > rather than the truth of what's going on.
>
> Censored? Please expand on this, how is it censored? I thought we were
> allowed to put anything Gentoo related we want to in our Gentoo blog?

It's censored in the sense, that you limit the audience. Blog's are not suited 
for general information/discussion, because no one wants to monitor dozens of 
them and follow multiple threads on different web pages on one and the same 
topic. Weblogs are useful for people who feel it's necessary to have their 
own prominent place to raise their voice - a self-projection thingie, that's 
all. And therefore 99,5% of all the blogs are superfluous. Also a blog owner 
controls the comments and can delete them as he likes (less important, since 
it lets him not look good, but he can).

To make it short: When you really have something important to say, post it to 
the appropriate mailing list - and post the whole text, not a ridiculous link 
to your blog, most people are not interested in and won't read! The same goes 
for our userbase: They're right to expect a single source of general 
information and one for security information, but not being forced to follow 
lots of blogs.


Carsten



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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Greg KH]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 04:31:30AM +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 07:57:06PM -0800 or thereabouts, Greg KH wrote:
> > > Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow
> > > decline.
> > 
> > Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline?
> 
> Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO, leader,
> boss, manager, etc.  (you know, all those corporate-type words that raise
> the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.)
> 
> Right now, Gentoo is this gigantic, obese amoeba that just sort of sits in
> one place.  Different parts of it try to go in different directions, with
> the net result being that the whole body never goes anywhere.  We haven't
> done anything interesting or innovative over the last...year?  two years?
> We have no effective leadership whatsoever.  We spend far too much time
> arguing amongst ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common
> goal.  

Like others have pointed out, I think the problem is you either are:
	- not looking in the proper place
	- have the goals you want to see happen, happen.

The first one can be handled in a variety of different ways, and is
sometimes easily overlooked due to the slow incremental improvements
that happen over time.  One only has to look back over a longer period
of time to see the changes and realize how good they are (as an example,
I _love_ the baselayout stuff that has happened over the past year or
so, it's flexible and works very well, much nicer than any other rc
based system I've seen for a Linux distro.  Huge props out to those
developers.)

The second one can be easily handled by getting out there, stating your
goals, and working to solve them yourself.  Like any opensource project,
people work on what they want to work on, and you can't tell anyone what
to do, without resistance (well, there are ways to do this, but that's
for another time...)

> We should appoint one person to lead the project.  Make sure that person
> knows WTF they're doing, are respected by the right developers, has a good
> vision for Gentoo and then let them make decisions.  Expect people to
> adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other
> opportunities for their creative outlet.

Decisions are one thing.  Results are another.  Decisions are easy to
make, but convincing others to do your bidding is tough :)

> That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up.
> S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the
> strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out
> where the best direction is for it to proceed.  They should then be
> responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes
> according to this direction.  Folks who disagree with the vision will be
> able to go their own direction and start their own projects.  That's the
> beauty of the GPL. 

Ok, for example, the "enterprise" stuff for Gentoo?  I think the only
thing holding that back are getting the work done.  All of the
infrastructure is there to do it, it will only take a lot of time and
effort to achieve it.  So, gather the people who want to do it, and go
do it, that too is easily achievable due to the beauty of the GPL :)

But that doesn't require a great "leader" to accomplish.  And I think
our current mis-mash of director board is actually good for us in that
it handles the things we need to have handled (pissing matches between
developers, infrastructure things, etc.) and keeps out of everyone
else's way :)

> Anyway, I have no illusions of this idea ever being implemented in the
> current Gentoo environment.  /shrug.  It was a good ride.

I hear Debian is still looking for developers.  Oh wait, they are having
worse problems for real than people are perceiving we are having :)

Thanks for your comments, hopefully some good will come of this thread.
If not, I'm sure the developers who are actively working on integrating
good things into Gentoo will continue to do so.

thanks,

greg k-h
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Curtis Napier]

Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Thursday 05 January 2006 16:46, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> 
>>Yeah ok, let me end up these holidays, and I'll prepare a written request
>>to change the Linux part in something else
> 
> 
> You should also contact the folks working on the gentoo.org redesign. While 
> there was a bit of fuss about the infinity symbol, I always wondered why no 
> one lost a word against the "Linux" below, given that we claim to provide a 
> meta-distribution.
> 
> 
> Carsten

I was thinking the exact same thing when I was reading this thread. 
Removing the "linux" from the logo would only take a few minutes if it's 
decided to drop it. I'll follow this and make the change if/when it's 
necessary.
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Philip Webb]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 04:31:30AM +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> appoint a CEO, leader, boss, manager, etc. all those corporate-type words
> that raise the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.
> We have no effective leadership whatsoever.  We spend far too much time
> arguing among ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common goal.  
> We should appoint one person to lead the project.  Make sure
> that person knows WTF they're doing, are respected by the right developers,
> has a good vision for Gentoo and then let them make decisions.
> Expect people to adhere to the decisions and, if they don't,
> invite them to find other opportunities for their creative outlet.
> That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up.
> S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders,
> look at the strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently
> and then figure out where the best direction is for it to proceed.
> They should then be responsible for making sure everyone
> executes according to this direction.  I have no illusions
> of this idea ever being implemented in the current Gentoo environment.
> /shrug.  It was a good ride.

</spectate>

After reading -- quickly -- this thread for a day or two,
to see what Gentoo devs are thinking, I'm surprised
anyone has been taking this rubbish seriously enough to reply at length.
The final line suggests the writer has no serious interest in Gentoo.

A "boss" owns the company or at least has been appointed by its owners
to manage it on their behalf.  He hires & pays employees to do his bidding.
Gentoo is not a company, has no employees & no money to pay them with.

"Appoint one person to lead": the Germans did that back in 1933
-- as did the French in 1799, the Russians in 1917 & the Chinese in 1949 --
& we have had a long time to reflect on the kind of thing which results.
The community which achieved the most with the least in human history
was ancient Athens, which was even less directed than Gentoo.
Democracy ?  Consensus ?  Co-operative efforts ?  Rational discussion ?
Apparently they are of no interest to the OP.

As soon as anyone starts to order Gentoo devs to do anything,
they will leave & not come back & the project really will die a prompt death.
What makes it work is precisely "arguing among ourselves".

All this should be utterly clear to anyone involved in developing Gentoo.
Can we please get back to something important, like the news GLEP ?

<spectate>

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@chass.utoronto.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'  University of Toronto
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 11:23:07PM -0500 or thereabouts, Philip Webb wrote:
> The final line suggests the writer has no serious interest in Gentoo.

Do your research.  You know not of what you speak.

> "Appoint one person to lead": the Germans did that back in 1933

Excellent.  I declare Godwin's law.  Can we please all move on now? 

--kurt

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Mike Frysinger]

On Tuesday 03 January 2006 11:05, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Henrik Brix Andersen wrote: [Sun Jan 01 2006, 05:35:26PM CST]
> > On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 05:30:01AM +0000, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > > If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> > > vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> > > Gentoo dev list to see.
> >
> > I would like GLEP 45 [1] - GLEP date format - to be discussed and
> > voted on.
>
> I doubt that GLEP 45 really needs a vote by the full council.  The lead
> GLEP editor's decision should probably suffice for something this
> trivial.  (Recall that the GLEP process is that the GLEP author let's
> the GLEP editors know when a GLEP is ready to go up for approval, and
> that it is generally the editors who work out precisely who needs to
> approve the thing.)

that's fine by me ... although i doubt anyone on the council would be against 
it and it'd be voted in with little to no discussion ;)
-mike
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Patrick Lauer]

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On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 23:23 -0500, Philip Webb wrote:
> After reading -- quickly -- this thread for a day or two,
> to see what Gentoo devs are thinking, I'm surprised
> anyone has been taking this rubbish seriously enough to reply at length.
> The final line suggests the writer has no serious interest in Gentoo.
I'd say the writer has an interest in Gentoo that does not fully overlap
with what has happened lately and wants to see things move
differently ...

> "Appoint one person to lead": the Germans did that back in 1933
> -- as did the French in 1799, the Russians in 1917 & the Chinese in 1949 --
dude ... like ... y'know ... the americans have one of those, too?
That was a really unneeded comment.

> & we have had a long time to reflect on the kind of thing which results.
... but still haven't learned much yet I think

> The community which achieved the most with the least in human history
> was ancient Athens, which was even less directed than Gentoo.
How about the Mongols or Turks? Atlantis? 

> Democracy ?  Consensus ?  Co-operative efforts ?  Rational discussion ?
> Apparently they are of no interest to the OP.
hmmm?
> As soon as anyone starts to order Gentoo devs to do anything,
> they will leave & not come back & the project really will die a prompt death.
> What makes it work is precisely "arguing among ourselves".
Inefficient. The collective demands to assimilate your individuality.


-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Sunday 01 January 2006 06:30, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> Keep in mind that every resubmission to the council for review must
> first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum) before
> being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days before the
> meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be notified at
> least 14 days before the meeting itself.

I think I'm too late for this month, but want to put it on the table before I 
forget about it. I'd appreciate a three months moratorium, disallowing 
everyone to add new packages to the tree (despite new dependencies of 
existing packages), so everyone is forced/asked to put his energy in existing 
ebuilds, especially unmaintained ones. Sort of spring-cleaning, because parts 
of the tree look like a dump.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Stuart Herbert]

On 1/8/06, Carsten Lohrke <carlo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I think I'm too late for this month, but want to put it on the table before I
> forget about it. I'd appreciate a three months moratorium, disallowing
> everyone to add new packages to the tree (despite new dependencies of
> existing packages), so everyone is forced/asked to put his energy in existing
> ebuilds, especially unmaintained ones. Sort of spring-cleaning, because parts
> of the tree look like a dump.

I agree that some cleaning is needed (and some of my packages are
desperate for it!), but I'm totally opposed to this idea.  I think the
idea of shutting up shop for three months (presumably with a "closed
for refurbishment" sign on the door) would let down our users who rely
on us for regular package updates, and would be a massive PR disaster.
 Cleaning is something that has to happen all the time; it needs to be
a natural and sustainable part of what we do every day.

If you feel so strongly about this, why not setup a "cleaning crew"
project that goes around doing exactly this?

Best regards,
Stu

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Brian Harring]

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On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 01:15:22AM +0100, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Sunday 01 January 2006 06:30, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > Keep in mind that every resubmission to the council for review must
> > first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum) before
> > being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days before the
> > meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be notified at
> > least 14 days before the meeting itself.
> 
> I think I'm too late for this month, but want to put it on the table before I 
> forget about it. I'd appreciate a three months moratorium, disallowing 
> everyone to add new packages to the tree (despite new dependencies of 
> existing packages), so everyone is forced/asked to put his energy in existing 
> ebuilds, especially unmaintained ones. Sort of spring-cleaning, because parts 
> of the tree look like a dump.

-1
Asking people to focus on cleaning the tree?  Sure.  Generate a list 
of candidates would help.  Blocking new packages?  No...

~harring

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Stuart Herbert wrote:
| I agree that some cleaning is needed (and some of my packages are
| desperate for it!), but I'm totally opposed to this idea.  I think the
| idea of shutting up shop for three months (presumably with a "closed
| for refurbishment" sign on the door) would let down our users who rely
| on us for regular package updates, and would be a massive PR disaster.
|  Cleaning is something that has to happen all the time; it needs to be
| a natural and sustainable part of what we do every day.

I inferred "new packages" to be actual new packages and not updates to
existing packages already in the tree.

That's considerably less dramatic than what you're saying.

Thanks,
Donnie
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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Stephen Bennett]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2006 01:15:22 +0100
Carsten Lohrke <carlo@gentoo.org> wrote:

> I think I'm too late for this month, but want to put it on the table
> before I forget about it. I'd appreciate a three months moratorium,
> disallowing everyone to add new packages to the tree (despite new
> dependencies of existing packages), so everyone is forced/asked to
> put his energy in existing ebuilds, especially unmaintained ones.
> Sort of spring-cleaning, because parts of the tree look like a dump.

And I'd like to propose disallowing everyone from proposing the wrong
solution to the wrong problem for the next three months.
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Sunday 08 January 2006 01:38, Brian Harring wrote:
> Asking people to focus on cleaning the tree?  Sure.  Generate a list
> of candidates would help.  Blocking new packages?  No...

I can't say I did not expect negative replies and "generating a list of 
candidates" is at least a suggestion. But a very weak one if you think about 
it; It would presume that most devs are too dumb to use bugzilla or to grep 
the tree.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Sunday 08 January 2006 01:35, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> I agree that some cleaning is needed (and some of my packages are
> desperate for it!), but I'm totally opposed to this idea.  I think the
> idea of shutting up shop for three months (presumably with a "closed
> for refurbishment" sign on the door) would let down our users who rely
> on us for regular package updates, and would be a massive PR disaster.
>  Cleaning is something that has to happen all the time; it needs to be
> a natural and sustainable part of what we do every day.

As Donnie already pointed out, I did not mean version bumps, but only new 
packages. How about this idea: Everyone who adds a new package, has to check 
and fix an unmaintained package before. This should be a non-issue for 
seasoned developers, but would slowdown those, who continually add new 
packages without caring for what they should maintain as well as those who 
become new devs, add a bunch of packages and hide again, leaving the 
maintenance to others. This would also have the benefit of continuous QA of 
unmaintained stuff.

Regarding PR: The quality of parts of the tree is more than enough bad PR.

> If you feel so strongly about this, why not setup a "cleaning crew"
> project that goes around doing exactly this?

Don't you think that it is pretty much barefaced to let a small group do the 
dirty, boring and annoying work, while those who don't care a bit can 
continue to do so?!


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Brian Harring]

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On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 02:40:47PM +0100, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Sunday 08 January 2006 01:35, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> > I agree that some cleaning is needed (and some of my packages are
> > desperate for it!), but I'm totally opposed to this idea.  I think the
> > idea of shutting up shop for three months (presumably with a "closed
> > for refurbishment" sign on the door) would let down our users who rely
> > on us for regular package updates, and would be a massive PR disaster.
> >  Cleaning is something that has to happen all the time; it needs to be
> > a natural and sustainable part of what we do every day.
> 
> As Donnie already pointed out, I did not mean version bumps, but only new 
> packages. 

> How about this idea: Everyone who adds a new package, has to check 
> and fix an unmaintained package before.

Guessing you missed the previous flame war about how trying to force 
people to do something doesn't actually work?


> This should be a non-issue for 
> seasoned developers, 

You're assuming seasoned devs don't occasionally go MIA on 
QA/maintenance?  It's not the case...


> but would slowdown those who continually add new 
> packages [ snip vitriolic opinions ]

If you've got an issue with devs adding stuff and abandoning/not 
supporting their stuff, hey that's fine, bitch at QA.

Don't go freezing the whole tree just because you're after slapping at 
a couple of devs over perceived wrongs.


> Don't you think that it is pretty much barefaced to let a small group do the 
> dirty, boring and annoying work, while those who don't care a bit can 
> continue to do so?!

If you've got an issue with certain devs (seems to be the case from 
your statement), take it up with QA/ombudsman, not the loop 
around attempt you're doing here.

If you're after trying to decrease the unmaintained packages, like I 
said, generate a list _from the tree_, compare it to bugs, etc.  Do 
the legwork, kick off the effort to cover the gap.

Basically, you want to decrease bugs for unmaintained, decrease the 
gap of maintained vs unmaintained, work on _that_ rather then trying 
to force everyone to drop what they're doing and fix an issue they're 
already working on at their own pace.

Folks *are* handling retirement of unmaintained packages, and taking 
on maintainance of packages already- just watch -dev for the 
occasional announcements if you think otherwise.

~harring

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Paweł Madej]

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Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Sunday 08 January 2006 01:35, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> As Donnie already pointed out, I did not mean version bumps, but only new 
> packages. How about this idea: Everyone who adds a new package, has to check 
> and fix an unmaintained package before. This should be a non-issue for 
> seasoned developers, but would slowdown those, who continually add new 
> packages without caring for what they should maintain as well as those who 
> become new devs, add a bunch of packages and hide again, leaving the 
> maintenance to others. This would also have the benefit of continuous QA of 
> unmaintained stuff.
> 

In my opinion such prohibition will kill gentoo portage as there were no
new apps and dev's will be sitting with old toys like in a closed room
without windows and doors. If some package is unmaintained it's surely
because users and devs forgotten it, upstream is dead and noone cares if
its actual or not.


- --
Paweł Madej aka Nysander
http://quanteam.info          | http://forum-farmaceutyczne.org
http://nysander.quanteam.info | http://wiki.quanteam.info
GPG key: 5861680B             | keyserver: http://pgp.mit.edu
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=1F6t
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-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 14:40 +0100, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> > If you feel so strongly about this, why not setup a "cleaning crew"
> > project that goes around doing exactly this?
> 
> Don't you think that it is pretty much barefaced to let a small group do the 
> dirty, boring and annoying work, while those who don't care a bit can 
> continue to do so?!

Not really...  We already have a QA project.  Join it.  If certain
developers are constantly breaking QA, inform them.  If they continue to
do it after being warned, go to devrel.  While the QA team can go and
clean up some things, it should only really do so *once* and inform the
developer.  Otherwise, the developer might not honestly know that he is
doing something incorrectly, or that anyone is even paying attention.
Doing this allows for a cleanup of the tree, without putting
restrictions arbitrarily on the entire developer pool.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Sunday 08 January 2006 15:01, Brian Harring wrote:
> Guessing you missed the previous flame war about how trying to force
> people to do something doesn't actually work?

When it's not common sense, that every dev is supposed to do a minimal on 
general QA, Gentoo has a problem.

> You're assuming seasoned devs don't occasionally go MIA on
> QA/maintenance?  It's not the case...

I did not assume anything, I propose better QA.

> > but would slowdown those who continually add new
> > packages [ snip vitriolic opinions ]

Thanks for calling something a vitriolic opinion, I did notice a few times, so 
it's a description of what's happening, but does not imply the majority of 
devs do so.

> If you've got an issue with certain devs (seems to be the case from
> your statement), take it up with QA/ombudsman, not the loop
> around attempt you're doing here.
>
> If you're after trying to decrease the unmaintained packages, like I
> said, generate a list _from the tree_, compare it to bugs, etc.  Do
> the legwork, kick off the effort to cover the gap.
>
> Basically, you want to decrease bugs for unmaintained, decrease the
> gap of maintained vs unmaintained, work on _that_ rather then trying
> to force everyone to drop what they're doing and fix an issue they're
> already working on at their own pace.
>
> Folks *are* handling retirement of unmaintained packages, and taking
> on maintainance of packages already- just watch -dev for the
> occasional announcements if you think otherwise.

To answer this paragraph in a short sentence: No, it doesn't work at the 
moment, and yes I'd like everyone would be urged to care a bit more, not 
leaving the legwork to a single person or small group, accepting that devs 
can feel as irresponsible as they like.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Mike Frysinger]

On Thursday 05 January 2006 13:42, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:56:30AM -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > You guys are more than welcome to go apply at Red Hat or Novell.
>
> Some of us already work for companies that produce other Linux
> distributions or support the companies that do. :)

i know i would if i could get hired ;)
-mike
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 05 January 2006 07:49, Brian Harring wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 10:05:52PM -0800, Corey Shields wrote:
> > Where is the centralized vision that everyone is working together
> > here that people not directly related to each project will buy in to
> > and therefore do what they can to see it succeed?
>
> We've had centralized visions for a long while.  Recall use/slot deps?
>
> See them available anywhere?

Those requirements have been there since before 1.0. When the team was 
still smaller.

>
> Vision ofr an installer?  Yes, underway now, but the centralized vision
> really didn't do jack for actually acquring folk to work on it, did
> it (feel free to chime in agaffney since it's effectively yours now a
> days).

Actually we put a lot of effort into starting it off, along with other 
prospective improvement projects. This stuff however stands and falls 
with people being willing to do the work. While I have been instrumental 
in starting it up, I never had time to do the work myself.

> > Portage team is running in one direction,
> > webapps another, GLI a third direction (while kicking anyone who
> > wishes to run with them in the nuts).
>
> Examples would be lovely.
>
Look at gentoo-dev@gentoo.org archives for the last years. I'm not saying 
that this is wrong, or unnatural. It is something that could be expected. 
A group of 300 people is not similar to a team of 40. The big amount of 
developers creates subgroups. That includes communication problems.

> > Gentoo won't fail..  I don't believe that is what Kurt or Lance are
> > saying.  I think the point was that Gentoo is not moving at the
> > typical pace of OSS development, and we believe that it is the
> > organizational structure that is holding it back.
>
> Actually, here's where I'm going to get lynched- (both for bringing up
> anon* after pissing y'all off by asking about it less then 24 hours
> previously, and stepping on other toes).

Organizational structure doesn't mean bureaucracy. We already saw that 
didn't work. Open source organizations are different from normal ones 
though. This includes chronic lack of time for many participants.

> Typical foss project is optimized for one thing, and one thing alone-
> maximal usage of available resources.  It has to be *easy* for folks
> to contribute whatever time they have- this means eliminating as much
> menial/manual work as possible.

Gentoo is not a typical OSS project either. Developing a distribution is 
fundamentally different from developing one application.

> Further, foss has something of a rapid release cycle.  We're actively
> trying to move in the opposite direction if you consider the actual
> implication of trying to widen the unstable keywording gap- I'm not
> stating QA is bad, what I'm stating is that QA explicitly requires
> delays built in (whether via multiple reviews by devs, or letting the
> changes sit for a while).

We try to make a better gentoo. This does not mean do what every other 
foss project does. No matter how applicable.

> Why has gentoo gotten slower as it's gotten larger?  Because the lone
> wolf developer has less bullshit to deal with, they can just hammer
> towards their goal.  Introduce more folk into it, waste more of their
> time syncing up with each other, more time of those who see their
> goal, know how to get their, having to run it past everyone who wants
> to be know what's afoot.

Also remember the lack of stability at that time. And the fact there were 
less packages. And the fact that we had Daniel, who often just said "Yes" 
or "No", shortcutting any decision.

> > Thanks for your comments..   As for management, anyone who reads
> > "Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni[1] will see all of
> > the problems that Gentoo has, as well as the potential Gentoo has if
> > it worked well.
>
> Not trying to stick it to you, but I think what you're pointing at as
> good is fundamentally the issue here- more process tagged into gentoo
> isn't going to help anything, just push us further towards
> debianization (something that's bugged me for the last 18 months I
> might add).

What I think people are arguing about is how to prevent this.

>
> What I've seen with gentoo is bluntly, wasted resources (bit
> intentional in some cases).  We've been progressing more towards
> keeping everyone in the loop rather then letting folks spring on ahead
> and get things done (sometimes with a bit of a mess in the process).
>
> Note I said 'intentional'; seems like people have been pushing for
> gentoo as a whole to slow down (note the enterprise
> concerns/complaints that hit the ml every 6 months for example).

There you've got it wrong in my opinion. Enterprise does not mean slow the 
project down. It means create subproject that at some point takes a 
snapshot of the distribution and makes a stable fork from that that only 
changes for security issues. It should not limit the progress of the 
project itself.

> Dunno.  Maybe it's all a ramble, maybe you think I'm a loon, but final
> point I'm going to make is that pushing for a global solution (whether
> a BDFL or board or committee) totally is missing the actual issue-
> that individuals get things done, the larger the # of folks involved
> in progressing towards something the slower they're going to move.

So you want to solve the problem of making gentoo go forward 300 times. 
Once for each developer. Good luck, I'll put my money on an approach that 
looks at all developers at once. To try to solve things for all (probably 
not once ;-) )

> Central vision, mission statements, etc, that crap, doesn't
> actually accomplish anything; if someone is working towards something,
> someone is working towards it.  Extra beuracray/cruft doesn't
> translate to code however, nor does it really enable faster production
> of code.

What I see as the problem is that gentoo has become quite stable in 
nature. Of course packages get updated, some new features get added to 
portage, and things improve a bit gradually. However in general the idea 
is that the gentoo distribution 1 year from now is not fundamentally 
different / improved from the distribution today. This means that others 
are making innovations and will be getting better than gentoo. I would 
like to keep gentoo the best distribution (for me) around, and as such 
would like gentoo to be more innovative.

There are currently some issues that limit this innovation. First of all, 
there is currently no overall vision of where gentoo will be in say 2 
years. Second, we lack leadership. The council is there to make 
decisions, as was the management team before. The council is intended to 
be an improvement to the non-functioning hierarchy of projects. The 
council should however not be a limiting factor to the improvement of 
gentoo.

If we take that reducing the number of developers to 30 is not going to be 
the solution, we need to find another solution to improve innovation in 
gentoo. Part of that is in infrastructure, like project overlays that 
allow for testing out stuff. Another part is in the organization of 
gentoo. Innovation should be encouraged, while effort should also not go 
wasted on dead projects. Perhaps a single lead would be a way to 
encourage innovation, perhaps not. If enough people think it will, we 
might want to try it out.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Friday 06 January 2006 00:17, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
>
> To make it short: When you really have something important to say, post
> it to the appropriate mailing list - and post the whole text, not a
> ridiculous link to your blog, most people are not interested in and
> won't read! The same goes for our userbase: They're right to expect a
> single source of general information and one for security information,
> but not being forced to follow lots of blogs.

Even better,

send a mail to Ulrich, or to the gwn-feedback address, and propose a nice 
article in the GWN, and possibly on the homepage. That's why we have 
them.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 05 January 2006 17:20, Patrick Lauer wrote:
>
> But it's already getting too bureaucratic ;-)
> It's getting more and more difficult to get things done, more and more
> people / groups / herds to wait on to decide "obvious" things.
>
They shouldn't. If there is anything I learned is that a mailing list 
never comes to a "decision". At some point the principal stakeholder (the 
person waiting for the decision) must make a conclusion, and get to work. 
It works. The support was there, people will follow, end else there is 
repoman to force them to ;-).

> For example - our baselayout supports UML and vServer (almost fully)
> native. Most of you won't see that, but to those that do it's something
> that's really nice.

One of the reasons that gentoo is still my favourite distro.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 05 January 2006 18:03, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> Exactly :-) But I guess many among us have become a bit disillusioned
> and try to stay away from what is perceived as useless trolling and
> silly infights. So things either stall in discussion or get implemented
> with the "obvious" flawed approach (early webapp-config and portage are
> good examples) and then take a long time to become "fixed". There's
> still a lot of good stuff happening, but as someone else said in this
> thread, "we suck at execution" :-(

I guess, the council should be more brave, and make decisions like 
rejecting flawed approaches. Even when discussions have not been thrown 
up and re-eaten again.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 05 January 2006 21:09, Aron Griffis wrote:
> I think there is a Post Hoc fallacy happening here: A happened before
> B, therefore A must be causing B.  In the case at hand: A = loss of
> leader, B = lack of progress.  While A might be the cause of B, it is
> dangerous to jump to that conclusion without more than the sequence as
> support.

From what I remember from talking with Daniel, the oposite is more 
through. Daniel felt that things were getting nowhere, he was overloaded 
and brickwalled at the same time, and to make worse had financial 
problems. So indeed rather a fallacy.

> First, Gentoo's developers are not going to follow a leader's
> direction unless they sincerely agree with it.  Since we're all
> volunteers, the only cooperative work we're going to see is when
> people agree with a goal.  Therefore it doesn't matter whether you
> name somebody "our leader" or if they're just another developer,
> either way they're going to have to convince people to play along.
> Our current model already allows for centralized leadership via
> meritocracy: any developer can step up to the plate and be king for
> the day, they just have to have a good idea and convince others to go
> along with it.

People should also notice the difference between leader and boss.

> Second, I think the factualness of B is in question.  A few people
> have brought up examples of progress being made within Gentoo.  The
> problem here appears to be that the progress being made is not in the
> same areas where some people are looking.  Which brings up the
> question: How is Gentoo falling short in your eyes?  Are you certain
> that those specific areas are related to the non-existence of a boss?

Part of it is portage, and that is getting somewhere now. The "boss" 
stepped down, so that others than him can work on it too.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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[gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Mike Frysinger]

This is your monthly friendly reminder !  Same bat time (typically the
2nd Thursday at 2000 UTC), same bat channel (#gentoo-council @
irc.freenode.net) !

If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
Gentoo dev list to see.

Keep in mind that every GLEP *re*submission to the council for review
must first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum)
before being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days
before the meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be
notified at least 14 days before the meeting itself.

For more info on the Gentoo Council, feel free to browse our homepage:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Mike Frysinger]

This is your monthly friendly reminder !  Same bat time (typically
the 2nd Thursday at 2000 UTC / 1600 EST), same bat channel
(#gentoo-council @ irc.freenode.net) !

If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
Gentoo dev list to see.

Keep in mind that every GLEP *re*submission to the council for review
must first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum)
before being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days
before the meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be
notified at least 14 days before the meeting itself.

For more info on the Gentoo Council, feel free to browse our homepage:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Piotr Jaroszyński]

On Tuesday 01 of January 2008 06:30:01 Mike Frysinger wrote:
> If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> Gentoo dev list to see.

I would like council to discuss GLEP 54 and 55.

-- 
Best Regards,
Piotr Jaroszyński
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Caleb Tennis]

> If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> Gentoo dev list to see.

I would like to request the council discuss, though not necessarily take action or
vote on, the idea of "slacker arches" and what ebuild maintainers are allowed/can do
to a package versions that are languishing due to not getting stable keywords on
those arches.

I'm not trying to pick on any specific case, but I am hoping to find out if there's
an allowable/acceptable period of time to which if an arch team is unable to
stabilize a package to a newer version, for non-technical reasons, that it's okay to
drop older unstable ebuilds.

I realize this is open to lots of debate and dicussion, and I'm just trying to have
a dialogue as to what is acceptable and hopefully get concensus as to some kind of
guidance that could be added to the devmanual.

Thanks,
Caleb

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Luca Barbato]

Caleb Tennis wrote:
>> If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
>> vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
>> Gentoo dev list to see.
> 
> I would like to request the council discuss, though not necessarily take action or
> vote on, the idea of "slacker arches" and what ebuild maintainers are allowed/can do
> to a package versions that are languishing due to not getting stable keywords on
> those arches.
>

I'd suggest something like "if nobody could test your update in a timely
way you should ask and possibly get an account on an arch box in order
to test it and bump if the minimal test pass"

sounds fair?

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:54:50 +0100
Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I'd suggest something like "if nobody could test your update in a
> timely way you should ask and possibly get an account on an arch box
> in order to test it and bump if the minimal test pass"
> 
> sounds fair?

Sounds like a great way to get more broken packages, which means more
work for arch teams fixing them, which means less time available for
fixing important bugs.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ryan Hill]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> I'd suggest something like "if nobody could test your update in a
>> timely way you should ask and possibly get an account on an arch box
>> in order to test it and bump if the minimal test pass"
>>
>> sounds fair?
> 
> Sounds like a great way to get more broken packages, which means more
> work for arch teams fixing them, which means less time available for
> fixing important bugs.

I find it more often we're waiting for the arch team to do something
so we can remove the broken package from the tree.  I have four versions 
of freetype sitting around that I'd really like to get rid of but can't 
until mips stabilizes a newer version.  Granted, I may only think it 
happens more often because I only see it from the dev side.

I don't mean to rag on the mips team because I understand how difficult 
it can be to build and test packages on that type of hardware (see [i] 
for a good explanation).  I've personally been looking into getting an 
Indigo2 or O2 box to help out.  I'd like to know, though, if they have 
any plans to deal with the current situation. And if there is no real 
solution in sight, what can we do about it?  Is dropping the
MIPS stable tree an option?

(btw this is a discussion that should take place on the -project ML)


[i] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/46072

-- 
fonts,                                            by design, by neglect
gcc-porting,                              for a fact or just for effect
wxwindows @ gentoo     EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662

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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:40:43 -0600
Ryan Hill <dirtyepic@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I have four versions of freetype sitting around that I'd really like
> to get rid of

And what is the cost of you not getting rid of them? Is there any
particular reason it matters when it's done?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ryan Hill]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:40:43 -0600
> Ryan Hill <dirtyepic@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> I have four versions of freetype sitting around that I'd really like
>> to get rid of
> 
> And what is the cost of you not getting rid of them? Is there any
> particular reason it matters when it's done?

The general maintenance cost of any ebuild in the tree.  If we want to 
make an external or global change in how the package is built or used, 
we have to make sure those changes work with all versions in the tree.


-- 
fonts,                                            by design, by neglect
gcc-porting,                              for a fact or just for effect
wxwindows @ gentoo     EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:21:39 -0600
Ryan Hill <dirtyepic@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > On Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:40:43 -0600
> > Ryan Hill <dirtyepic@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> I have four versions of freetype sitting around that I'd really
> >> like to get rid of
> > 
> > And what is the cost of you not getting rid of them? Is there any
> > particular reason it matters when it's done?
> 
> The general maintenance cost of any ebuild in the tree.  If we want
> to make an external or global change in how the package is built or
> used, we have to make sure those changes work with all versions in
> the tree.

And do you actually want to make such a change? If you do, give an
explanation, and demonstrate why it can't be solved simply by
dependencies.

Most of the time, when people are moaning about 'slacker' archs, they
don't have any kind of decent technical reason for doing so... In cases
where such a reason exists, the arch teams are usually quite happy to
prioritise if asked.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Caleb Tennis]

> Most of the time, when people are moaning about 'slacker' archs, they
> don't have any kind of decent technical reason for doing so... In cases
> where such a reason exists, the arch teams are usually quite happy to
> prioritise if asked.

And the point of me asking for the council to talk about this is to set some kind of
guidelines for what happens after you've asked X number of times and let Y number of
days go by, where X and Y are amounts open for discussion.

Caleb


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 06:23:11 -0500 (EST)
"Caleb Tennis" <caleb@gentoo.org> wrote:
 > > Most of the time, when people are moaning about 'slacker' archs,
> > they don't have any kind of decent technical reason for doing so...
> > In cases where such a reason exists, the arch teams are usually
> > quite happy to prioritise if asked.
> 
> And the point of me asking for the council to talk about this is to
> set some kind of guidelines for what happens after you've asked X
> number of times and let Y number of days go by, where X and Y are
> amounts open for discussion.

X and Y are pretty much irrelevant. The important factor is Z, the
impact of leaving things the way they are.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Caleb Tennis]

> X and Y are pretty much irrelevant. The important factor is Z, the
> impact of leaving things the way they are.

Well, I'm asking the council to discuss when "pretty much" irrelevant no longer
applies.

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 17:26:39 -0500 (EST)
"Caleb Tennis" <caleb@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > X and Y are pretty much irrelevant. The important factor is Z, the
> > impact of leaving things the way they are.
> 
> Well, I'm asking the council to discuss when "pretty much" irrelevant
> no longer applies.

Compared to the cost of causing yet more arch breakage, which takes
huge amounts of time to fix and leads to far more problems, I'd say X
and Y should be something like one billion and three billion
respectively, except in those rare cases where Z is genuinely
significant.

Really, I'd like to see some genuine examples of cases where people
think they have a legitimate value of Z...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 21:02 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> X and Y are pretty much irrelevant. The important factor is Z, the
> impact of leaving things the way they are.

...and the idea is to let the Council decide what level of Z is
acceptable.  Currently, it appears as if the "issue" is maintainers
being forced to keep abhorrently old versions of packages, including
security-vulnerable packages, simply because a security-unsupported
architecture hasn't had time to test/update/whatever.

This has been an issue for quite some time.  Of course, the impact is
debatable, but it seems that we cannot agree ourselves on what is
agreeable, so I see this as a point to bring to the Council simply so it
can be resolved "once and for all" and things can resume normal
operation.  I know that I, as an ebuild developer, would be much more
comfortable/accepting of having to keep around old versions of packages,
if the Council had deemed it to be something "important" enough.  No
offence to any alternative architectures or their hard-working team
members, but there are some times when we have to look at the common
good, and forcing maintainers to spend time keeping older ebuilds that
are possibly using older ebuild code and other idiosyncrasies versus the
current versions for the more mainstream architectures simply might not
be worth it for architectures with a very minimal number of users.

I've heard some suggestions for removing stable KEYWORDS on arches that
aren't security supported.  I see this as a possible solution to such
issues, since ~arch packages aren't "security-supported" in the sense of
GLSA and such, so why not keep arches which aren't security-supported
from having stable KEYWORDS?  Of course, this is a "global" change which
affects multiple architectures, so it should be deferred to the Council.
I don't really think it requires a large amount of discussion simply
because it is simple to see how it would come to a swift stand-still.
The arch teams affected will want nothing to change, the package
maintainers will want to make things easier on themselves.  This is to
be expected.  We elect the Council for a reason.  Making decisions like
this is one of them.  Let's let them do their job and follow their
leadership.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 22:37 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Really, I'd like to see some genuine examples of cases where people
> think they have a legitimate value of Z...

How about we base X Y and Z on the number of verifiable users of said
arch?  That's just as arbitrary and fits with the normal "pink ponies"
philosophy of pulling complete bullshit out of the air and using it as a
justification or argument.  Maybe we'll base it on how many months
they've been security-supported?

No offense to anyone, but holding back hundreds of developers and
thousands of users for a handful of developers, who could do their jobs
just as well without stable KEYWORDS, and an nearly as small number of
users, just isn't worth it to us all.  How many users do you really
think breaking some of these arches affects?  If the architecture (or
its team) is incapable of maintaining stable KEYWORDS in a timely
manner, why should we care about them, again?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:20:18 -0800
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> No offense to anyone, but holding back hundreds of developers and
> thousands of users for a handful of developers

...and how exactly are hundreds of developers and thousands of users
being held back? So far as I can see, in cases where anyone really is
being held back, the arch teams are quite happy to prioritise -- the
people who go around moaning about 'slacker archs' rarely if ever
actually have anything holding them back.

If anyone has any examples of where they really are being held back and
where they really have given the arch teams plenty of time to do
something, I'd like to see them... Somehow I doubt it happens very
often, if at all.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Samuli Suominen]

On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 04:32:33 +0000
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

> On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:20:18 -0800
> Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > No offense to anyone, but holding back hundreds of developers and
> > thousands of users for a handful of developers
> 
> ...and how exactly are hundreds of developers and thousands of users
> being held back? So far as I can see, in cases where anyone really is
> being held back, the arch teams are quite happy to prioritise -- the
> people who go around moaning about 'slacker archs' rarely if ever
> actually have anything holding them back.
> 
> If anyone has any examples of where they really are being held back
> and where they really have given the arch teams plenty of time to do
> something, I'd like to see them... Somehow I doubt it happens very
> often, if at all.
> 

No need to talk about 'slacker archs' since we are REALLY talking about
a 'slacker arch' called mips. I've given up hope long time ago, leaving
ebuilds behind with KEYWORDS="mips" since opening bugs seems useless and
maintaining them is too much work (the target of stabilization or
keywording changes many times before the bug is finally touched)

Mainly, talking about categories (yes, categories, no need to mention
single ebuilds at this point) xfce-* and media-* here.

IIRC, paludis has the "imlate" script you can use.

- drac
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Caleb Tennis]

> If anyone has any examples of where they really are being held back and
> where they really have given the arch teams plenty of time to do
> something, I'd like to see them... Somehow I doubt it happens very
> often, if at all.

Why?  You aren't the person I or anyone else has to make a case to.  In fact, I
never would have mailed the list about this to prevent this very type of
potentially-out-of-control discussion from occurring, except that the e-mail from
Mike said that discussion topics needed to be sent to the list.

We currently get rid of packages that are unmaintained or are old enough that they
pose technical problems for developers with today's tools.  I see no difference in
establishing some similar kinds criteria for arch team keywords (which I'm not even
asking for.  I'm simply asking for dialogue to determine what kinds of criteria
would be appropriate, if any).

Similarly, what would the Gentoo policy be if at some time in the future an arch
team had no members?  What if it had two members, but they were unable to keep up
with stabilization requests and were running 6-12 months behind?  "Sorry, there
isn't anybody who can mark that stable, but we're hoping to get someone on the team
this year" isn't a valid answer in my book.

I have no idea what the process is to add an "officially" support arch to the tree,
but certainly it's more than just one guy making a few commits.  There's some
process that has to be gone through, right?  Well, there also needs to be an exit
strategy for when lack of interest in maintenance no longer means that arch should
be supported.  But right now, all I'm asking for it when it's appropriate for an
ebuild maintainer to not have to spend any more time waiting for the arch team to
respond to requests.  If you believe that number is 1 billion days, fine.  Those of
us who have faced the issue and disagree can also make our opinions heard to the
council, and let them decide what should be done, again, if anything.

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Luca Barbato]

Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> This has been an issue for quite some time.  Of course, the impact is
> debatable, but it seems that we cannot agree ourselves on what is
> agreeable, so I see this as a point to bring to the Council simply so it
> can be resolved "once and for all" and things can resume normal
> operation.

This thread so far spawned lots of reply from an external contributor
making the point of keeping stale ebuilds around and 4 developers
against the idea proposing different solutions ranging from force update
pending some remote testing to remove the stable keyword for such arches.

Anything other suggestions?

lu

PS: has anybody checked how viable is now qemu-system ?

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Wulf C. Krueger]

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On Saturday, 05. January 2008 18:19:10 Luca Barbato wrote:
> This thread so far spawned lots of reply from an external contributor
> making the point of keeping stale ebuilds around and 4 developers
> against the idea 

Make that 5.

> Anything other suggestions?

Let the maintainer of said package decide on the keywording (and therefore 
how to handle slacker arches). 

An example: An arch cares more about e. g. games (and proudly blogs about 
it) than KDE. In such a case in the future I'm going to try to work it 
out with the respective arch and if they don't react in a timely manner, 
I'll simply remove the stale ebuilds (or whatever action is appropriate).

And, if that has happened often enough, I will take appropriate steps to 
make sure such stuff doesn't happen again, e. g. by making sure the 
ebuilds I maintain are not keyworded by the respective arch again until 
their problems have been resolved. As will be the case for KDE4. It won't 
get any mips keyword.

As for Ciaran's remarks - yes, theoretically, he is right but I don't see 
him arch testing for mips so his remarks are pretty meaningless to me.

-- 
Best regards, Wulf

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Samstag, 5. Januar 2008, Wulf C. Krueger wrote:
> > Anything other suggestions?
>
> Let the maintainer of said package decide on the keywording (and therefore
> how to handle slacker arches).

That's not a good idea. What Gentoo needs is users (and this includes 
co-develoepers) having a reliable maintenance experience across the 
repository and developers not following our maintenance policies to be 
booted. In fact the MIPS team should have been given a last chance to reduce 
the number of keyworded packages to a number the team can handle and 
otherwise we should have said "Sorry, but goodbye MIPS." long long ago.

That said, the only reason the old KDE ebuilds are still in the tree is that I 
didn't kick my ass to do it, yet.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Petteri Räty]

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Ciaran McCreesh kirjoitti:
> 
> If anyone has any examples of where they really are being held back and
> where they really have given the arch teams plenty of time to do
> something, I'd like to see them... Somehow I doubt it happens very
> often, if at all.
> 

Maintainers want that the versions they provide to users work. I don't 
want to make that guarantee for old versions because I don't have the 
time to test wrt updates to the dependency tree etc. Maintainers could 
keep the old versions for some time but in my experience the mips team 
is completely unresponsive (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160056).

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Peter Volkov]

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В Сбт, 05/01/2008 в 18:19 +0100, Luca Barbato пишет:
> Anything other suggestions?

I think, arch which does not manage to cope with stabilize bugs force
users to use unstable branch so it's good both for developers and users
to force such arch to concentrate on fixing real bugs and maintain only
unstable branch. Decision to drop stable branch for certain arch should
be done by council after request and discussion on -dev having
arch@gentoo.org in CC.

-- 
Peter.

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ryan Hill]

Luca Barbato wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote:
>> This has been an issue for quite some time.  Of course, the impact is
>> debatable, but it seems that we cannot agree ourselves on what is
>> agreeable, so I see this as a point to bring to the Council simply so it
>> can be resolved "once and for all" and things can resume normal
>> operation.
> 
> This thread so far spawned lots of reply from an external contributor
> making the point of keeping stale ebuilds around and 4 developers
> against the idea proposing different solutions ranging from force update
> pending some remote testing to remove the stable keyword for such arches.
> 
> Anything other suggestions?

I don't know, I can kinda see both sides.  Alt arches tend to be finicky 
so it's important that updates are well tested on them.  Also they're 
more prone to break during upgrades, not only because they're more 
fragile but because upstream is far less likely to have tested on them, 
so I can see why having a stable tree is important.

On the other hand, that stable tree is crufting up badly and also prone 
to breakage just due to being unmaintained.  mips have 225 open bugs, 87 
of which they are the assignee.  i don't really care about open bugs, 
but some do, and it's making them crabby.

I don't think any of the current suggestions are very good, but I don't 
have anything better, other than we get more mips/alt-arch ppl or access 
to hardware.  Like I said, I'm willing to buy hardware if I can find any 
(must ship to Nowhere, Canada).

Does anyone from the (current) mips team have anything to suggest?

> PS: has anybody checked how viable is now qemu-system ?

Does it build with GCC 4 yet?


-- 
fonts,                                            by design, by neglect
gcc-porting,                              for a fact or just for effect
wxwindows @ gentoo     EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 12:47:51 +0200
Samuli Suominen <drac@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Mainly, talking about categories (yes, categories, no need to mention
> single ebuilds at this point) xfce-* and media-* here.

So nothing that's a priority for the users of those archs then. Now
please provide specific examples of how anyone is being held up.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 09:03:43 -0500 (EST)
"Caleb Tennis" <caleb@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > If anyone has any examples of where they really are being held back
> > and where they really have given the arch teams plenty of time to do
> > something, I'd like to see them... Somehow I doubt it happens very
> > often, if at all.
> 
> Why?  You aren't the person I or anyone else has to make a case to.
> In fact, I never would have mailed the list about this to prevent
> this very type of potentially-out-of-control discussion from
> occurring, except that the e-mail from Mike said that discussion
> topics needed to be sent to the list.

Ah, so you'd like the Council to jump to some arbitrary decision,
rather than hearing specific examples and evidence from all involved?

How will providing specific examples of how people are being held up
not be beneficial to the decision-making process?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ryan Hill]

Ryan Hill wrote:
> I don't think any of the current suggestions are very good, but I don't 
> have anything better, other than we get more mips/alt-arch ppl or access 
> to hardware.  Like I said, I'm willing to buy hardware if I can find any 
> (must ship to Nowhere, Canada).

Alright, I put my money where my mouth is and found an R5K O2 for sale 
in Texas.  Hopefully shipping won't be too much.


-- 
fonts,                                            by design, by neglect
gcc-porting,                              for a fact or just for effect
wxwindows @ gentoo     EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Michael Sterrett -Mr. Bones.-]

On Sun, 6 Jan 2008, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> So nothing that's a priority for the users of those archs then. Now
> please provide specific examples of how anyone is being held up.

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202726

Michael Sterrett
   -Mr. Bones.-
mr_bones_@gentoo.org
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 20:33:15 -0500 (EST)
"Michael Sterrett -Mr. Bones.-" <msterret@coat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Jan 2008, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > So nothing that's a priority for the users of those archs then. Now
> > please provide specific examples of how anyone is being held up.
> 
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202726

And what is the impact of that holdup? Have you explained why you
consider that to be a priority to the arch teams in question?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Martin Jackson]

> And what is the impact of that holdup? Have you explained why you
> consider that to be a priority to the arch teams in question?
> 

We had a sec bug on net-snmp that was held up due to 
dev-python/setuptools not being ~mips.  The net-snmp folks added a 
python module to their distribution, and I added support to the ebuild 
for it, so now the latest stable net-snmp for mips has a DoS against it.

See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=191550 - it took > 2 months 
for mips to keyword it.

Security bugs are normally supposed to have enhanced priority for 
keywording, etc.

Thanks,
Marty
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:18:09 -0600
Martin Jackson <mjolnir@gentoo.org> wrote:
> See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=191550 - it took > 2
> months for mips to keyword it.
> 
> Security bugs are normally supposed to have enhanced priority for 
> keywording, etc.

Perhaps you should have explicitly stated in the bug that it was for
security reasons and thus a priority. Make things easy for the arch
teams -- if you have useful information like that, provide it in an
easy to see place. Looking at that bug, I don't see anything indicating
that there's any reason it should have been considered over more widely
used packages.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Martin Jackson]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:18:09 -0600
> Martin Jackson <mjolnir@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=191550 - it took > 2
>> months for mips to keyword it.
>>
>> Security bugs are normally supposed to have enhanced priority for 
>> keywording, etc.
> 
> Perhaps you should have explicitly stated in the bug that it was for
> security reasons and thus a priority. Make things easy for the arch
> teams -- if you have useful information like that, provide it in an
> easy to see place. Looking at that bug, I don't see anything indicating
> that there's any reason it should have been considered over more widely
> used packages.
> 

Because setuptools is not widely used?

The sec bug was (and remains) linked as a blocker.  Is that not explicit 
or easy enough?

Thanks,
Marty
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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Luca Barbato]

Ryan Hill wrote:
>> PS: has anybody checked how viable is now qemu-system ?
> 
> Does it build with GCC 4 yet?

not yet...

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero

-- 
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:32:09 -0600
Martin Jackson <mjolnir@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Perhaps you should have explicitly stated in the bug that it was for
> > security reasons and thus a priority. Make things easy for the arch
> > teams -- if you have useful information like that, provide it in an
> > easy to see place. Looking at that bug, I don't see anything
> > indicating that there's any reason it should have been considered
> > over more widely used packages.
> 
> Because setuptools is not widely used?
> 
> The sec bug was (and remains) linked as a blocker.  Is that not
> explicit or easy enough?

When arch people get dozens to hundreds of bug emails per day, no, it's
not. A simple "this is now a security issue, see bug blah" makes it an
awful lot easier for arch people to prioritise -- emails that merely
show blockers added or removed tend to get ignored because a) they're
almost always meaningless changes from the arch team's perspective, and
b) the bug email doesn't convey any useful information on its own
anyway.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:19:10 +0100
Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org> wrote:
> PS: has anybody checked how viable is now qemu-system ?

Testing on qemu isn't anything like testing on real hardware. It's not
a reliable or useful way of doing arch work.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Martin Jackson]

> When arch people get dozens to hundreds of bug emails per day, no, it's
> not. A simple "this is now a security issue, see bug blah" makes it an
> awful lot easier for arch people to prioritise -- emails that merely
> show blockers added or removed tend to get ignored because a) they're
> almost always meaningless changes from the arch team's perspective, and
> b) the bug email doesn't convey any useful information on its own
> anyway.
> 

That's making the assumption that anyone looked at it, of course. Please 
note comment #9 on http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198346.  It 
was still ~8 days from then that the setuptools keyword was added.

So, we have examples of impact due to delay in keywords/etc.  Shall we 
proceed with the discussion of what to do about it?

Thanks,
Marty

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Martin Jackson]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:32:09 -0600
> Martin Jackson <mjolnir@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> Perhaps you should have explicitly stated in the bug that it was for
>>> security reasons and thus a priority. Make things easy for the arch
>>> teams -- if you have useful information like that, provide it in an
>>> easy to see place. Looking at that bug, I don't see anything
>>> indicating that there's any reason it should have been considered
>>> over more widely used packages.
>> Because setuptools is not widely used?
>>
>> The sec bug was (and remains) linked as a blocker.  Is that not
>> explicit or easy enough?
> 
> When arch people get dozens to hundreds of bug emails per day, no, it's
> not. A simple "this is now a security issue, see bug blah" makes it an
> awful lot easier for arch people to prioritise -- emails that merely
> show blockers added or removed tend to get ignored because a) they're
> almost always meaningless changes from the arch team's perspective, and
> b) the bug email doesn't convey any useful information on its own
> anyway.
> 

To be clear, the security issue didn't arise until November 7, 2007. 
The request to keyword setuptools was *not* a security issue until then.

Thanks,
Marty
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:52:49 -0600
Martin Jackson <mjolnir@gentoo.org> wrote:
> That's making the assumption that anyone looked at it, of course.
> Please note comment #9 on
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198346.  It was still ~8 days
> from then that the setuptools keyword was added.
> 
> So, we have examples of impact due to delay in keywords/etc.  Shall
> we proceed with the discussion of what to do about it?

http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/vulnerability-policy.xml

The target for that GLSA was 20 days. 8 days is well within target.
What are you moaning about?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Martin Jackson]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:52:49 -0600
> Martin Jackson <mjolnir@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> That's making the assumption that anyone looked at it, of course.
>> Please note comment #9 on
>> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198346.  It was still ~8 days
>> from then that the setuptools keyword was added.
>>
>> So, we have examples of impact due to delay in keywords/etc.  Shall
>> we proceed with the discussion of what to do about it?
> 
> http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/vulnerability-policy.xml
> 
> The target for that GLSA was 20 days. 8 days is well within target.
> What are you moaning about?
> 

The original topic of this conversation was about what to do about an 
arch that is obviously not as responsive as other arches.  This is a 
concrete example of that fact, which you requested.  This seems to be a 
topic frequently discussed here.

Who knows how long that request would have languished if not for the 
security bug?  As you said, when there are so many requests and so few 
people to service them, they all have the same priority, unless there's 
something to elevate their priority.

Ciaran, I think you've made my point far more eloquently than I could 
have myself.  Thanks for your time and attention to this matter.

Marty
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Matthias Langer]

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On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 02:06 +0300, Peter Volkov wrote:
> В Сбт, 05/01/2008 в 18:19 +0100, Luca Barbato пишет:
> > Anything other suggestions?
> 
> I think, arch which does not manage to cope with stabilize bugs force
> users to use unstable branch so it's good both for developers and users
> to force such arch to concentrate on fixing real bugs and maintain only
> unstable branch. Decision to drop stable branch for certain arch should
> be done by council after request and discussion on -dev having
> arch@gentoo.org in CC.
> 

Well, if running mips actually causes more breakage than running ~mips
and if it is unlikely that this will change soon, then the stable
keyword is not just useless, but misleading. In this case, just dropping
it seems the most sensible solution.

Thus it all comes down to a question for mips users/developers: Is mips
any longer more stable than ~mips? Any opinions?
 



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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:35:52 -0600
Martin Jackson <mjolnir@gentoo.org> wrote:
> The original topic of this conversation was about what to do about an 
> arch that is obviously not as responsive as other arches.  This is a 
> concrete example of that fact, which you requested.  This seems to be
> a topic frequently discussed here.

Really, I wanted concrete examples of where there was an actual
problem. Preferably lots of concrete examples, to demonstrate that this
is a systemic thing rather an odd one off issue.

> Who knows how long that request would have languished if not for the 
> security bug?

Who knows indeed... Wouldn't the Council be better served with examples
where we do know? If there's a real problem here, surely it wouldn't be
that hard to produce an extensive list of examples? Ideally each
example would state how often the arch team has been asked, how long
they've had to respond, how clear it has been made to the arch team
that the issue is considered a priority and what the impact of the arch
team not taking action is.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Denis Dupeyron]

On Jan 6, 2008 1:33 AM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 09:03:43 -0500 (EST)
> "Caleb Tennis" <caleb@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > > If anyone has any examples of where they really are being held back
> > > and where they really have given the arch teams plenty of time to do
> > > something, I'd like to see them... Somehow I doubt it happens very
> > > often, if at all.
> >
> > Why?  You aren't the person I or anyone else has to make a case to.
> > In fact, I never would have mailed the list about this to prevent
> > this very type of potentially-out-of-control discussion from
> > occurring, except that the e-mail from Mike said that discussion
> > topics needed to be sent to the list.
>
> Ah, so you'd like the Council to jump to some arbitrary decision,
> rather than hearing specific examples and evidence from all involved?

No. What he meant and doesn't dare to say is you didn't ask, but
demanded, in your usual dry and pesky "I'm a spoiled 6-year old" tone.
And this as usual results in people ignoring you. People aren't as
stupid as you think they are, and they don't want to play this game
with you anymore. So don't build a case on the fact that you're not
getting answers.

Someday you'll understand this.

Oh, and council members too aren't as stupid as you think they are. If
they decide to discuss this, one of their first steps will surely be
to try and evaluate what the current situation is. If I were a council
member I'd probably feel offended by such condescension from your
part.

Denis.
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sun, 6 Jan 2008 10:08:47 +0100
"Denis Dupeyron" <calchan@gentoo.org> wrote:
> No. What he meant and doesn't dare to say is you didn't ask, but
> demanded, in your usual dry and pesky "I'm a spoiled 6-year old" tone.
> And this as usual results in people ignoring you. People aren't as
> stupid as you think they are, and they don't want to play this game
> with you anymore. So don't build a case on the fact that you're not
> getting answers.
> 
> Someday you'll understand this.
> 
> Oh, and council members too aren't as stupid as you think they are. If
> they decide to discuss this, one of their first steps will surely be
> to try and evaluate what the current situation is. If I were a council
> member I'd probably feel offended by such condescension from your
> part.

Ah, so this is what you consider to be solid technical reasoning, is
it? You certainly present a compelling case, but probably not for
the position you were trying to...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Peter Volkov]

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В Сбт, 05/01/2008 в 18:17 -0600, Ryan Hill пишет:
> I don't know, I can kinda see both sides.  Alt arches tend to be finicky 
> so it's important that updates are well tested on them.  Also they're 
> more prone to break during upgrades, not only because they're more 
> fragile but because upstream is far less likely to have tested on them, 
> so I can see why having a stable tree is important.

If this is an issue arch developers should tell us that.

Problems with having slacker archs are: open bugs in bugzilla and old
ebuilds which are unsupported by maintainer[1]. Open bug just takes my
time and attention to open it and to find out that we already fixed that
bug and wait for arch to take their action. Old ebuilds they leave me
without satisfaction and lie to our users - I know that they are broken,
but they are still in the tree and are marked as stable.

Open bugs problem can't be solved until we fix problem with old ebuilds
because ordinary for broken/old ebuilds I keep herd/myself in CC of bug
until it's closed to drop old ebuild from the tree.

And for me the problem with old ebuilds could be solved if I could drop
keywords from old ebuilds. Then I could remove herd/myself from CC to
bug. Also if council decide this way I'd like to see recommendation for
slacker arch to drop old ebuild (with none keywords except ~arch) from
the tree by themselves as soon as they stabilize new version.

[1] And security problem could be solved by labeling arch as security
unsupported.

-- 
Peter.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Luca Barbato]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:19:10 +0100
> Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> PS: has anybody checked how viable is now qemu-system ?
> 
> Testing on qemu isn't anything like testing on real hardware. It's not
> a reliable or useful way of doing arch work.
> 
We ALL know that the right way is to build on the target hw, test on the
hw and do that in a TIMELY manner.

Now, since seems that certain arches do not have enough hw or people
which are the workaround to have stuff tested to a minimum in time?

- emulate such hardware if you don't own it
- use cross-distcc if you have the hardware but takes ages to build or
just requires too much power.
- use qemu-system or qemu-softmmu if you don't have access to the hw.


lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Matthias Langer]

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On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 09:12 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Jan 2008 10:08:47 +0100
> "Denis Dupeyron" <calchan@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > No. What he meant and doesn't dare to say is you didn't ask, but
> > demanded, in your usual dry and pesky "I'm a spoiled 6-year old" tone.
> > And this as usual results in people ignoring you. People aren't as
> > stupid as you think they are, and they don't want to play this game
> > with you anymore. So don't build a case on the fact that you're not
> > getting answers.
> > 
> > Someday you'll understand this.
> > 
> > Oh, and council members too aren't as stupid as you think they are. If
> > they decide to discuss this, one of their first steps will surely be
> > to try and evaluate what the current situation is. If I were a council
> > member I'd probably feel offended by such condescension from your
> > part.
> 
> Ah, so this is what you consider to be solid technical reasoning, is
> it? You certainly present a compelling case, but probably not for
> the position you were trying to...
> 

This kind of conversation is not technical at all... Ciaranm, are you a
MIPS user? If so, do you think that running KEYWORDS="mips" is less
likely to result in breakage than running KEYWORDS="~mips"?

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Piotr Jaroszyński]

On Sunday 06 of January 2008 13:04:13 Luca Barbato wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:19:10 +0100
> >
> > Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> PS: has anybody checked how viable is now qemu-system ?
> >
> > Testing on qemu isn't anything like testing on real hardware. It's not
> > a reliable or useful way of doing arch work.
>
> We ALL know that the right way is to build on the target hw, test on the
> hw and do that in a TIMELY manner.
>
> Now, since seems that certain arches do not have enough hw or people
> which are the workaround to have stuff tested to a minimum in time?
>
> - emulate such hardware if you don't own it
> - use cross-distcc if you have the hardware but takes ages to build or
> just requires too much power.
> - use qemu-system or qemu-softmmu if you don't have access to the hw.

Might as well toss a coin or check the phase of the moon...

-- 
Best Regards,
Piotr Jaroszyński
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Luca Barbato]

Piotr Jaroszyński wrote:
> Might as well toss a coin or check the phase of the moon...

Forgot those and dropping mips from the main repo as whole, yes.

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero

-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ryan Hill]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> "Caleb Tennis" <caleb@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> If anyone has any examples of where they really are being held back
>>> and where they really have given the arch teams plenty of time to do
>>> something, I'd like to see them... Somehow I doubt it happens very
>>> often, if at all.
>> Why?  You aren't the person I or anyone else has to make a case to.
>> In fact, I never would have mailed the list about this to prevent
>> this very type of potentially-out-of-control discussion from
>> occurring, except that the e-mail from Mike said that discussion
>> topics needed to be sent to the list.
> 
> Ah, so you'd like the Council to jump to some arbitrary decision,
> rather than hearing specific examples and evidence from all involved?
> 
> How will providing specific examples of how people are being held up
> not be beneficial to the decision-making process?

First you have to acknowledge that old perpetually open bugs and old 
unmaintained ebuilds are a maintenance burden.  There seems to be a 
consensus among maintainers that they are, but when given the examples 
of xfce and media-* you responded that those are not a priority for the 
archs in question.  Well, that's nice, but they are for the maintainers 
of those herds and that's what we're talking about.  We're not actively 
looking for ways to dump more work on the arch teams, but we're also 
tired of having more work dumped on us.  We're looking for a solution 
that has both sides happy here, but that won't happen if you don't admit 
there's a problem.


-- 
fonts,                                            by design, by neglect
gcc-porting,                              for a fact or just for effect
wxwindows @ gentoo     EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:36:06 -0600
Ryan Hill <dirtyepic@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > How will providing specific examples of how people are being held up
> > not be beneficial to the decision-making process?
> 
> First you have to acknowledge that old perpetually open bugs and old 
> unmaintained ebuilds are a maintenance burden.  There seems to be a 
> consensus among maintainers that they are, but when given the
> examples of xfce and media-* you responded that those are not a
> priority for the archs in question.  Well, that's nice, but they are
> for the maintainers of those herds and that's what we're talking
> about.  We're not actively looking for ways to dump more work on the
> arch teams, but we're also tired of having more work dumped on us.
> We're looking for a solution that has both sides happy here, but that
> won't happen if you don't admit there's a problem.

Ok, so explain:

* How perpetually open bugs are a maintenance burden. They don't
generate emails and they don't require any work on the maintainer's
part. Is the mere fact that they show up in queries all you're
concerned about, and if so, have you considered either adapting your
queries or requesting a special keyword to make such bugs easier to
filter?

* How unmaintained ebuilds are a maintenance burden. Doesn't that
contradict itself?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Christian Faulhammer]

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Hi,

Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk>:
> > Who knows how long that request would have languished if not for
> > the security bug?
> Who knows indeed... Wouldn't the Council be better served with
> examples where we do know? 

<URL:http://tinyurl.com/ypoxyg> is a list of closed security bugs where
mips is still cced.  163 is the total number, where surely some
duplicates can be found (PHP, Mozilla products), but we can assume that
quite an extensive number of packages which are vulnerable stay still
in the tree.
 Normal policy is to remove all vulnerable ebuilds which is not
possible if a vulnerable version is the only one keyworded mips.  This
would break an even bigger rule.
 We are not here to accuse anyone but to find a solution to this
problem...and no, I am not in the (financial) position to buy MIPS
hardware nor am I really interested in having it.

V-Li

-- 
Christian Faulhammer, Gentoo Lisp project
<URL:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode

<URL:http://www.faulhammer.org/>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:09:24 +0100
Matthias Langer <mlangc@gmx.at> wrote:
> This kind of conversation is not technical at all... Ciaranm, are you
> a MIPS user? If so, do you think that running KEYWORDS="mips" is less
> likely to result in breakage than running KEYWORDS="~mips"?

I think you'd need a much larger sample than one to get any meaningful
answer there (and it might be worth doing it across all other archs
too, to find out whether mips is in any way anomalous).

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Mon, 7 Jan 2008 00:35:41 +0100
Christian Faulhammer <opfer@gentoo.org> wrote:
> <URL:http://tinyurl.com/ypoxyg> is a list of closed security bugs
> where mips is still cced.  163 is the total number, where surely some
> duplicates can be found (PHP, Mozilla products), but we can assume
> that quite an extensive number of packages which are vulnerable stay
> still in the tree.

And how many of those have been fixed on mips without the Cc: being
removed? How many more of those would have been fixed had the bug not
been closed off?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Christian Faulhammer]

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Hi,

Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk>:

> On Mon, 7 Jan 2008 00:35:41 +0100
> Christian Faulhammer <opfer@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > <URL:http://tinyurl.com/ypoxyg> is a list of closed security bugs
> > where mips is still cced.  163 is the total number, where surely
> > some duplicates can be found (PHP, Mozilla products), but we can
> > assume that quite an extensive number of packages which are
> > vulnerable stay still in the tree.
> And how many of those have been fixed on mips without the Cc: being
> removed? How many more of those would have been fixed had the bug not
> been closed off?

 As you are so interested in those numbers, I humbly leave it to you
to investigate in depth because I have to run a business.  
 A quick check on the 15 newest bugs showed exactly 1 package where
mips was not lagging behind, where out of these only 2 are X
applications.  The bugs reach back until mid-November 2007 (CC date for
arches).
 For the sake of fairness I took 15 bugs in a row from 170000 and
greater.  Where mips lagging behind in 4 packages (from April 2007,
1 X application), 2 packages where mips has been dropped completely
(MySQL 5 e.g.).

V-Li

-- 
Christian Faulhammer, Gentoo Lisp project
<URL:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode

<URL:http://www.faulhammer.org/>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Petteri Räty]

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Christian Faulhammer kirjoitti:
> Hi,
> 
> Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk>:
> 
>> On Mon, 7 Jan 2008 00:35:41 +0100
>> Christian Faulhammer <opfer@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> <URL:http://tinyurl.com/ypoxyg> is a list of closed security bugs
>>> where mips is still cced.  163 is the total number, where surely
>>> some duplicates can be found (PHP, Mozilla products), but we can
>>> assume that quite an extensive number of packages which are
>>> vulnerable stay still in the tree.
>> And how many of those have been fixed on mips without the Cc: being
>> removed? How many more of those would have been fixed had the bug not
>> been closed off?
> 
>  As you are so interested in those numbers, I humbly leave it to you
> to investigate in depth because I have to run a business.  
>  A quick check on the 15 newest bugs showed exactly 1 package where
> mips was not lagging behind, where out of these only 2 are X
> applications.  The bugs reach back until mid-November 2007 (CC date for
> arches).
>  For the sake of fairness I took 15 bugs in a row from 170000 and
> greater.  Where mips lagging behind in 4 packages (from April 2007,
> 1 X application), 2 packages where mips has been dropped completely
> (MySQL 5 e.g.).
> 
> V-Li
> 

Also let's see the CIA activity of the MIPS team for last month:
kumba: 3 commits
cristel: 0 commits
iluxa: 0 commits
peitolm: 1 commit
psi29: 0 commits
rbrown: 26 commits (None of the commits listed on the page reference mips)
redhatter: 6 commits (Finally some commits mentioning mips)
spb: 1 commit

 From this I would say the mips team is pretty much inactive.

Regards,
Petteri



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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Matthias Langer]

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On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 23:35 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:09:24 +0100
> Matthias Langer <mlangc@gmx.at> wrote:
> > This kind of conversation is not technical at all... Ciaranm, are you
> > a MIPS user? If so, do you think that running KEYWORDS="mips" is less
> > likely to result in breakage than running KEYWORDS="~mips"?
> 
> I think you'd need a much larger sample than one to get any meaningful
> answer there (and it might be worth doing it across all other archs
> too, to find out whether mips is in any way anomalous).

Right, but if everyone I ask gives me an answer like this, it will take
quite a while before we have even two opinions...

As you are engaged in this discussion very heavily, I thought that maybe
you are a occasional MIPS user, that could point out, that for example
removing stable keywords for all MIPS packages, would have a quite
negative impact for most MIPS boxes.

The thing that really bothers me about this discussion is, that there
seems to be almost no input from the people actually affected (users and
developers), which makes the whole thing a bit pointless, unless it
turns out that exactly this is the problem, in which case MIPS support
may be removed entirely without doing any harm.



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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Petteri Räty]

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Ciaran McCreesh kirjoitti:
> On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:52:49 -0600
> Martin Jackson <mjolnir@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> That's making the assumption that anyone looked at it, of course.
>> Please note comment #9 on
>> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198346.  It was still ~8 days
>> from then that the setuptools keyword was added.
>>
>> So, we have examples of impact due to delay in keywords/etc.  Shall
>> we proceed with the discussion of what to do about it?
> 
> http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/vulnerability-policy.xml
> 
> The target for that GLSA was 20 days. 8 days is well within target.
> What are you moaning about?
> 

Well sqlite has been security vulrenable for two months now 
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194812

Here is the comment from security for remaining arch teams to speed 
things up:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194812#c8

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 04:32 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:20:18 -0800
> Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > No offense to anyone, but holding back hundreds of developers and
> > thousands of users for a handful of developers
> 
> ...and how exactly are hundreds of developers and thousands of users
> being held back? So far as I can see, in cases where anyone really is
> being held back, the arch teams are quite happy to prioritise -- the
> people who go around moaning about 'slacker archs' rarely if ever
> actually have anything holding them back.
> 
> If anyone has any examples of where they really are being held back and
> where they really have given the arch teams plenty of time to do
> something, I'd like to see them... Somehow I doubt it happens very
> often, if at all.

It happened several times during the 2007.1 release cycle.  Of course, I
don't feel like wasting my time searching bugs to justify myself to you,
so if you're interested, feel free to search on your own.  Pretending it
doesn't happen doesn't make it go away.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 11:36 -0600, Ryan Hill wrote:
> that has both sides happy here, but that won't happen if you don't admit 
> there's a problem.

He doesn't have to admit anything.  He is neither an ebuild maintainer
nor an arch team developer.  Basically, his opinion is useless in this
case, as *his* work flow is not affected.  As such, I think we can
simply just ignore him.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 23:34 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Ok, so explain:
> 
> * How perpetually open bugs are a maintenance burden. They don't
> generate emails and they don't require any work on the maintainer's
> part. Is the mere fact that they show up in queries all you're
> concerned about, and if so, have you considered either adapting your
> queries or requesting a special keyword to make such bugs easier to
> filter?

I have foo 1.0, which is mips.  There is foo 2.0, which is stable
everywhere else.  The foo 1.0 ebuild does not conform to current ebuild
standards.  I want to commit changes to foo 2.0, and repoman won't allow
me due to problems in foo 1.0, but I don't want to WASTE MY TIME on foo
1.0, because it's been EOL for 2 years and I've had an open bug for mips
to test the newer version for 2 years.  I've asked several mips team
developers, who all give me the same "we don't have enough
manpower/horsepower to test that right now" excuse.

> * How unmaintained ebuilds are a maintenance burden. Doesn't that
> contradict itself?

When repoman keeps me from being able to commit due to an ebuild that
remains in the tree only for an architecture hardly anyone uses or cares
about, that affects me.

Now, I know that you're just being your usual self-absorbed
argumentative self and I likely shouldn't feed you, but I thought that
answering this might clear it up for the people who don't understand
this as well as you do.

This is especially true since you've been pretty much the main proponent
for keeping things as they are with these slack arches.  I mean, if
vapier can maintain arm/sh/s390, by himself, to a better degree than the
mips *TEAM* can do, that should be an indication of a problem.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 23:35 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:09:24 +0100
> Matthias Langer <mlangc@gmx.at> wrote:
> > This kind of conversation is not technical at all... Ciaranm, are you
> > a MIPS user? If so, do you think that running KEYWORDS="mips" is less
> > likely to result in breakage than running KEYWORDS="~mips"?
> 
> I think you'd need a much larger sample than one to get any meaningful
> answer there (and it might be worth doing it across all other archs
> too, to find out whether mips is in any way anomalous).

Are there even enough users to get a larger sample?  Other than the like
3 devs still working on mips, I thought you were the only actual user.
I mean, I've watched things in "system" get broken on mips and nobody
even notices for several weeks.  There simply can't be that many people
who actually care if nobody even notices when *system* breaks.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:04:49 -0800
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I have foo 1.0, which is mips.  There is foo 2.0, which is stable
> everywhere else.  The foo 1.0 ebuild does not conform to current
> ebuild standards.  I want to commit changes to foo 2.0, and repoman
> won't allow me due to problems in foo 1.0, but I don't want to WASTE
> MY TIME on foo 1.0, because it's been EOL for 2 years and I've had an
> open bug for mips to test the newer version for 2 years.  I've asked
> several mips team developers, who all give me the same "we don't have
> enough manpower/horsepower to test that right now" excuse.

You know what by far the largest cause of repoman not allowing you to
commit because of older versions is? Developers screwing up keywords
because they don't care about certain archs. Things don't mysteriously
break on their own...

> > * How unmaintained ebuilds are a maintenance burden. Doesn't that
> > contradict itself?
> 
> When repoman keeps me from being able to commit due to an ebuild that
> remains in the tree only for an architecture hardly anyone uses or
> cares about, that affects me.

And why does repoman do that?

Oh. Yeah. Because people with an attitude like yours think that the
correct way to fix a repoman message is to start nuking arch keywords,
ignoring what it does to the rest of the tree.

> This is especially true since you've been pretty much the main
> proponent for keeping things as they are with these slack arches.

Perhaps because the people maintaining those archs have better things
to do that deal with the same silly ill-thought-out arguments every
three months.

> I mean, if vapier can maintain arm/sh/s390, by himself, to a better
> degree than the mips *TEAM* can do, that should be an indication of a
> problem.

That's an interesting assertion. Can you back it up?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 02:17 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Oh. Yeah. Because people with an attitude like yours think that the
> correct way to fix a repoman message is to start nuking arch keywords,
> ignoring what it does to the rest of the tree.

...for the architecture in question which is proving incapable of
keeping up with the state of the tree as it is...

Sorry, you fail.

> 
> > This is especially true since you've been pretty much the main
> > proponent for keeping things as they are with these slack arches.
> 
> Perhaps because the people maintaining those archs have better things
> to do that deal with the same silly ill-thought-out arguments every
> three months.
> 
> > I mean, if vapier can maintain arm/sh/s390, by himself, to a better
> > degree than the mips *TEAM* can do, that should be an indication of a
> > problem.
> 
> That's an interesting assertion. Can you back it up?

Sure.  You can, too.  Just look at bugs.  If you think I'm taking the
time to do it to justify my statements to YOU, you're sorely mistaken.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:38:07 -0800
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 02:17 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > Oh. Yeah. Because people with an attitude like yours think that the
> > correct way to fix a repoman message is to start nuking arch
> > keywords, ignoring what it does to the rest of the tree.
> 
> ...for the architecture in question which is proving incapable of
> keeping up with the state of the tree as it is...
> 
> Sorry, you fail.

Uh... So where do the original problems come from? Are you saying that
packages mysteriously start breaking on their own because no-one's
maintaining them?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Alec Warner]

On 1/8/08, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:38:07 -0800
> Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 02:17 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > > Oh. Yeah. Because people with an attitude like yours think that the
> > > correct way to fix a repoman message is to start nuking arch
> > > keywords, ignoring what it does to the rest of the tree.
> >
> > ...for the architecture in question which is proving incapable of
> > keeping up with the state of the tree as it is...
> >
> > Sorry, you fail.
>
> Uh... So where do the original problems come from? Are you saying that
> packages mysteriously start breaking on their own because no-one's
> maintaining them?

Of course they do
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 18:44:22 -0800
"Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Uh... So where do the original problems come from? Are you saying
> > that packages mysteriously start breaking on their own because
> > no-one's maintaining them?
> 
> Of course they do

Ah, right. Because of the magical elf that lives in the CVS server
that mysteriously goes around breaking dependencies when no-one's
looking.

Yes, a magical elf. Much more plausible than the theory that it's
actually developers screwing up by dropping keywords or best keyworded
version on a package's deps.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ryan Hill]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> "Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:

>>> Uh... So where do the original problems come from? Are you saying
>>> that packages mysteriously start breaking on their own because
>>> no-one's maintaining them?

>> Of course they do

> Ah, right. Because of the magical elf that lives in the CVS server
> that mysteriously goes around breaking dependencies when no-one's
> looking.

Hey, maybe he's the one behind the maintainer-needed bugs we keep 
getting too!  You know, the 250-odd bugs and growing that we have open 
right now on packages that no-one's maintaining.  Fucking elf!


-- 
fonts,                                            by design, by neglect
gcc-porting,                              for a fact or just for effect
wxwindows @ gentoo     EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662

-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 02:47 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 18:44:22 -0800
> "Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > > Uh... So where do the original problems come from? Are you saying
> > > that packages mysteriously start breaking on their own because
> > > no-one's maintaining them?
> > 
> > Of course they do
> 
> Ah, right. Because of the magical elf that lives in the CVS server
> that mysteriously goes around breaking dependencies when no-one's
> looking.
> 
> Yes, a magical elf. Much more plausible than the theory that it's
> actually developers screwing up by dropping keywords or best keyworded
> version on a package's deps.

Actually, nobody ever said anything about things that magically break.
It's more the things like ebuilds with bad code that can't really be
changed without a revision bump, which would also require the arch team
in question to ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING to make stable.

Seriously, your thinly-veiled attempts at deflecting the conversation to
something that supports your pithy points is laughable.

The issue that was raised is that certain arch teams are incapable of
keeping up with the minimal workload they already have and what should
be done about it.  We want the Council to do something about this issue.
You can deny the issue all that you want or try to deflect conversation
from the actual issue, but your opinion isn't very important to the much
of the current developer pool, seeing as how it doesn't affect you in
any way, having been thrown from the project, and all.

Now, if you have something possibly constructive to add to this
conversation, as a user, feel free, but don't pretend like you're still
a member of the mips team.  You're not.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Matthias Langer]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 02:47 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 18:44:22 -0800
> "Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > > Uh... So where do the original problems come from? Are you saying
> > > that packages mysteriously start breaking on their own because
> > > no-one's maintaining them?
> > 
> > Of course they do
> 
> Ah, right. Because of the magical elf that lives in the CVS server
> that mysteriously goes around breaking dependencies when no-one's
> looking.
> 
> Yes, a magical elf. Much more plausible than the theory that it's
> actually developers screwing up by dropping keywords or best keyworded
> version on a package's deps.

Software that is not maintained is known to fail after some time; not
because the software changes, but the environment the software has to
interact with - but i guess you know that very well.

Really, this discussion is completely pointless unless some mips
users/developers join in - or aren't there any at all?

Matthias

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Fernando J. Pereda]

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On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 08:02:39AM -0500, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> > If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> > vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> > Gentoo dev list to see.
> 
> I would like to request the council discuss, though not necessarily take action or
> vote on, the idea of "slacker arches" and what ebuild maintainers are allowed/can do
> to a package versions that are languishing due to not getting stable keywords on
> those arches.
> 
> I'm not trying to pick on any specific case, but I am hoping to find out if there's
> an allowable/acceptable period of time to which if an arch team is unable to
> stabilize a package to a newer version, for non-technical reasons, that it's okay to
> drop older unstable ebuilds.

Why taking it against arch teams? How is that different from "certain
maintainer not taking care of a bug that holds stabilization of certain
package by some time measured in months" ? I'll tell you my answer: 'no
difference at all'.

Note that I'm probably responsible for some real situations related to
what I said both as an ebuild maintainer and as an arch developer. So
nobody should take this as slacker-calling since we are all VOLUNTEERS
and we do what we want. However, a fine example of that is:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181275

- ferdy

-- 
Fernando J. Pereda Garcimartín
20BB BDC3 761A 4781 E6ED  ED0B 0A48 5B0C 60BD 28D4

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Caleb Tennis]

> Why taking it against arch teams? How is that different from "certain
> maintainer not taking care of a bug that holds stabilization of certain
> package by some time measured in months" ? I'll tell you my answer: 'no
> difference at all'.

You are right, there's not much difference.  However, I brought up the topic because
I felt like this particular situation was a bit of a problem that needed to be
addressed.  Yours is also one that can/should potentially be addressed, and I advise
you to recommend the council discuss it as well.

My goal wasn't to point fingers or to call anyone lazy.  My goal was to address that
if development in this certain area has stagnated, how can those of us who it
affects continue to move forward?  This is simply an area that is "gray" and needs
to be discussed.  There are many other gray areas that need to be discussed too.

I understand we all have real lives and are volunteers.  But if there are areas that
we are responsible for and we aren't able to meet the needs/demands of the other
developers in those areas, it's only fair to let them continue moving forward.

I never even mentioned any specific arch in my original request, nor did I call any
developer out.  So please, nobody needs to take this personally.

Caleb

-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Christian Faulhammer]

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Hi,

Christian Faulhammer <opfer@gentoo.org>:
>  A quick check [...]

 Hereby you have proven that you are not interested about
real arguments...some people have tried to gather facts and you pick
those that maybe have a weak reasoning or come from people you know how
to upset.  Congratulations.

V-Li

-- 
Christian Faulhammer, Gentoo Lisp project
<URL:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode

<URL:http://www.faulhammer.org/>

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 15:37:47 +0100
Christian Faulhammer <opfer@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Christian Faulhammer <opfer@gentoo.org>:
> >  A quick check [...]
> 
>  Hereby you have proven that you are not interested about
> real arguments...some people have tried to gather facts and you pick
> those that maybe have a weak reasoning or come from people you know
> how to upset.  Congratulations.

Actually, I've taken to ignoring people who're just outright wrong.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:59:29 -0800
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> The issue that was raised is that certain arch teams are incapable of
> keeping up with the minimal workload they already have and what should
> be done about it.

The issue was raised, with absolutely no proof or justification, and
every previous time said issue has been raised it's turned out to be
somewhere between highly misleading and utter bollocks.

> We want the Council to do something about this issue. You can deny
> the issue all that you want or try to deflect conversation from the
> actual issue, but your opinion isn't very important to the much of
> the current developer pool, seeing as how it doesn't affect you in
> any way, having been thrown from the project, and all.

Ah, so now what matters is who says something, not whether or not it's
true.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:11:58 +0100
Matthias Langer <mlangc@gmx.at> wrote:
> Really, this discussion is completely pointless unless some mips
> users/developers join in - or aren't there any at all?

I'd imagine most of them are staying well clear of it because they've
already seen this discussion a dozen times before and know that it's
just the usual malcontents going around making largely bogus claims and
backing them up with lots of thinly veiled mips bashing rather than
anything relevant...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Alec Warner]

On 1/8/08, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 18:44:22 -0800
> "Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > > Uh... So where do the original problems come from? Are you saying
> > > that packages mysteriously start breaking on their own because
> > > no-one's maintaining them?
> >
> > Of course they do
>
> Ah, right. Because of the magical elf that lives in the CVS server
> that mysteriously goes around breaking dependencies when no-one's
> looking.
>
> Yes, a magical elf. Much more plausible than the theory that it's
> actually developers screwing up by dropping keywords or best keyworded
> version on a package's deps.

I was going to go with 'the stable glibc changed' or 'some lib this
software depended on was updated to a new version' or any other action
that could cause software to not work as intended.

I'm not trying to make the argument that developers don't screw up.
Certainly mr_bones can attest that they do it on a daily basis.

I think the argument here is that developers control ebuilds.  If a
given ebuild is causing 'trouble' for a maintainer it is within their
control to remove the ebuild.  Just as if a given package is causing
the maintainer grief it can be deleted from the tree, so can keywords
for a given arch be removed for a given ebuild (and possibly that
ebuild removed because it is known to be old and buggy.)

If the arch team wants that ebuild in the tree they should do some
work to keep a given package up to date in terms of other arches or we
should define some sort of metadata that notifies people that the arch
team is the 'maintainer' for a given version of a package.

I agree that you should not break the arch's tree by removing a given
package (or it's last stable ebuild).
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 06:58:40 -0800
"Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I think the argument here is that developers control ebuilds.  If a
> given ebuild is causing 'trouble' for a maintainer it is within their
> control to remove the ebuild.  Just as if a given package is causing
> the maintainer grief it can be deleted from the tree, so can keywords
> for a given arch be removed for a given ebuild (and possibly that
> ebuild removed because it is known to be old and buggy.)
> 
> If the arch team wants that ebuild in the tree they should do some
> work to keep a given package up to date in terms of other arches or we
> should define some sort of metadata that notifies people that the arch
> team is the 'maintainer' for a given version of a package.

The problem is this: the impact upon an arch of dekeywording something
is almost always far higher than the impact of leaving things the way
they are. And even if, like some people here, you don't care about the
arch, the impact upon the rest of the tree when you dekeyword is often
massive. If, for example, an arch were to have their last stable
keyword of something like gtk+ removed by a developer who did it in
order to 'fix' a repoman message, a very large number of other
developers would then end up with a far bigger repoman mess.

Heck, most of the repoman messages people are moaning about are caused
by developers doing exactly this.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Fernando J. Pereda]

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On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 09:25:11AM -0500, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> > Why taking it against arch teams? How is that different from
> > "certain maintainer not taking care of a bug that holds
> > stabilization of certain package by some time measured in months" ?
> > I'll tell you my answer: 'no difference at all'.
>
> You are right, there's not much difference.  However, I brought up the
> topic because I felt like this particular situation was a bit of a
> problem that needed to be addressed.  Yours is also one that
> can/should potentially be addressed, and I advise you to recommend the
> council discuss it as well.

Well, while discussing what you brought up, they should _also_ consider
what I said as part of the same (so-called) problem.

> My goal wasn't to point fingers or to call anyone lazy.  My goal was
> to address that if development in this certain area has stagnated, how
> can those of us who it affects continue to move forward?  This is
> simply an area that is "gray" and needs to be discussed.  There are
> many other gray areas that need to be discussed too.
>
> I understand we all have real lives and are volunteers.  But if there
> are areas that we are responsible for and we aren't able to meet the
> needs/demands of the other developers in those areas, it's only fair
> to let them continue moving forward.
>
> I never even mentioned any specific arch in my original request, nor
> did I call any developer out.  So please, nobody needs to take this
> personally.

I didn't take it personally myself, honestly, I couldn't care less.

Wonder why there is almost no non-mainstream arch team people
contributing to this thread?

- ferdy

-- 
Fernando J. Pereda Garcimartín
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Caleb Tennis]

> I'd imagine most of them are staying well clear of it because they've
> already seen this discussion a dozen times before and know that it's
> just the usual malcontents going around making largely bogus claims and
> backing them up with lots of thinly veiled mips bashing rather than
> anything relevant...

Your demand for evidence in this thread doesn't seem balanced with your ability to
only offer speculation.

-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Caleb Tennis]

> The issue was raised, with absolutely no proof or justification, and
> every previous time said issue has been raised it's turned out to be
> somewhere between highly misleading and utter bollocks.

Let's assume that you are right, and that dropping keywords is not a proper thing to
do.

What's the proper fix for when keyword requests stagnate in bugzilla?  If the arch
team in question was to completely disband and stop all keywording today, then
you're suggesting the proper thing to do is to never remove the ebuild from portage
that has keywords for that arch?

And thus, the current system of filing a stabilization request and waiting
indefinitely is sufficient?

-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 10:36:13 -0500 (EST)
"Caleb Tennis" <caleb@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > The issue was raised, with absolutely no proof or justification, and
> > every previous time said issue has been raised it's turned out to be
> > somewhere between highly misleading and utter bollocks.
> 
> Let's assume that you are right, and that dropping keywords is not a
> proper thing to do.
> 
> What's the proper fix for when keyword requests stagnate in
> bugzilla?

That depends upon whether the keyword request is important. If it isn't,
you wait for the arch team to get around to it. If it is (and
legitimately so -- we're not talking spurious "I want to remove this
old version that doesn't affect anything, that works fine and isn't
causing any problems beyond it existing" here), you ask the arch team to
prioritise it, explaining why.

> If the arch team in question was to completely disband and
> stop all keywording today, then you're suggesting the proper thing to
> do is to never remove the ebuild from portage that has keywords for
> that arch?

If that ever comes remotely close to happening then the issue can be
raised when it does. You might as well ask what would happen if
suddenly all the KDE maintainers disappeared.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Wulf C. Krueger]

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Hello Ciaran!

>> What's the proper fix for when keyword requests stagnate in
>> bugzilla?
> That depends upon whether the keyword request is important.

Let's take a real world example: KDE 3.5.5 is old, buggy and has some  
important issues which won't be fixed anymore.

At first, this wasn't too important, so we did what you suggested:

> If it isn't, you wait for the arch team to get around to it.

Nothing happened for months.

> If it is (and legitimately so

I hope you'll accept it when I say that 3.5.5 is such a legitimate case now.

> you ask the arch team to prioritise it, explaining why.

We did this. We asked on Bugzilla, by mail, I explained it in  
#gentoo-mips and in /queries. Nothing happened for months.

What would you suggest to do now? I think we've done all we could  
short of the following:

a) Drop all keywords but those of mips. Leaves mips and, more  
importantly, its users with a vulnerable and unmaintained set of  
packages.

b) package.mask 3.5.5 with a big, fat warning and let the users  
decide. Same drawbacks as a).

c) Drop 3.5.5 from the tree. The cleanest but most radical solution.  
If mips' users want KDE, they would have to bug (sic!) the mips team.

The solution I favour by far is c). What's your suggestion or did I  
miss any other viable solution? Just doing nothing is not an option  
here, I'd say, but state your case.

Best regards, Wulf

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:49:40 +0100
"Wulf C. Krueger" <philantrop@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> What's the proper fix for when keyword requests stagnate in
> >> bugzilla?
> > That depends upon whether the keyword request is important.
> 
> Let's take a real world example: KDE 3.5.5 is old, buggy and has
> some important issues which won't be fixed anymore.

Yet it's the most proven version on mips.

> > If it is (and legitimately so
> 
> I hope you'll accept it when I say that 3.5.5 is such a legitimate
> case now.

Why? It was good enough to be keyworded stable at one point.

> What would you suggest to do now? I think we've done all we could  
> short of the following:
> 
> a) Drop all keywords but those of mips. Leaves mips and, more  
> importantly, its users with a vulnerable and unmaintained set of  
> packages.

...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
they try to do anything.

> b) package.mask 3.5.5 with a big, fat warning and let the users  
> decide. Same drawbacks as a).

...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
they try to do anything.

> c) Drop 3.5.5 from the tree. The cleanest but most radical solution.  
> If mips' users want KDE, they would have to bug (sic!) the mips team.

...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
they try to do anything.

> The solution I favour by far is c). What's your suggestion or did I  
> miss any other viable solution? Just doing nothing is not an option  
> here, I'd say, but state your case.

3.5.5 was good enough to be keyworded stable at one point. Thus, it
can't be *that* bad.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Richard Freeman]

I wanted to take this thread in a slightly different direction so that 
the council has a little more to work with tomorrow.  Obviously there 
are multiple opinions on whether a problem currently exists - and the 
council will need to decide on this.  If no problem currently exists 
they will likely take no action.  However, if a problem does exist, what 
would be a reasonable solution?

Here's a proposal.  Maybe not a great one - feel free to come up with 
others (other than just do nothing - if we are going to do nothing we 
don't need to work out what that will be).  I think it gives arch teams 
a fair amount of time to keep up with stable requests, but also allows 
package maintainers to eventually get rid of cruft.  The exact 
timeframes are of course the easiest and most obvious things to modify.

My hope is that this will give everybody something to think about so 
that if a decision to enact policy is made tomorrow the policy is a good 
one...


Ebuild Stabilization Time

Arch teams will normally have until the LATER of the following two dates 
to stabilize ebuilds for non-security-related issues:
1.  60 days from the day the last substantial change was made to the 
ebuild (clock resets if a non-trivial change is made to the ebuild). 
That's 30 days to allow the package to be proven stable, and 30 days to 
do something about it.
2.  30 days from the day a bug was filed and keyworded STABLEREQ and the 
arch was CCed and the maintainer either filed the bug or commented that 
it was OK to stabilize (clock starts when all of these conditions are met).

Perhaps the guideline should be one week on both time periods for 
security bugs.


Technical Problems With Ebuild Revisions

If an arch team finds a technical problem with an ebuild preventing 
stabilization a bug will be logged as a blocker for the stable keyword 
request.  The bug being resolved counts as a substantial change for the 
purpose of #1 above.


Removing Stable Ebuilds.

If an ebuild meets the time criteria above and there are no technical 
issues preventing stabilization, then the maintainer MAY choose to 
delete an older version even if it is the most recent stable version for 
a particular arch.

If an ebuild meets the time criteria and there IS a technical problem 
preventing stabilization, but the package is subject to security issues, 
the maintainer MAY choose to mask the vulnerable versions in package.mask.

If an ebuild does not meet the time criteria or there is a technical 
problem preventing stabilization and there isn't an outstanding security 
issue, then the maintainer must not remove the highest-versioned stable 
ebuild for any given arch.


Spirit of Cooperation

Ebuild maintainers and arch teams are encouraged to work together for 
the sake of each other and end users in facilitating the testing and 
maintenance of ebuilds on obscure hardware or where obscure expertise is 
needed.  Package maintainers are encouraged to use discretion when 
removing ebuilds in accordance with this policy.
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Fernando J. Pereda]

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On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 12:11:47PM -0500, Richard Freeman wrote:
> snip

Simply put: No, thank you.

- ferdy

-- 
Fernando J. Pereda Garcimartín
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:11:47 -0500
Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> If an ebuild meets the time criteria above and there are no technical 
> issues preventing stabilization, then the maintainer MAY choose to 
> delete an older version even if it is the most recent stable version
> for a particular arch.

...and as soon as they do, everyone gets hit by pages and pages of
repoman output, and users get royally humped. Developers doing this
is by far the most common cause for people getting hit by the repoman
thing.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Wulf C. Krueger]

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Hello Ciaran!

(On a totally unrelated side-note - how do you pronounce your name?)

>> Let's take a real world example: KDE 3.5.5 is old, buggy and has
>> some important issues which won't be fixed anymore.
> Yet it's the most proven version on mips.

Yes.

> ...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
> your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
> they try to do anything.

Yes, all three solutions would have disadvantages for some, indeed.

>> The solution I favour by far is c). What's your suggestion [...]

Unfortunately, you didn't explicitly answer this so I gather you're in  
favour of just keeping 3.5.5 around?

> 3.5.5 was good enough to be keyworded stable at one point. Thus, it
> can't be *that* bad.

Yes, because at that time, many of those issues, some of which are  
security ones, simply weren't known at that point. Security issues  
tend not to be known from the start (or they wouldn't exist at all :-)  
) but can turn up at any later time. This is the case for KDE 3.5.5.

-- 
Best regards, Wulf "grateful for an answer, remembering you declared  
to completely ignore morons ;-)" Krüger

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Roy Marples]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 17:01 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> 3.5.5 was good enough to be keyworded stable at one point. Thus, it
> can't be *that* bad.

So what happens if a flaw is discovered in KDE 3.5.5 that allows root
access?

In your world you allow mips users to trivially install now flawed and
insecure software, instead of having to add
to /etc/portage/package.keywords or package.unmask

Yes, this breaks their tree, but it's fixable from the users end as we
can rest in the knowledge that mips users have acknowledged the security
flaw by adding the package to the above mentioned files.

Thanks

Roy

-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Jan Kundrát]

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Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> I have foo 1.0, which is mips.  There is foo 2.0, which is stable
> everywhere else.  The foo 1.0 ebuild does not conform to current ebuild
> standards.  I want to commit changes to foo 2.0, and repoman won't allow
> me due to problems in foo 1.0, but I don't want to WASTE MY TIME on foo
> 1.0, because it's been EOL for 2 years

Why don't fix repoman not to scream about such issues, then?

Cheers,
-jkt

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Alec Warner]

On 1/9/08, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:49:40 +0100
> "Wulf C. Krueger" <philantrop@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > >> What's the proper fix for when keyword requests stagnate in
> > >> bugzilla?
> > > That depends upon whether the keyword request is important.
> >
> > Let's take a real world example: KDE 3.5.5 is old, buggy and has
> > some important issues which won't be fixed anymore.
>
> Yet it's the most proven version on mips.
>
> > > If it is (and legitimately so
> >
> > I hope you'll accept it when I say that 3.5.5 is such a legitimate
> > case now.
>
> Why? It was good enough to be keyworded stable at one point.
>
> > What would you suggest to do now? I think we've done all we could
> > short of the following:
> >
> > a) Drop all keywords but those of mips. Leaves mips and, more
> > importantly, its users with a vulnerable and unmaintained set of
> > packages.
>
> ...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
> your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
> they try to do anything.
>
> > b) package.mask 3.5.5 with a big, fat warning and let the users
> > decide. Same drawbacks as a).
>
> ...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
> your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
> they try to do anything.
>
> > c) Drop 3.5.5 from the tree. The cleanest but most radical solution.
> > If mips' users want KDE, they would have to bug (sic!) the mips team.
>
> ...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
> your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
> they try to do anything.

Actually if they dump kde-3.5.5 and anything depending on it, then
they don't break the tree and everyone is happy, no?
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 10:07:31 -0800
"Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Actually if they dump kde-3.5.5 and anything depending on it, then
> they don't break the tree and everyone is happy, no?

Everyone except the users, who end up with pages and pages of horrible
Portage output...

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:27:52 +0000
Roy Marples <roy@marples.name> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 17:01 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > 3.5.5 was good enough to be keyworded stable at one point. Thus, it
> > can't be *that* bad.
> 
> So what happens if a flaw is discovered in KDE 3.5.5 that allows root
> access?

Then the one particular part of 3.5.5 that's affected gets fixed and
priority keyworded.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Wulf C. Krueger]

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On Wednesday, 09. January 2008 19:16:24 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > So what happens if a flaw is discovered in KDE 3.5.5 that allows root
> > access?
> Then the one particular part of 3.5.5 that's affected gets fixed and
> priority keyworded.

So you suggest that mips keeps doing nothing and expect others to work 
*more* in exchange for that?

-- 
Best regards, Wulf

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 19:29:53 +0100
"Wulf C. Krueger" <philantrop@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 09. January 2008 19:16:24 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > > So what happens if a flaw is discovered in KDE 3.5.5 that allows
> > > root access?
> > Then the one particular part of 3.5.5 that's affected gets fixed and
> > priority keyworded.
> 
> So you suggest that mips keeps doing nothing and expect others to
> work *more* in exchange for that?

Well, most users will simply ignore or postpone the mass upgrade, so
yes. Forcing a mass upgrade is rarely if ever the correct solution to
any security issue.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Petteri Räty]

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Ciaran McCreesh kirjoitti:
> On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:59:29 -0800
> Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> The issue that was raised is that certain arch teams are incapable of
>> keeping up with the minimal workload they already have and what should
>> be done about it.
> 
> The issue was raised, with absolutely no proof or justification, and
> every previous time said issue has been raised it's turned out to be
> somewhere between highly misleading and utter bollocks.
> 

So you just ignore for example my post about CIA activity for the mips team?

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:50:38 +0200
Petteri Räty <betelgeuse@gentoo.org> wrote:
> So you just ignore for example my post about CIA activity for the
> mips team?

That falls into the highly misleading category.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Wulf C. Krueger]

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On Wednesday, 09. January 2008 19:45:38 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > > Then the one particular part of 3.5.5 that's affected gets fixed
> > > and priority keyworded.
> > So you suggest that mips keeps doing nothing and expect others to
> > work *more* in exchange for that?
> Well, most users will simply ignore or postpone the mass upgrade, 

So far so good. If users postpone it, that's entirely their 
responsibility.

> so yes. 

That's not so good, though, and where we really disagree. Thanks for the 
straight answer, though. 

In my book, it's not acceptable to not do one's job properly and by that  
force others to do more. You basically told me the same when I suggested 
likewise measures against mips. :-)

The only difference being that we supported KDE 3.5.5 for a long time and 
gave mips months to get up to speed again.

> Forcing a mass upgrade is rarely if ever the correct solution to 
> any security issue.

I absolutely agree. This, IMO, is such a case, though.

-- 
Best regards, Wulf

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 20:06:00 +0100
"Wulf C. Krueger" <philantrop@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 09. January 2008 19:45:38 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > > > Then the one particular part of 3.5.5 that's affected gets fixed
> > > > and priority keyworded.
> > > So you suggest that mips keeps doing nothing and expect others to
> > > work *more* in exchange for that?
> > Well, most users will simply ignore or postpone the mass upgrade, 
> 
> So far so good. If users postpone it, that's entirely their 
> responsibility.

It's all very well to say that, but which do you care about? Covering
your ass and claiming that you have a secure distribution, or the
security of end user systems?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Roy Marples]

On Wednesday 09 January 2008 18:16:24 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:27:52 +0000
>
> Roy Marples <roy@marples.name> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 17:01 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > > 3.5.5 was good enough to be keyworded stable at one point. Thus, it
> > > can't be *that* bad.
> >
> > So what happens if a flaw is discovered in KDE 3.5.5 that allows root
> > access?
>
> Then the one particular part of 3.5.5 that's affected gets fixed and
> priority keyworded.

Lets say that there's just 3.5.5 and 3.5.8 in the tree.
3.5.5 is keyworded stable mips
3.5.8 doesn't have the mips keyword because it's horribly broken on mips

A security flaw is discovered in 3.5.5, the solution is to upgrade to 3.5.8.
This flaw involves code that has radically changed from 3.5.5 to 3.5.8. For 
the sake of argument say it will take 1 month of time for anyone to create a 
patch for 3.5.5 that fixes the flaw OR makes 3.5.8 magically work on mips.

During this month, what do you propose happens to the end user?

The choices are
1) Carry on as we are, user is blissfully unaware of security flaw and doesn't 
have time to read GLSA's, etc has he's busy with real life thereby giving 
Gentoo the reputation of shipping insecure software.
2) Force the user to spend a few minutes adding 3.5.5 to a package.unmask, 
thereby acknowledging the security flaw but by his own choice keeping the 
highly insecure software.

Thanks

Roy
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Vlastimil Babka]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>> a) Drop all keywords but those of mips. Leaves mips and, more  
>> importantly, its users with a vulnerable and unmaintained set of  
>> packages.
> 
> ...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
> your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
> they try to do anything.

Can somebody clarify to me why would it cause this? Maybe I just miss 
something.

VB
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Pierre-Yves Rofes]

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Ciaran McCreesh a écrit :
> On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 20:06:00 +0100
> "Wulf C. Krueger" <philantrop@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 09. January 2008 19:45:38 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>>>>> Then the one particular part of 3.5.5 that's affected gets fixed
>>>>> and priority keyworded.
>>>> So you suggest that mips keeps doing nothing and expect others to
>>>> work *more* in exchange for that?
>>> Well, most users will simply ignore or postpone the mass upgrade, 
>> So far so good. If users postpone it, that's entirely their 
>> responsibility.
> 
> It's all very well to say that, but which do you care about? Covering
> your ass and claiming that you have a secure distribution, or the
> security of end user systems?
> 

And what's the point in caring about the security of users systems, when
some of them don't care themselves in the first place? Remember, Gentoo
is all about choices. If users choose to skip security updates, it's up
to them and there's nothing you can do to change it. When their boxes
get rooted due to unpatched vulnerabilities, maybe they'll change their
mind. Ok, I admit that a few dumbasses will claim that Gentoo sucks and
switch to another distro instead, but hey, that's just the way it is.

- --
Pierre-Yves Rofes
Gentoo Linux Security Team
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 09:25 -0500, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> I never even mentioned any specific arch in my original request, nor
> did I call any developer out.  So please, nobody needs to take this
> personally.

Correct, you did not.  What I find absolutely *damning* is the fact that
as soon as any arches *were* mentioned, everybody was talking about the
same one.  It's rather funny that everybody seems to have the exact same
impression of what architecture might be a slacker and would be affected
by this.  I wonder why that is?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 14:44 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > We want the Council to do something about this issue. You can deny
> > the issue all that you want or try to deflect conversation from the
> > actual issue, but your opinion isn't very important to the much of
> > the current developer pool, seeing as how it doesn't affect you in
> > any way, having been thrown from the project, and all.
> 
> Ah, so now what matters is who says something, not whether or not it's
> true.

Well, when a non-developer who was thrown out of the project because his
attitude and approach was unwanted points out something and makes
statements as if he actually were still involved in the process of
maintaining packages or working on an architecture team and is unable to
get others to agree with him and insists that there isn't a problem but
is unable to back it up, then yes, it definitely does matter.  I'm just
making sure that people are aware of the situation, as you like to
portray yourself as important to the Gentoo project, when the project
has deemed you as not important and forcibly removed you.  Thanks for
playing, but you fail.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Luca Barbato]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> And why does repoman do that?
> 
> Oh. Yeah. Because people with an attitude like yours think that the
> correct way to fix a repoman message is to start nuking arch keywords,
> ignoring what it does to the rest of the tree.

Dropping keywords works perfectly to have repoman quit complaining, you
just have to do a recursive dropping on the rdeps of this package.

> Perhaps because the people maintaining those archs have better things
> to do that deal with the same silly ill-thought-out arguments every
> three months.

cia/cvs commits ml says something different, gentoo wise at least.

>> I mean, if vapier can maintain arm/sh/s390, by himself, to a better
>> degree than the mips *TEAM* can do, that should be an indication of a
>> problem.
> 
> That's an interesting assertion. Can you back it up?

Feel free to run imlate scripts and come up with some numbers.

Note that I hate whining and I love get solutions.

MOST of the packages runs fine if they build fine, MOST of the
endian-issues or the 64bit-issues got caught by ppc and amd64 and there
aren't that many right now. Ugly arch specific codepath could be
present, but, as I said, usually you catch those breaking on gcc. So
having some way to test if the package builds (cross toolchain) and if
the package at least runs (qemu) IS something that should let small
arches with large tree coverage improve a bit. Otherwise you can just
reduce the tree coverage.

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero

-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 15:11 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Heck, most of the repoman messages people are moaning about are caused
> by developers doing exactly this.

No, most of the ones we're complaining about have nothing to do with
KEYWORDS, at all, and everything to do with changes to policy and such
that have been enacted since the ebuild was last touched.  See, repoman
doesn't care if you're just making a KEYWORD change or if you're making
coding changes to an ebuild.  It still will fail if something fails a QA
check, even if the failure is on an ebuild you're not touching.  As
such, it is a serious pain in the ass for architecture teams and
developers who are *not* slacking when one particular architecture only
has ebuilds that are ancient marked stable.  It increases the support
burden for *EVERYONE* else to keep this one architecture's stable tree
as it currently sits.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Peter Volkov]

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В Срд, 09/01/2008 в 13:13 +0100, Fernando J. Pereda пишет:
> Why taking it against arch teams? How is that different from "certain
> maintainer not taking care of a bug that holds stabilization of certain
> package by some time measured in months" ? I'll tell you my answer: 'no
> difference at all'.

No. There is difference. If you see maintainer does not care, you can
ask him and fix bug by yourself. In case of arch teams bugs, you must
have access to hardware.

-- 
Peter.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 18:56 +0100, Jan Kundrát wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > I have foo 1.0, which is mips.  There is foo 2.0, which is stable
> > everywhere else.  The foo 1.0 ebuild does not conform to current ebuild
> > standards.  I want to commit changes to foo 2.0, and repoman won't allow
> > me due to problems in foo 1.0, but I don't want to WASTE MY TIME on foo
> > 1.0, because it's been EOL for 2 years
> 
> Why don't fix repoman not to scream about such issues, then?

What, have repoman complain only about problems in ebuilds that have
been changed unless someone does "repoman full" ?

Honestly, that coupled with dropping all KEYWORDS except for the arch in
question (in other words, marking something KEYWORDS="mips" and then
ignoring it, as a maintainer) would be enough to keep package
maintainers and other architecture teams from having to deal with the
crap left all over the tree due to slacker arches.  Of course, tree
quality would probably go down even more, since these QA issues would
likely never be fixed on said architectures, but who really cares,
anyway.  The support burden gets lain on the people who are slacking,
and not on the package maintainers or other architecture teams.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 18:11 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 10:07:31 -0800
> "Alec Warner" <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Actually if they dump kde-3.5.5 and anything depending on it, then
> > they don't break the tree and everyone is happy, no?
> 
> Everyone except the users, who end up with pages and pages of horrible
> Portage output...

What, all six of them?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 18:45 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 19:29:53 +0100
> "Wulf C. Krueger" <philantrop@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Wednesday, 09. January 2008 19:16:24 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > > > So what happens if a flaw is discovered in KDE 3.5.5 that allows
> > > > root access?
> > > Then the one particular part of 3.5.5 that's affected gets fixed and
> > > priority keyworded.
> > 
> > So you suggest that mips keeps doing nothing and expect others to
> > work *more* in exchange for that?
> 
> Well, most users will simply ignore or postpone the mass upgrade, so
> yes. Forcing a mass upgrade is rarely if ever the correct solution to
> any security issue.

This is why I find it funny that people even bother to listen to Ciaran,
at all.  All he cares about is his little pet projects/teams and doesn't
care if it increases workload for everybody else.  I mean, where would
Gentoo be if not for our support of mips?  Oh dear, we'd definitely be
nowhere near as popular... *cough*

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 20:50 +0200, Petteri Räty wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh kirjoitti:
> > On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:59:29 -0800
> > Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> The issue that was raised is that certain arch teams are incapable of
> >> keeping up with the minimal workload they already have and what should
> >> be done about it.
> > 
> > The issue was raised, with absolutely no proof or justification, and
> > every previous time said issue has been raised it's turned out to be
> > somewhere between highly misleading and utter bollocks.
> > 
> 
> So you just ignore for example my post about CIA activity for the mips team?

Of course, it is common practice to ignore any factual data that
supports the opposing side of a discussion.  This is Gentoo, man!
Where've you been?  :P

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 18:56 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:50:38 +0200
> Petteri Räty <betelgeuse@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > So you just ignore for example my post about CIA activity for the
> > mips team?
> 
> That falls into the highly misleading category.

Yes, hard numbers are always misleading, especially when they show that
the entire team is barely active, at all, and only one of those people
is doing *any* mips work.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 20:45 +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> >> a) Drop all keywords but those of mips. Leaves mips and, more  
> >> importantly, its users with a vulnerable and unmaintained set of  
> >> packages.
> > 
> > ...and break the tree spectacularly, causing huge amounts of pain for
> > your fellow developers when they encounter horrible repoman output when
> > they try to do anything.
> 
> Can somebody clarify to me why would it cause this? Maybe I just miss 
> something.

He's making the assumption that this sort of thing would be done
improperly and would cause other developers issues.

I went and created a tiny script[1] to change mips KEYWORDS to ~mips in
the tree, and created a patch[2] against the current CVS tree.  Were the
Council to choose this course of action, the work is mostly done.

[1] http://dev.gentoo.org/~wolf31o2/killmips.sh
[2] http://dev.gentoo.org/~wolf31o2/mips_to_testing.patch

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Caleb Tennis]

> Correct, you did not.  What I find absolutely *damning* is the fact that
> as soon as any arches *were* mentioned, everybody was talking about the
> same one.  It's rather funny that everybody seems to have the exact same
> impression of what architecture might be a slacker and would be affected
> by this.  I wonder why that is?

Righto.  I also have specific mips related issues, and while I'm certain all of the
mips conversation will play on lots of people's minds, I think it also is helpful
from the council point of view to address this generically as it may be a problem
for a different arch in the future.

In other words, if people want to use mips as an example, then so be it, but
whatever resolution eventually comes to play shouldn't be mips specific.



-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Kumba]

Well, I guess it's something that's been needing to be faced for some time now, 
as difficult as it is to do.  Regardless of the accusations and 
counter-accusations flying around in this thread, I'll just go ahead and state 
the fact that yes, we are a "slacker arch".

Why?  Because there's just no time anymore these days and no one left really of 
the original team.  And a lot of that really is my fault.  Tuxus may have laid 
the first keel of our ship, but I was the one who, so long ago, made her 
seaworthy and crewed her.  But now, she's largely a ghost ship -- adrift in the 
seas, and a hazard to the other ships.

And for that, I apologize to all of you.


My availability lately has been diminished as I've started wearing more "hats" 
at work, and I find myself with barely five hours a night of free time to 
meander about in whatever entertains me in my free time.  Occasionally, I pull 
up the window that connects to my Octane and keyword a bunch of things, and 
knock out some bugs.  But I'll be honest, that's been a rare thing these days.

So many of you by now are probably thinking "Ah hell, he's jumping ship on us". 
  No, not yet.  I have to fix what I created before I even begin to ponder those 
thoughts.  To just up and leave with the mess I've allowed to occur would be 
unfair, and frankly, just not something that's in my character.

So how can this ship be righted?  I did a quick scan of most of the mails in the 
thread to get an idea of some of the existing opinions (while trying to pass 
over the arguments), and here's what I found that needed to be addressed.



1. It's been suggested that mips drop all stable keywords ('mips') leaving 
unstable keywords as-is ('~mips').

Contrary to whatever damage and/or impact this may create, I think this is a 
good idea for us.  I've always ran ~arch on my Octane, and with a few 
exceptions, have found ~arch to be pretty usable.  Does something sometimes 
break?  Sure, but when one looks at all the wacky crap that exists in our arch, 
sometimes you're left wondering how it all manages to work anyways.

Besides, we've always been a more experimental arch to begin with.  Usually 
we've been the first to try some new hair-brained idea (like automated netboot 
builds via catalyst or running the most bleeding edge glibc), so this would just 
be another item in our tumultuous history to take a swing at.

That said, however, I don't think it would be appropriate to commit a patch to 
portage that wipes out all our stable keywords in one go.  I think it would be 
more appropriate to phase such a change in gently, because as far as I know, no 
one else has really done this.  The other archs typically maintain a 
stable/unstable set of keywords in the tree.  So I think this should be managed 
by the profiles.  I've been needing to do some profile cleanup anyways, so I can 
probably fiddle with a 2008.0-dev profile set to only do ~arch, and then see how 
that goes.

Thus as 2007.0 and 2007.1-dev die off, so does our stable keywords.  This frees 
up other package maintainers to not have to worry about one of our "pesky" 
keywords holding things back, and should give us more freedom to move at our own 
pace, relative to those who have free time and those who don't.



2. Many have wandered if we as a team are still alive.

And the answer to that really is a resounding "No".  Individually, me and 
Redhatter are probably the only ones who still do anything (and Redhatter, 
thanks for all the work you've done keeping things alive).  The rest had other 
priorities come up in their lives that ultimately required them to resign or 
fade into some un-indexed inode someplace.  And it's my fault for not replacing 
those lost team members with new folks.

I've got a guy in mentoring right now, but even that's been really slow as both 
of us have found time to be a scarce thing.  But I'd like to get some kind of a 
"team" back together, and hopefully get them on the right track to run things so 
that I can step off the platform as "Lead" and take more of a backseat role, 
which I feel is something better suited for me anyways.  It's not like I've lost 
faith in Gentoo or found I have zero time, it's just that I don't have enough 
time to operate effectively in the role of a Team Lead anymore.  Right now, I 
fit in better as "That crazy old guy who lives in a cave", or something equivalent.

But I can't do that till I get things back in shape, and so, I'll need help from 
the rest of you guys.  I need people to step up who want a chance to play with 
an arch that's about as insane as a pikachu slamming PCP.  People who don't mind 
running machines that are heavy, sometimes noisy, usually slow, and weren't 
exactly designed with "energy conservation" in mind.  People who want to help 
bring us closer to the rest of Gentoo, rather than off in our own little world, 
as we are oft found to be.

I'll fill those interested in all the dirty information they need to hunt down a 
machine we support (but to make it easy, just acquire an Octane), so e-mail me 
and ask whatever questions you need to know.



3. Should Gentoo even continue to support mips?  Do people even *use* mips?

My opinion is that yes, we should continue to support mips.  Ultimately, I'll 
leave that decision to the higher authority, but I think if a new team can be 
assembled, and I can be allowed to step aside to more of an advisory role, that 
mips can function normally again.  And maybe, regain some of the respect we've 
lost over the years for various reasons.

As for whether we even have users, I can say affirmatively that we do.  Not many 
for sure, like say Sparc or PPC, but we do.  Part of the problem with this is 
our area of focus.  The Mips Team really only focuses on SGI Hardware, because 
this hardware is readily available on eBay, and usually at good prices.  Mips as 
an architecture spans a swamp-load more of various devices.  Everything from a 
PSP to your cable modem is usually run by some variant of a mips processor.

However, I made the decision long ago to only focus on the workstation hardware 
because I wanted Gentoo to be the "User's Distro" on these machines.  I didn't 
want us to run off and support these obscure development boards that cost an arm 
and a leg, and are only available to very specific individuals who just happen 
to know the right people.  Lord knows the SGI machines alone keep things 
interesting as far as support matrices go.

But largely, Linux/MIPS leaves people with two choices for a distribution: 
Debian or Gentoo.  And while I give props to the Debian people for keeping the 
mips binary world alive, I don't think it'd be right for us to pull out and 
reduce those choices to one.  After all, Gentoo is all about letting the users 
have choices, right?




So there you all have it.  My thoughts, my opinions, my apologies.  In the end, 
I'll go along with whatever the rest of the distribution wants to do to rectify 
things.  After all, most of it stems from my own inactivity, by and large, and 
that hasn't made us a lot of friends around here.  So it's time to fix that, and 
put an end to all this pointless, utterly stupid bickering that drives away some 
of the best talent we have.

Besides, BSG returns in two months.  I will probably become more scarce than 
George Carlin at Catholic Mass when that happens, permanently affixed to my 
television trying to grok whatever crazy stuff Moore throws out in this final 
season.

So, thoughts?


--Kumba

-- 
"Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands 
do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."  --Elrond
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Wednesday 09 January 2008, Kumba wrote:
> Well, I guess it's something that's been needing to be faced for some time
> now, as difficult as it is to do.  Regardless of the accusations and
> counter-accusations flying around in this thread, I'll just go ahead and
> state the fact that yes, we are a "slacker arch".
>
> Why?  Because there's just no time anymore these days and no one left
> really of the original team.  And a lot of that really is my fault.  Tuxus
> may have laid the first keel of our ship, but I was the one who, so long
> ago, made her seaworthy and crewed her.  But now, she's largely a ghost
> ship -- adrift in the seas, and a hazard to the other ships.

thanks ... you've always been a straight shooter without any bs mixed in.

> 1. It's been suggested that mips drop all stable keywords ('mips') leaving
> unstable keywords as-is ('~mips').
>
> That said, however, I don't think it would be appropriate to commit a patch
> to portage that wipes out all our stable keywords in one go.  I think it
> would be more appropriate to phase such a change in gently, because as far
> as I know, no one else has really done this.  The other archs typically
> maintain a stable/unstable set of keywords in the tree.  So I think this
> should be managed by the profiles.  I've been needing to do some profile
> cleanup anyways, so I can probably fiddle with a 2008.0-dev profile set to
> only do ~arch, and then see how that goes.

that certainly sounds reasonable to me.  if the stable cant be maintained, let 
the common workflow of developers transition it back to ~arch until someone 
has the time to keep arch usable.  changing profiles.desc accordingly should 
be done ahead of time.  perhaps a new category for profiles.desc ?  "exp" for 
such ports ?  i could see all *-fbsd ports being moved there.  tweak repoman 
to be less verbose about dep issues for such profiles and we're set.

> 3. Should Gentoo even continue to support mips?

i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back* into the 
tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and it was hell), 
while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and generally not a blocker 
for package maintainers.

> Do people even *use* mips? 

mips certainly sees use on the embedded side.  there should be no doubt 
whatsoever about its usage.
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:52:37 -0800
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I went and created a tiny script[1] to change mips KEYWORDS to ~mips
> in the tree, and created a patch[2] against the current CVS tree.
> Were the Council to choose this course of action, the work is mostly
> done.

Ooooops! Your script doesn't work! You forgot about profiles and
eclasses.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:54:47 -0800
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 09:25 -0500, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> > I never even mentioned any specific arch in my original request, nor
> > did I call any developer out.  So please, nobody needs to take this
> > personally.
> 
> Correct, you did not.  What I find absolutely *damning* is the fact
> that as soon as any arches *were* mentioned, everybody was talking
> about the same one.  It's rather funny that everybody seems to have
> the exact same impression of what architecture might be a slacker and
> would be affected by this.  I wonder why that is?

Because we all know it's a euphemism, like "state rights".

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:33:40 -0800
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> This is why I find it funny that people even bother to listen to
> Ciaran, at all.  All he cares about is his little pet projects/teams
> and doesn't care if it increases workload for everybody else.  I
> mean, where would Gentoo be if not for our support of mips?  Oh dear,
> we'd definitely be nowhere near as popular... *cough*

Ah yes, you're entirely right. We should all listen to you instead,
because of the brilliant job you're doing on your pet projects, 2007.1
and the GWN.

In the mean time, I'll just say that if you don't drop the personal
attacks and apologise, I'll have no choice but to take it up with
devrel. You're supposed to be arguing technically here, but all you do
is go around name calling.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Markus Ullmann]

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Thanks for your input on this, really made it look by 200% better from 
what we have so far on this list and gives a much better point of view 
to judge from.

Kumba++

Greetz
-Jokey


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Alin Năstac]

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Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> 3. Should Gentoo even continue to support mips?
>>     
>
> i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back* into the 
> tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and it was hell), 
> while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and generally not a blocker 
> for package maintainers.
>   

How about arm, s390 and sh arches? If I'm not mistaken, you are the only
one taking care of these arches and apparently you loosed interest in
maintaining them.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Thursday 10 January 2008, Alin Năstac wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > > 3. Should Gentoo even continue to support mips?
> >
> > i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back*
> > into the tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and it
> > was hell), while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and generally
> > not a blocker for package maintainers.
>
> How about arm, s390 and sh arches? If I'm not mistaken, you are the only
> one taking care of these arches and apparently you loosed interest in
> maintaining them.

i'm afraid we differ in opinion quite drastically here.  i routinely update 
the arches according to the tree.  i do not go through bugzilla though and 
remove my cc's until much later.

i imagine on KEYWORDREQ, these arches take quite a while, but not for 
STABLEREQ.
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Jeroen Roovers]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 07:08:46 +0000
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

> In the mean time, I'll just say that if you don't drop the personal
> attacks and apologise, I'll have no choice but to take it up with
> devrel.

s|devrel|userrel|


Thanks,
     JeR
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 07:08 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:33:40 -0800
> Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > This is why I find it funny that people even bother to listen to
> > Ciaran, at all.  All he cares about is his little pet projects/teams
> > and doesn't care if it increases workload for everybody else.  I
> > mean, where would Gentoo be if not for our support of mips?  Oh dear,
> > we'd definitely be nowhere near as popular... *cough*
> 
> Ah yes, you're entirely right. We should all listen to you instead,
> because of the brilliant job you're doing on your pet projects, 2007.1
> and the GWN.

I'm afraid that once again, you simply don't have a clue what you're
talking about.  I've not been doing the GWN for a few months now, nor
was it *ever* a pet project of mine.  Keep it coming.  You're
entertaining the *hell* out of me.  *grin*

> In the mean time, I'll just say that if you don't drop the personal
> attacks and apologise, I'll have no choice but to take it up with
> devrel. You're supposed to be arguing technically here, but all you do
> is go around name calling.

Feel free to bring up an issue with Developer Relations.  They'll likely
throw it out because YOU ARE NOT A DEVELOPER.  Also, you'll notice that
rather than call you names, which is really your forte, I have instead
pointed out why I think your opinion is completely worthless to Gentoo.
If you feel insulted by people pointing out things like you being fired
from the project due to your attitude, perhaps you shouldn't have gone
and gotten yourself fired?  I mean, you made your bed, now lie in it.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Alexander Færøy]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 11:49:24AM -0800, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> I've not been doing the GWN for a few months now

Yes, we noticed that.

What about 2007.1? As release engineering lead that *should* be your pet
project.

-- 
Alexander Færøy
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:49:24 -0800
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Feel free to bring up an issue with Developer Relations.  They'll
> likely throw it out because YOU ARE NOT A DEVELOPER.  Also, you'll
> notice that rather than call you names, which is really your forte, I
> have instead pointed out why I think your opinion is completely
> worthless to Gentoo. If you feel insulted by people pointing out
> things like you being fired from the project due to your attitude,
> perhaps you shouldn't have gone and gotten yourself fired?  I mean,
> you made your bed, now lie in it.

I'm sorry, what do you do around here again?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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RE: [gentoo-dev] Re: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Chrissy Fullam]

> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Feel free to bring up an issue with Developer Relations.  They'll 
> > likely throw it out because YOU ARE NOT A DEVELOPER.  Also, you'll 
> > notice that rather than call you names, which is really 
> your forte, I 
> > have instead pointed out why I think your opinion is completely 
> > worthless to Gentoo. If you feel insulted by people pointing out 
> > things like you being fired from the project due to your attitude, 
> > perhaps you shouldn't have gone and gotten yourself fired?  I mean, 
> > you made your bed, now lie in it.
> 
> I'm sorry, what do you do around here again?

Could everyone just drop the 'mud slinging' already, from all parties/in all
directions. The topic of this thread, and the relevant posts as best as I
can tell, were about the council meeting. It's going on as I type, so the
thread should be over. Join us in #council if you want to see your council
at work, addressing the Gentoo business that you requested them to.

Kind regards,
Christina Fullam
Gentoo Developer Relations Lead | Gentoo Public Relations 


-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-dev] Re: Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Ryan Hill]

Kumba wrote:

> So how can this ship be righted?  I did a quick scan of most of the 
> mails in the thread to get an idea of some of the existing opinions 
> (while trying to pass over the arguments), and here's what I found that 
> needed to be addressed.

a) thanks for the post.

b) thanks for helping me with mips questions (and thanks to redhatter, 
spbecker, and eroyf).  hopefully i can start helping you guys out soon.


-- 
fonts,                                            by design, by neglect
gcc-porting,                              for a fact or just for effect
wxwindows @ gentoo     EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662

-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Kumba]

Mike Frysinger wrote:
> 
> that certainly sounds reasonable to me.  if the stable cant be maintained, let 
> the common workflow of developers transition it back to ~arch until someone 
> has the time to keep arch usable.  changing profiles.desc accordingly should 
> be done ahead of time.  perhaps a new category for profiles.desc ?  "exp" for 
> such ports ?  i could see all *-fbsd ports being moved there.  tweak repoman 
> to be less verbose about dep issues for such profiles and we're set.

Sounds like a plan.  'exp' would be the 'status' field?  I need to remove 
2006.1, as that profile has been a big holdup due to it not being glibc-2.4 
friendly (or one of the newer glibcs back in that era; I forget).  Even 
pondering just outright booting 2007.0, as I've been using 2007.1-dev since I 
commited it long ago, and haven't had an issue with it really.  I can then put 
2008.0-dev together and use it as a launch platform for ~arch migration.



> i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back* into the 
> tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and it was hell), 
> while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and generally not a blocker 
> for package maintainers.

Aye, I believe that was sh's removal and subsequent re-add?

Part of the hangup lately has been our kernel support.  O2 systems are dead in 
the water in 2.6.24, and only work in 2.6.23 if you apply a hack to serial_core 
(a hack that only masks a problem rather than fixes it).  Octane's I can still 
forward port, but with the upstream author having moved onto other interests, if 
something breaks badly enough from one version to the next, then I run the risk 
of getting stuck on a particular version permanently.

Indigo2 R10000's may wind up getting resurrected, as support for that is 
actually headed into upstream now, so it'll be the end of patching for that 
system.  Though the gcc patch needs fixing.

And I'm really considering dropping our mips3 (Indigo2/Indy R4x00) support to 
cut back on the number of stages and netboots pumped out (-3 and -1, 
respectively, when they get pumped out).  R4x00 is an odd CPU, with a ton of 
variations, and of them, only the R4400 ever seems to work well at all.

The hard part is finding time and motivation.  My attention span lately has been 
worse than a goldfish's.  That said, however, profiles should be doable come the 
weekend, at least for removing 2006.1, renaming 2007.1, and pondering 2007.0's fate.


--Kumba

-- 
Gentoo/MIPS Team Lead

"Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands 
do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."  --Elrond
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Stuart Longland]

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Kumba wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
>>
>> that certainly sounds reasonable to me.  if the stable cant be
>> maintained, let the common workflow of developers transition it back
>> to ~arch until someone has the time to keep arch usable.  changing
>> profiles.desc accordingly should be done ahead of time.  perhaps a new
>> category for profiles.desc ?  "exp" for such ports ?  i could see all
>> *-fbsd ports being moved there.  tweak repoman to be less verbose
>> about dep issues for such profiles and we're set.
> 
> Sounds like a plan.  'exp' would be the 'status' field?  I need to
> remove 2006.1, as that profile has been a big holdup due to it not being
> glibc-2.4 friendly (or one of the newer glibcs back in that era; I
> forget).  Even pondering just outright booting 2007.0, as I've been
> using 2007.1-dev since I commited it long ago, and haven't had an issue
> with it really.  I can then put 2008.0-dev together and use it as a
> launch platform for ~arch migration.

This is fine by me too.  At the moment, my 2007.1 stages are built with
stable keywords in mind, but that's something the user can easily fix. ;-)

>> i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back*
>> into the tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and
>> it was hell), while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and
>> generally not a blocker for package maintainers.
> 
> Aye, I believe that was sh's removal and subsequent re-add?
> 
> Part of the hangup lately has been our kernel support.  O2 systems are
> dead in the water in 2.6.24, and only work in 2.6.23 if you apply a hack
> to serial_core (a hack that only masks a problem rather than fixes it). 
> Octane's I can still forward port, but with the upstream author having
> moved onto other interests, if something breaks badly enough from one
> version to the next, then I run the risk of getting stuck on a
> particular version permanently.

Lately, I've been slacking for the last few weeks... no excuses... I've
been concentrating on other projects and interests.

Part of this is that I've been trying to get µClibc stages going so we
can build some newer netboot images (at this point, I'm considering
doing a few bloated ones based on glibc) but thus far, I haven't been
successful.  I haven't bothered since my trip down to Gibraltar Ranges
National Park.

I've got one of the Lemote boxes building a userland that'll hopefully
become a LiveUSB image that'll allow a user to try out Gentoo on one of
these systems, and install it (by hand... although ultimately having the
Gentoo Installer would be good too).  At last check, it was building KDE
3.5.8.  Presently, the only way to install Gentoo, is to use my
precompiled kernel and stage3 tarball to boot the box using
Root-over-NFS, so I'd like to get this going properly soon.

My TODO list at present (no specific order):
o Build a new netboot image for Cobalt
o Rebuild my Qube2 using the 2007.1 stage3
o Build boot media for Lemote Fulong
o Test X11-related patches for Fulong on other MIPS systems to make sure
  they don't break anything (at some point, I'd like to see these
  systems supported out-of-the-box by Gentoo)
o Check the documentation is still accurate
o Clean up the bugzilla list

Kumba,
	Since you're otherwise busy with other things, did you want me to build
some new big-endian stages based on the 2007.1-dev profile?  If so,
could I get access to the SWARM?  (I could do it on my O2, but I think
the SWARM will easily outperform it.)
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter)              .'''.
Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer  '.'` :
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   .'.'
http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter             :.'

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Alec Warner]

Continuing on a side angle.  I have a 300mhz Octane I'll ship to
someone in the US if they need more mips hardware.  If you ask nice I
might even pay for the shipping.  I haven't booted it in ages but it
used to work ;)

-Alec

On 1/10/08, Stuart Longland <redhatter@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Kumba wrote:
> > Mike Frysinger wrote:
> >>
> >> that certainly sounds reasonable to me.  if the stable cant be
> >> maintained, let the common workflow of developers transition it back
> >> to ~arch until someone has the time to keep arch usable.  changing
> >> profiles.desc accordingly should be done ahead of time.  perhaps a new
> >> category for profiles.desc ?  "exp" for such ports ?  i could see all
> >> *-fbsd ports being moved there.  tweak repoman to be less verbose
> >> about dep issues for such profiles and we're set.
> >
> > Sounds like a plan.  'exp' would be the 'status' field?  I need to
> > remove 2006.1, as that profile has been a big holdup due to it not being
> > glibc-2.4 friendly (or one of the newer glibcs back in that era; I
> > forget).  Even pondering just outright booting 2007.0, as I've been
> > using 2007.1-dev since I commited it long ago, and haven't had an issue
> > with it really.  I can then put 2008.0-dev together and use it as a
> > launch platform for ~arch migration.
>
> This is fine by me too.  At the moment, my 2007.1 stages are built with
> stable keywords in mind, but that's something the user can easily fix. ;-)
>
> >> i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back*
> >> into the tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and
> >> it was hell), while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and
> >> generally not a blocker for package maintainers.
> >
> > Aye, I believe that was sh's removal and subsequent re-add?
> >
> > Part of the hangup lately has been our kernel support.  O2 systems are
> > dead in the water in 2.6.24, and only work in 2.6.23 if you apply a hack
> > to serial_core (a hack that only masks a problem rather than fixes it).
> > Octane's I can still forward port, but with the upstream author having
> > moved onto other interests, if something breaks badly enough from one
> > version to the next, then I run the risk of getting stuck on a
> > particular version permanently.
>
> Lately, I've been slacking for the last few weeks... no excuses... I've
> been concentrating on other projects and interests.
>
> Part of this is that I've been trying to get µClibc stages going so we
> can build some newer netboot images (at this point, I'm considering
> doing a few bloated ones based on glibc) but thus far, I haven't been
> successful.  I haven't bothered since my trip down to Gibraltar Ranges
> National Park.
>
> I've got one of the Lemote boxes building a userland that'll hopefully
> become a LiveUSB image that'll allow a user to try out Gentoo on one of
> these systems, and install it (by hand... although ultimately having the
> Gentoo Installer would be good too).  At last check, it was building KDE
> 3.5.8.  Presently, the only way to install Gentoo, is to use my
> precompiled kernel and stage3 tarball to boot the box using
> Root-over-NFS, so I'd like to get this going properly soon.
>
> My TODO list at present (no specific order):
> o Build a new netboot image for Cobalt
> o Rebuild my Qube2 using the 2007.1 stage3
> o Build boot media for Lemote Fulong
> o Test X11-related patches for Fulong on other MIPS systems to make sure
>   they don't break anything (at some point, I'd like to see these
>   systems supported out-of-the-box by Gentoo)
> o Check the documentation is still accurate
> o Clean up the bugzilla list
>
> Kumba,
>         Since you're otherwise busy with other things, did you want me to build
> some new big-endian stages based on the 2007.1-dev profile?  If so,
> could I get access to the SWARM?  (I could do it on my O2, but I think
> the SWARM will easily outperform it.)
> --
> Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter)              .'''.
> Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer  '.'` :
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   .'.'
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter             :.'
>
> I haven't lost my mind...
>   ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.
>
>
>
--
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Friday 11 January 2008, Kumba wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > that certainly sounds reasonable to me.  if the stable cant be
> > maintained, let the common workflow of developers transition it back to
> > ~arch until someone has the time to keep arch usable.  changing
> > profiles.desc accordingly should be done ahead of time.  perhaps a new
> > category for profiles.desc ?  "exp" for such ports ?  i could see all
> > *-fbsd ports being moved there.  tweak repoman to be less verbose about
> > dep issues for such profiles and we're set.
>
> Sounds like a plan.  'exp' would be the 'status' field?

yeah.  i'll fork a new thread on the topic.

> > i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back*
> > into the tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and it
> > was hell), while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and generally
> > not a blocker for package maintainers.
>
> Aye, I believe that was sh's removal and subsequent re-add?

arm actually.  i blame solar.

thanks Kumba, i'd wager my left one that without you there would be no mips.
-mike

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[gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Mike Frysinger]

This is your monthly friendly reminder !  Same bat time (typically
the 2nd Thursday at 2000 UTC / 1600 EST), same bat channel
(#gentoo-council @ irc.freenode.net) !

If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
Gentoo dev list to see.

Keep in mind that every GLEP *re*submission to the council for review
must first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum)
before being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days
before the meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be
notified at least 14 days before the meeting itself.

For more info on the Gentoo Council, feel free to browse our homepage:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/

[gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Mike Frysinger]

This is your monthly friendly reminder !  Same bat time (typically
the 3rd Thursday at 1800 UTC / 2000 CET / 1400 EST), same bat channel
(#gentoo-council @ irc.freenode.net) !

If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
Gentoo dev list to see.

Keep in mind that every GLEP *re*submission to the council for review
must first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum)
before being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days
before the meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be
notified at least 14 days before the meeting itself.

For more info on the Gentoo Council, feel free to browse our homepage:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Brian Harring]

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On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 01:31:44PM +0000, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> This is your monthly friendly reminder !  Same bat time (typically
> the 3rd Thursday at 1800 UTC / 2000 CET / 1400 EST), same bat channel
> (#gentoo-council @ irc.freenode.net) !
> 
> If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> Gentoo dev list to see.

Kindly put VDB modification timestamp on the schedule-
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_6b3e00049a1bf35fbf7a5e66d1449553.xml

~harring

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Pacho Ramos]

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El vie, 01-01-2010 a las 13:31 +0000, Mike Frysinger escribió:
> This is your monthly friendly reminder !  Same bat time (typically
> the 3rd Thursday at 1800 UTC / 2000 CET / 1400 EST), same bat channel
> (#gentoo-council @ irc.freenode.net) !
> 
> If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> Gentoo dev list to see.
> 
> Keep in mind that every GLEP *re*submission to the council for review
> must first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum)
> before being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days
> before the meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be
> notified at least 14 days before the meeting itself.
> 
> For more info on the Gentoo Council, feel free to browse our homepage:
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/
> 

Hello 

I would like to know what was finally decided about "Adding real
multilib features from current multilib-portage to currently hardmasked
and testing portage-2.2*", as I failed to see if, finally, an approval
from the council is needed for merging it to portage-2.2 or not and, if
needed, if it will be discussed finally on this meeting.

Thanks a lot for the info :-)

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Denis Dupeyron]

2010/1/2 Pacho Ramos <pacho@condmat1.ciencias.uniovi.es>:
> [...] I failed to see if, finally, an approval
> from the council is needed for merging [multilib] to portage-2.2 or not

The only approval that's required to merge anything to an official
portage branch is Zac's (zmedico). He may have to follow some rules
and wait for some vote from the council when for example EAPIs are
concerned but whether to merge code or not is his decision and
responsibility. That said I've never seen him refusing to merge
anything that was worth it.

> if [multilib] will be discussed finally on this meeting.

Technically we don't need to (I'll explain that in another email) but
we may. I'm just starting to work on the agenda for the 18th and I
don't have everything in place yet.

Denis.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Saturday 02 January 2010 13:21:05 Pacho Ramos wrote:
> El vie, 01-01-2010 a las 13:31 +0000, Mike Frysinger escribió:
> > This is your monthly friendly reminder !  Same bat time (typically
> > the 3rd Thursday at 1800 UTC / 2000 CET / 1400 EST), same bat channel
> > (#gentoo-council @ irc.freenode.net) !
> >
> > If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> > vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> > Gentoo dev list to see.
> >
> > Keep in mind that every GLEP *re*submission to the council for review
> > must first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum)
> > before being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days
> > before the meeting.  Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be
> > notified at least 14 days before the meeting itself.
> >
> > For more info on the Gentoo Council, feel free to browse our homepage:
> > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/
> 
> I would like to know what was finally decided about "Adding real
> multilib features from current multilib-portage to currently hardmasked
> and testing portage-2.2*", as I failed to see if, finally, an approval
> from the council is needed for merging it to portage-2.2 or not and, if
> needed, if it will be discussed finally on this meeting.

the multilib discussion hasnt moved past the development stages yet, so 
there's nothing to be discussed by the council or merged by the portage team.
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Pacho Ramos]

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El jue, 07-01-2010 a las 15:59 -0700, Denis Dupeyron escribió:
> 2010/1/2 Pacho Ramos <pacho@condmat1.ciencias.uniovi.es>:
> > [...] I failed to see if, finally, an approval
> > from the council is needed for merging [multilib] to portage-2.2 or not
> 
> The only approval that's required to merge anything to an official
> portage branch is Zac's (zmedico). He may have to follow some rules
> and wait for some vote from the council when for example EAPIs are
> concerned but whether to merge code or not is his decision and
> responsibility. That said I've never seen him refusing to merge
> anything that was worth it.
> 
> > if [multilib] will be discussed finally on this meeting.
> 
> Technically we don't need to (I'll explain that in another email) but
> we may. I'm just starting to work on the agenda for the 18th and I
> don't have everything in place yet.
> 
> Denis.
> 

OK, thanks a lot for the information :-)

Best regards

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