[gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[David Seifert]

Nominees,
congratulations on your nominations! As part of this year's elections,
I'd like to pose five questions to the nominees, that I believe are
important factors in considering someone a good candidate for the
council:

1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
a council member)?

2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer? Do you consider
abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
last resort?

3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?

4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
"improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.

5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
the decision to be made for it? Would you consider a small number of
departing views on the mailing list or IRC to be enough to derail a
proposal? When do you consider a controversial issue to have been
discussed enough?

Regards
David

Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Marek Szuba]

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On 2021-06-20 22:40, David Seifert wrote:

> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo 
> council member in the 2021/2022 term?

Yes, I do.

> Does your commit activity support this?

I would say it does but in the end it is up to the others to judge.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you 
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical 
> decision needs to be made. How will you react?

Gather as many technical details about the background and the 
alternatives to be considered as well as the amount of effort (and/or 
cost) required to introduce *and maintain* the alternatives, consider 
the pros and cons, if need be and appropriate to the situation (some 
issues might better be kept within Gentoo after all) discuss the matter 
with an independent party possessing appropriate knowledge, present my 
view to other members of the Council, listen to their respective views, 
vote on the solution I consider best at that point.

> Will you defer? Do you consider abstaining a viable option for the
> group of people making decisions as a last resort?

I think the "last resort" part makes it clear here that under such 
circumstances I have to make a decision. Okay, technically I do not HAVE 
TO make one - but I do not have to be a member of the Gentoo Council 
either. Assuming I am, non-action doesn't seem a sensible option.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you 
> performed?

I assume you're talking about Gentoo and not my work in general. Well,
let's see:
  - my turnover rate as far as resolving bugs in or bumping packages is,
I dare say, rather good;
  - I have not only successfully adapted Python eclasses to Lua (which I
continue to insist has not been a big deal, it's the authors of the
former who have done the bulk of the work) but also single-handedly
migrated a large fraction of Lua/LuaJIT revdeps to the new eclasses,
finally - after more than 4 years since it had been proposed - making it
possible for Gentoo ebuilds to use Lua versions other than 5.1 without
bundling;
  - at the time of Gentoo switching the default Python target to 3.8,
most (if not all) of Python revdeps I maintain were already ready for 3.9.
Soooo... yes?

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you 
> would try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By 
> positive change I mean actually changing something concrete, not some
> diffuse notion of "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible
> deliverable.

As mentioned in my manifest, one thing I would definitely like to keep
an eye on is narrowing the gap between what PMS requires our package
managers to support and features our main tree implicitly relies on.
Call me weird but I quite like the idea of being able to choose one's
favourite Gentoo package manager and the narrower the aforementioned gap
is, the smaller the risk of alternative solutions falling behind
whatever the majority of developers use.

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take 
> decisions for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than 
> waiting for the decision to be made for it?

Absolutely.

> Would you consider a small number of departing views on the mailing 
> list or IRC to be enough to derail a proposal?

Definitely not, in my opinion that would pretty much guarantee us not to
be able to make any significant changes to anything.

> When do you consider a controversial issue to have been discussed 
> enough?

The particulars will depend on the issue at hand but there are several
indicators which, when combined, might indicate this. For instance, if:
  - newer comments essentially repeat the same statements over and over,
  - the discussion focusses more and more on dissecting some specific
minutiae,
  - the frequency of new comments is tailing off (caveat: this might take
a LONG time), and/or
  - growing fraction of ad-hominem attacks, trolling and the like.

-- 
Marecki


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Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Michał Górny]

On Sun, 2021-06-20 at 23:40 +0200, David Seifert wrote:
> Nominees,
> congratulations on your nominations! As part of this year's elections,
> I'd like to pose five questions to the nominees, that I believe are
> important factors in considering someone a good candidate for the
> council:
> 
> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
> this?

Yes. I consider this very important, and I wouldn't have accepted my
nomination if I couldn't have found sufficient time for Gentoo. You need
to stay on top of things, and others needs to be able to talk to you.

> If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
> and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
> a council member)?

I've served in 2017/18, and I didn't have unfinished business then.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
> needs to be made. How will you react?

If the projects can't reach a consensus themselves, the Council should
work with them in order to understand the problem and establish
a working solution. It is not always possible to find a solution that
works with everyone but the Council shouldn't just arbitrarily decide
for the projects without proper research.

It's important not only to consider the perceivable advantages
and disadvantages of any of the options but also the background,
workflows, implementation and maintenance costs, community response.
A seemingly good decision is meaningless if it's not going to be
implemented (see e.g. how QA team arbitrarily tried to enforce Qt-style
versioning on GTK+ flags in the past).

> Will you defer?

Ideally, the Council should be able to analyze the situation timely
and make a decision. However, in reality I can imagine that sometimes
deferring is the most reasonable option (e.g. when a new interesting
point has been made in the discussion).

> Do you consider
> abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
> last resort?

By accepting a Council position, you accept the responsibility coming
with it. Abstaining for a last resort decision means neglecting this
responsibility. So, no.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?

I think that this point my most typical area of expertise is Python.
I believe we've made a lot of important progress over the years.
The switch to Python 3.9 went smoothly (though I admit things weren't
perfect). Python 3.10 isn't going to reach RCs until September but we've
actually managed to enable its support on a large subset of packages. We
no longer have major stabilization delays, test coverage has improved
greatly, a large number of packages is being bumped timely. We have
really good documentation. A lot of new contributors are helping out.

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
> try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
> I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
> "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.

I think the key point is to focus on our strengths, and reiterate what
strengths we have today rather than clinging to the past.

I believe that Python support in Gentoo is superior to any other
distribution. It's important not to lose that edge, and push forward.
This means up-to-date packages, high test coverage, timely porting to
new implementations.

Getting new contributors is very important. However, I don't believe we
should be pursuing the 'everyone must become a developer' model anymore.
GURU's been a great example how helpful it can be to just let people do
their thing. People are working together, learning and becoming good dev
candidates. It somewhat resembles the Sunrise of old, except that it
comes with practically no maintenance effort from developers, and that
makes it much more sustainable.

I also support the idea of better defaults. While choice is often good,
forcing people to make choices all the time is not. If I develop
in Python, I enjoy being able to control implementations precisely;
if I just want to install a random program, ideally Gentoo should let me
do that without bothering me about Python versions. We should aim for
flexibility but also for reasonable defaults.

This is also a prerequisite for reasonably good binary package support.
With Gentoo's packaging model we can't expect to compete with binary
distros but we can make lives of some of our users much easier. Both
in the terms of providing binary packages ourselves and in making it
easier to deploy local binary packages on site.

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
> for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
> the decision to be made for it?

Individuals propel Gentoo forward, and the Council should do their best
to support them. Of course that doesn't stop Council members from being
these individuals, I just don't think we should consider Council members
special in this regard.

> Would you consider a small number of
> departing views on the mailing list or IRC to be enough to derail a
> proposal?

Every decision breaks somebody's workflow. We need to accept that
sometimes some people would be unhappy with what we do (or in extreme
cases even threaten to leave Gentoo). However, sometimes their arguments
can actually be important and are worth considering.

> When do you consider a controversial issue to have been
> discussed enough?

At the point that the same arguments start being reiterated over
and over again, and nobody's making new points anymore.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Sam James]

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> On 20 Jun 2021, at 22:40, David Seifert <soap@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Nominees,

> congratulations on your nominations! As part of this year's elections,
> I'd like to pose five questions to the nominees, that I believe are
> important factors in considering someone a good candidate for the
> council:

Thanks - I'm really proud to have been nominated!

>1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
>council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
>this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
>and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
>a council member)?

Yes. In the last year, I had ~35k commits to ::gentoo. I was able to
achieve this while completing the final year of my mathematics degree, which
wasn't always easy.

I hope I've shown to our community that my passion, commitment, and
dedication to Gentoo is unbounded.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
> needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer? Do you consider
> abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
> last resort?

I'd act just like on any other issue: analyse, consider, discuss, and seek advice
if needed. That's exactly what the role calls for.

People bring questions to the Council for a reason. If we
have to call it a "burden", so be it, but it's one of the responsibilities
of being a Council member - to take decisions. Simply, I would not defer.

Abstaining wouldn't be fair on prospective voters who trusted me to move
Gentoo forward on their behalf.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?

I have a few areas of responsibility, but I don't restrict myself to
any single area - which I feel is one of my strengths. I have consistently
sought to do whatever Gentoo needs at a given time.

- Arch testing:

  I've spent a fair amount of time automating arch testing and managed to get it
  to a place where it's sustainable (the amount of work I need to do manually
  barely grows with the # of bugs filed).

  This has been one of my biggest drives -- to solve the problem of "slow arch
  teams" once and for all. I think we're getting there.

  e.g. over the last year, we managed to transform arm64 from being on-death's-door
  to one of the speediest teams.

- Being user-facing and tackling real problems head-on:

  This sounds a bit daft, but a lot of what I do is miscellaneous. I watch Bugzilla,
  #gentoo, and the forums for new issues which our users are hitting.

  I regularly commit patches based on user issues reported over IRC in response
  to an immediate need.

  Examples:

  * With the help of gienah@ and then tupone@, we've taken over maintenance
  in Gentoo. Why? I have no specific interest in the language itself, but several
  prominent applications users needed depend on the ML stack. That _makes it_ matter
  to me.

  * Worked hard on reducing the friction of "Python bumps" (default target changes)
  and the impact on users by filing stabilisation bugs, porting ebuilds, and triaging
  based on indicators of popularity and importance.

- General "tree health" work:

  This isn't glamorous but I'm really proud of what we achieved this year.

  * Progressed the work on removing EAPI 4;

  * Removed several long-long-deprecated eclasses
    (base.eclass, games.eclass, autotools-utils.eclass);

  * Identified pain points/ambiguities raised by contributors and worked
    to resolve these within the devmanual.

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
> try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
> I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
> "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.

Some of my future efforts will be directed towards:
- Further improving the user contribution picture.

  I think we're good at helping users contribute through the proxy-maint
  project (and getting them in the door through GURU), but not always so great
  at taking that leap with excellent contributors to get them to become
  developers.

  While not all contributors must - or should - become developers,
  there are definitely missed opportunities in this area right now.

  This requires a lot of time and investment as a mentor but it's worth it
  -- for them, for the health of our distribution, and for our users.

  I have already acted as a mentor for two developers and have been
  working on reviewing quizzes and developing candidate knowledge for three others;
  I believe this is what will keep Gentoo flourishing.

  I therefore feel passionately about working on this more in the next year,
  noticing star contributors, and working with them to become Gentoo developers --
  and encouraging *other* Gentoo developers to join me in doing this when I notice
  good contirbutors in their respective areas.

- Creating arm(64) images (ISOs) that can be flashed to e.g. SD cards to allow
  our users to quickly get up and running on SoCs like Raspberry Pis.

  The current bootstap process is rather painful (and slow) even if you know the
  process.

- Reviewing the state of OCaml in the tree and investigating improvements
  we can make to the eclasses to unify some of the current behaviour,
  e.g. proper "ocamlopt" handling (optimised bytecode).

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
> for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
> the decision to be made for it? Would you consider a small number of
> departing views on the mailing list or IRC to be enough to derail a
> proposal? When do you consider a controversial issue to have been
> discussed enough?

* Yes, it should be far more agile:

I have a concrete example to share for this: I requested that
the Council call an emergency meeting for the Gentoo community to have
certainty on its future re IRC networks, which was causing a lot of
distress and confusion to users and developers alike.

I saw the freenode crisis developing, discussed concerns with the community,
and decided we needed to act for the health of Gentoo.

Our fantastic Group Contacts team was then able to swoop into action
to get Gentoo migrated ASAP and make the process as smooth as possible;
a swift decision by the council facilitated minimised disruption to the
community.

* On debating-to-death:

I'm analytical by nature and in the council, I'd be just the same:
read, understand the arguments made, assess the  weight to give each by their
(technical) merit, speak with my colleagues, and ultimately make the call which
I believe is best for Gentoo.

As others have said: when the same points are being made ad nauseam and
often even with increased focus on some minute detail, that's usually
a good sign to draw things to a close.

* On a small number of departing views:

I touched on this partly in my above point, but no, the fact that people are
still disagreeing doesn't mean that we can't move forward. Waiting for a consensus
to magically appear is unrealistic and unsustainable (as I said in my manifesto [0]).

This is a particular point I feel rather strongly on. Waiting is not a substitute
for leadership.

[0] https://dev.gentoo.org/~sam/txt/2021-council-manifesto.txt

best,
sam


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Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Sam James]

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> On 23 Jun 2021, at 02:52, Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> [...]
>  Examples:
> 
>  * With the help of gienah@ and then tupone@, we've taken over maintenance
>  in Gentoo. Why? I have no specific interest in the language itself, but several
>  prominent applications users needed depend on the ML stack. That _makes it_ matter
>  to me.
> 

Typo: maintenance of OCaml and dev-ml/*, of course!

(Thanks ajak.)

> best,
> sam
> 


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Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Andreas K. Huettel]

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So...

> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
> this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
> and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
> a council member)?

Short answer: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Long answer: I may occasionally be quite busy outside Gentoo, but so far I've 
always been able to make time for current council activities. In particular, I 
do prepare meetings and read the relevant documents in advance, in order to be 
able to efficiently make an informed discussion.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
> needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer? Do you consider
> abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
> last resort?

Short answer: I think the council should pick the best possible option.

Long answer: The important part is not just knowing technical details, but 
also what procedures teams have and what drives people. Picking one way to go 
over another one and thereby completely stopping the activity of one team is 
not a good option. As I also write in my manifest, projects should ideally be 
structured in a way that they don't block each others' progress. We should all 
work to make such compromises possible.
That said, if a hard decision is really required, so be it.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?

I'm leaving that to everyone else to figure out. That gives me more time to 
version-bump dev-perl.

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
> try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
> I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
> "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.

Lots of ideas for things, but much less time. Let's instead list a few things 
recently started and upcoming...
* risc-v support (already "in production")
* qemu-based stage building (already "in production")
* binhost project (stalled due to lack of time / low priority)
* council decisions index (low priority)
* switch from glibc[crypt] to libxcrypt (soon, in planning)

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
> for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
> the decision to be made for it? 

Yes.

> Would you consider a small number of
> departing views on the mailing list or IRC to be enough to derail a
> proposal? 

No. For the simple reason that there is *always* someone who disagrees.

> When do you consider a controversial issue to have been
> discussed enough?

Well, at latest when only two or three "usual suspects" still reply on the 
thread... :)


Cheers,
Andreas



-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer
(council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)

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Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Andreas K. Huettel]

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Am Mittwoch, 23. Juni 2021, 23:51:16 CEST schrieb Andreas K. Huettel:
> So...
> 
> > 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> > council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
> > this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
> > and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
> > a council member)?
> 
> Short answer: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
> 
> Long answer: I may occasionally be quite busy outside Gentoo, but so far
> I've always been able to make time for current council activities. In
> particular, I do prepare meetings and read the relevant documents in
> advance, in order to be able to efficiently make an informed discussion.

That should've been "informed decision", but whatever... :D

-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer
(council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)

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Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Georgy Yakovlev]

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On Sunday, June 20, 2021 2:40:36 PM PDT David Seifert wrote:
> Nominees,
> congratulations on your nominations! As part of this year's elections,
> I'd like to pose five questions to the nominees, that I believe are
> important factors in considering someone a good candidate for the
> council:
> 
> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
> this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
> and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
> a council member)?
> 
Yes/Yes/Yes
Nothing really to add here, some details covered in following answers.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
> needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer? Do you consider
> abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
> last resort?
> 
I will do research and try to understand both positions,
talk with peers outside council meeting time, gather opinions.
Deferring if possible if I strongly feel that wrong decision is being made.
Abstaining is almost never an option for me.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?
> 
I was affected severely by burnout, isolation and health
problems last year, but I think I did just fine and kept doing gentoo work
and maintained friendly attitude regardless of personal problems.

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
> try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
> I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
> "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.
>
Many. Not everything is deliverable and no time for all of it. 
I'll list just things I'm confident in:
* I have plans to add module signing support to our kernels and
 eclasses. I made an attempt 2 years ago, but it really required EAPI=7
 for selective strip support.
* eselect-rust rewrite is pending and the way rust is installed will change
 in the future.
* A lot of ppc64 work is in progress and I will continue
 improving ppc64 experience on gentoo.

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
> for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
> the decision to be made for it? Would you consider a small number of
> departing views on the mailing list or IRC to be enough to derail a
> proposal? When do you consider a controversial issue to have been
> discussed enough?
> 
Yes, council feels sluggish and it needs to be proactive as well.

As for departing views, it really depends.
There are people who always disagree just for sake of it,
or people who always disagree on certain topic,
or people who have to have unnecessary opinion on everything.
While I try to keep all factors considered, getting blocked by vocal minority
or known offenders/trolls is not productive.
But valid and constructive criticism is always considered.

Controversial decisions  may need more input from developer or user community.
I can't really define exact "enough" condition.
I guess, when all the information is provided but only trolls remain active.

> Regards
> David

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Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Matt Turner]

On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 2:40 PM David Seifert <soap@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Nominees,
> congratulations on your nominations! As part of this year's elections,
> I'd like to pose five questions to the nominees, that I believe are
> important factors in considering someone a good candidate for the
> council:
>
> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
> this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
> and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
> a council member)?

Yes.

I have some concerns about the sustainability of my contribution level
now that I'm also maintaining GNOME, but yes, if I'm elected to
Council I will make it a priority. Council's not just a personal
responsibility that, if neglected, only affects you. Truthfully,
Council is a much smaller time commitment than some of my other
responsibilities in Gentoo, and I don't have any concerns about my
ability or capacity to handle Council responsibilities.

I don't have any unfinished Council business from my first year on Council.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
> needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer? Do you consider
> abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
> last resort?

It can seem there are irreconcilable differences even when there's
not, given some styles of debate...

For sake of argument, let's say the differences truly are irreconcilable.

Who has the track record of successfully completing projects? Which
project do we expect to provide more value for the distribution?

Abstaining in such a case doesn't really make sense to me. After all,
if the issue has been brought to the Council, it's because people want
us to make a decision! Even if I'm not a user of either project in the
disagreement it's still my responsibility as a Council member to
become informed and to make the best decision possible.

Deferring makes sense when we have reason to believe that we'll be in
a better position to make a decision later. I don't know who said it
but I appreciate the quote, "When the facts change, I change my mind.
What do you do?". If we're just going to rehash the same discussion
with no additional information in next month's Council meeting, we
might as well save ourselves the headache and make the decision today.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?

I think I've performed well. RelEng is chugging along, I'm still
improving things as time allows. X11 packages are all up to date. I
got GNOME 40 into the tree (and stabilized) and that seems to have
made a lot of users happy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gentoo/comments/nc6u1v/gnome_40_available_in_gentoo/

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
> try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
> I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
> "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.

I'm really interested to continue improving our RelEng build tools
(catalyst, automation scripts). They're currently pretty confusing to
set up, and I've got a handful of ideas (and a GSoC student!) that
will make them a lot simpler to use. Gentoo's all about being able to
customize your system by building from source, and so it's always been
kind of strange to me that it's so difficult to build your own stage
tarball or LiveCD image.

I'm now employed by Google working on the ChromeOS graphics team.
Though my job isn't specifically related to the Gentoo-bits in
ChromeOS, I do think it's an area that I can help with. I'm going to
work to upstream fixes from the chromiumos-overlay to Gentoo, and I'd
love to get more ChromeOS Googlers contributing directly to ::gentoo.
ChromeOS uses a lot of cross compilation infrastructure that most
developers don't exercise, so it seems like an area ripe for
improvement with benefits to both Gentoo and ChromeOS.

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
> for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
> the decision to be made for it? Would you consider a small number of
> departing views on the mailing list or IRC to be enough to derail a
> proposal? When do you consider a controversial issue to have been
> discussed enough?

Quoting my manifesto: Consensus need not be unanimous.

I think a Council member should be involved in finding and/or building
consensus around an issue. That means listening to those you disagree
with! Reasonable people can disagree and still get along, and drilling
down to find the difference in priorities and/or judgement gives you a
better understanding of the issue.

It seems to me that you know when a discussion has run its course when
you start seeing the same points made and remade. Again quoting my
manifesto: the purpose of a discussion is not for others to hear your
point. Restated, the purpose of the discussion is to understand the
issue. I think we should all have the maturity to acknowledge when an
issue is understood, that it's not valuable to continue to try to
drive your point into the other person's skull.

Thanks a bunch for your questions!

Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Ulrich Mueller]

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>>>>> On Sun, 20 Jun 2021, David Seifert wrote:

> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity
> support this?

Definitely yes to both questions.

> If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings and
> finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as a
> council member)?

No unfinished business.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
> needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer?

That's the kind of questions that are difficult to answer without a more
concrete example. :)

Generally, I'd try to discuss the issue with both teams, and then go for
a solution that I think is good for the distro as a whole, but that both
projects can live with. In my experience, keeping the discussion at a
technical and factual level also helps.

> Do you consider abstaining a viable option for the group of people
> making decisions as a last resort?

Not in the situation described above. There are other issues where I may
abstain from a vote, e.g. if I was involved with one of the projects.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?

I am active in all projects I am a member of (look them up on my user
page on the wiki, no "placeholder" projects there). I also believe that
I was responsive to any questions in a timely manner, typically within a
few hours.

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
> try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
> I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
> "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.

- There's a reorganisation of GNU Emacs packages pending, related to
just-in-time/native compilation that will be available with Emacs 28.
Not yet sure how large the impact of this will be. We also need better
integration with upstream package archives (ELPA, MELPA, etc.).

- I have some ideas how to improve license groups. Currently, especially
the GPL compatible licenses with exceptions aren't handled in the best
possible way. We also need a mapping between our license labels and the
ones used by the SPDX, so that automatic detection tools can be used
more conveniently.

- Represent Gentoo at events again, as soon as it will be possible after
the pandemic.

- Start collecting items for EAPI 9. :)

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
> for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
> the decision to be made for it?

This has been brought up repeatedly in the past and was mentioned in
countless manifestos of Council members, but not much has changed.
IMO a volunteer organisation doesn't function in that way, i.e. the
Council cannot tell people on what they should work. (If you need a
concrete example, the Council has voted three times for the feature
mentioned in bug 489458. We still don't have it, because nobody has
implemented it in package managers.)

Ultimately, Gentoo's progress is driven by developers and users having
good ideas and implementing them. Of course, nothing prevents Council
members from having good ideas either.

> Would you consider a small number of departing views on the mailing
> list or IRC to be enough to derail a proposal?

"Number of views" may not be a good criterion. One must rather look at
the arguments themselves.

> When do you consider a controversial issue to have been discussed
> enough?

When no more new arguments are being presented.

Ulrich

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Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[William Hubbs]

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On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 11:40:36PM +0200, David Seifert wrote:
> Nominees,
> congratulations on your nominations! As part of this year's elections,
> I'd like to pose five questions to the nominees, that I believe are
> important factors in considering someone a good candidate for the
> council:
 
 Hi David, 

 thanks much for your questions. i will do my best to answer them.

> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
> this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
> and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
> a council member)?
 
 Yes, I have the time for this role. I maintain and
 co-maintain many packages in the tree, so I believe my commit record
 supports this.
 The only thing I haven't done yet from last term is upload the last
 meeting log and summary. This will be done this week since I was on
 vacation last week.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
> needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer? Do you consider
> abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
> last resort?
 
First, I would research the issue and attempt to understand what the
differences are.  Once I understood the differences, I
would want to understand why they are irreconcilable. I believe that
ultimately if a decision is brought to the council and that decision
can't be made by the affected parties, it is the council's
responsibility to make the decision.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?
 
 I feel like i have performed pretty well.

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
> try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
> I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
> "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.
 
 I want to get the usr merge done in Gentoo this time around. The
 primary thing stopping that is we still don't have a way to migrate
 live systems, but I will put in the work on that.

Another project I'm interested in is a tool that will do automatic
stabilizations.

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
> for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
> the decision to be made for it?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I'll take this to mean "should the
council start making decisions about the distro proactively and
directing projects or developers to follow those decisions?"

In the past, the council has been seen as a dispute resolutions body
more than a leadership body; it doesn't get involved much unless the
community asks it to.

I am open to the council taking a stronger leadership role, but we need
to remember too that we are all volunteers, so people can only work on
things they have time to work on.

> Would you consider a small number of
> departing views on the mailing list or IRC to be enough to derail a
> proposal?

I would need to understand the details of the departing views to make
this decision.

> When do you consider a controversial issue to have been
> discussed enough?

If no new points are being brought up in regard to the view and we are
continually re-hashing the same points.

Thanks,

William

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Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[David Seifert]

Hello all,
I'd like to summarise the replies I've received to my questions from
nearly 2 weeks ago:

Replies to my question:
  dilfridge
  gyakovlev
  marecki
  mattst88
  mgorny
  sam
  ulm
  williamh

Did not reply:
  lu_zero
  patrick
  slyfox
  whissi
  zlogene
  zx2c4

Nominees who haven't voted yet (you can ls -l the files without reading
them, nothing nefarious):
  zx2c4 (last voted in 2018)

The council is the institution of last resort. Whether accountability
before an election matters is something every developer needs to judge
for themself. My personal view is that if a candidate has no time to
reply to some simple questions or even post a manifesto, they likely
either don't have time to serve, or don't respect the electorate. In
light of recent events, I might also suggest that a council member ought
to be reasonable and act rationally.

Just a reminder: you can change your votes if you wish:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Elections#Condorcet_method_of_voting

Regards
David