Re: [gentoo-project] Corporate affiliations of Council members

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

On 2020-06-22 18:18, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Here's another question for the Council nominees.  I'd like to ask
> the Council members to disclose their corporate affiliations,
> in particular whether they are employed or in partnership with companies
> using Gentoo or Gentoo derivatives.
> 
> This is because I believe that the electorate deserves to know whether
> their elected Council member may end up being in conflict of interest
> between doing what's right by the wide community and what's requested by
> his employer.
> 

As you may or may not know I've been working at Adjust GmbH 
(www.adjust.com) for the last almost 5 years.

Most of my job is babysitting a fleet of around 1000 servers running 
Gentoo, and ensure things work. I've had a few silly job titles, but I'm 
basically still Fixer of Things. (We're hiring!)

This inherently makes me motivated to have things in a sane state - e.g. 
packages actually compiling, updates not breaking and other very 
outdated traditional ideas about software development.

(And this is why I'm against things like the current py2 purge: There is 
code out there that works, can't be rewritten to py3 in a reasonable 
time*, and hasn't been rewritten in another language yet. There is no 
fundamental reason to exorcise all things older than 6 weeks, and it 
just forces me to spend time on useless busywork instead of doing 
something useful.
And it's inconsistent - packages like chromium won't get masked, because 
... err... ?
But I don't have the time to fight against this madness, so I just move 
everything useful to an overlay where it is vandalism-safe. Somehow that 
doesn't sound like a smart strategy to me but what can you do)

This doesn't mean I'm a statist, progress can be nice, but these days 
it's both computationally expensive with some packages taking more than 
a cpu-day to build, and lots of breakage because very few upstreams to 
anything resembling software engineering.
(e.g. gcc breaking ABI (wtf gcc5), glibc breaking collation (glibc 2.28 
which makes updating things exquisitely super fun times), random 
packages bundling in LLVM, openssl** and whatever else looks cute)

tl;dr: I want to be lazy, so stop breaking stuff ;)

Have fun,

Patrick



* "can't be rewritten" - there's some corners of python like 
manipulating binary data that are not cleanly portable to py3, and the 
people who would do the rewrite-from-scratch prefer using other 
languages like Go that don't mutate as fast (since rewriting sucks); as 
such this legacy py2 code will exist until it is either no longer 
needed, or the cost of rewriting is smaller than the negligible cost of 
maintenance.

** yes, a bundled-in security issue. Isn't it great!