Josh Saddler

So. Happy birthday to me? 24 on the 28th, it would seem.

Yesterday I turned in my two weeks notice to Borders, which means I'll be able to focus everything on my library job. However, I'm still looking for another daytime part-time job to fill out my working schedule, at least until (and if) the county has me go full-time. Did get one job offer from a company that wants me to write XML-based documentation for them, but they're located in Wisconsin, and failed to notice the part of my resume that said Unwilling to relocate. Ah well.

Today should be a happy occasion, but I opened my email a short while ago and was greeted with SwifT's retirement announcement! What's that all about!?!

Anyway, I sent my reply in. Sven, you'll be missed, and not just because of your docs work. Thanks for all that you've done for Gentoo.

PS: What's up with retirement messages retrieved by my mail client? I never get the original message! I only receive the first reply to it by some other developer who was kind enough to quote the original. I hate secondhand news! Stupid email.

Now that the latest stir in the gentoo-dev ML has been slashdotted, I thought I'd speak out as a voice of reason.

First, the Seeds project hasn't even decided exactly what they will release (though a canned LAMP stack is a likely thing), nor in what form. They've said they plan to use catalyst to build these stage4 tarballs, but catalyst might not be the only thing they use. They have very few rules in place about what they'll do.

Second, they wish to remain a top-level project, running autonomously, under their own auspices, etc. Not as a subproject for any other group.

Third, the devmanual and other rules say that project creation is allowed, even competing projects are allowed, all without creating GLEPs to approve them.

These points being made . . . several people simply don't get it. Some members of releng in particular feel slighted, that Seeds encroaches on their turf, that it's created more work for them, and so on. All the arguments against Seeds are based on one or more incorrect views of the above three points, whether ignored, not understood, or just forgotten. Let's take the most common arguments thus far. Note that I've personally talked with most of the parties who created these, so I'll use a mixture of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek.

- "Stop giving releng more work!" aka the releng refrain
No one is giving releng more work. You assume the onus is on you, when in fact it's the Seeds folks who create their own work. Let's say that Seeds gets around to actually releasing stages, rather than just working with profiles or specfiles (as previously touched upon in the thread). All that needs to be done is creating a new Bugzilla component to properly handle the Seeds stages/releases. I think proper Bugzie handling would go a long way toward ensuring proper workload distribution. Certainly no one is saying that Seeds requires releng to build and test their stages/specfiles/profiles/whatever. There's nothing that says Seeds stages will even be simultaneously released with 200X.x releases.

- "It needs a GLEP!" aka the ciaranm whine
No it doesn't. Period. Nothing in our rules says project creation must have a GLEP. GLEPs exist for "wide-ranging feature or enhancement" for things that affect Gentoo, e.g. Portage tree additions, new package managers, new ways of committing, and so on. As I said on the lists, there's a difference between a project that can be widely used by users and devs, and one that forces wide-ranging changes on everyone. Potential != forced effects.

- "He said this! Sneaky! Didn't get approval from so and so!" aka the underhanded allegation situation
This is actually a combined subset of the first two arguments. First, the Seeds people don't need permission from anyone -- not releng, and not from an approved GLEP. They're free to create what they wish, and to structure themselves with the same freedom. There was some early confusion in the first mail -- it seems that Stuart said he talked to some releng folks, who in turn have no knowledge of this, and that understandably annoyed them (some to more profane degrees than others, of which I have interesting logs), but really, they don't need anyone's permission to go about their business, as their efforts are not GLEP-worthy; i.e. do not directly affect all the other projects or Gentoo as a whole -- we can use their stuff. We're not forced to. I've heard them called "sneaky and underhanded" by agaffney, but there is no way that was their actual intent. Probably would have been better if Stuart simply hadn't mentioned releng at all.

- "Not enough cooperation!" aka duplicated work worries
This is actually a semi-valid point. kloeri brought it up on IRC, and while it's always nice to think that projects aren't competitive, that they'll contribute to each other (especially if they use the same tools e.g. catalyst), the reality is that we have any number of projects that don't have any particular level of cooperation or interaction with each other, whether good or bad. And again, until we all know more about what they plan to do, there's not much point in planning for or demanding levels of cooperation, or who answers to whom between projects. In response to this point, however, both releng and Seeds agreed to a liaison, so there's some progress right there.

- "You must implement feature X!" aka wanna-implement-these-old-GLEPs?
Carlo brought this up by demanding that Seeds implement user-specified Portage sets. Turns out that's not really the focus of the project. While the Seeds people are looking for ideas, it's not polite to order them to do something, is it? Be civilized; pitch your ideas to the appropriate people for discussion, but don't demand that something be added to a project not your own. You know how proper feature and implementation is supposed to go. (At least, the devs are supposed to.) Portage sets? So now Seeds is doing work for another project -- optional Portage work, at that? Please.

I'm sure there will be more arguments in the coming days. But as I said on IRC and the lists, new project, fresh start. Wait to see what they come up with before making judgments. This kind of instant, inflamed negative response to project creation is discouraging at best. I don't want to see another Sunrise debacle -- we lost a few good devs (such as brix) because of that.

I'd like to use this blog to give a great big shout-out of thanks to my fellow developer (and fellow Josh) Joshua Jackson, aka tsunam.

This guy just spent a solid hour -- a straight hour of his time helping me with my ebuild quiz, going over the points I really need to know. Wow, just wow. If that's not a gracious gesture, a sign that there is still good in the world, I don't know what is.

I'm now so much closer to my self-declared goal of being more helpful, to be more able to do stuff for Gentoo in the future. I love the GDP, always will. But I'm the kind of person that likes to do a lot of everything, not just learn, but see about applying the knowledge, so that's why I'd like to be a dev in other areas besides the GDP. So far, I'm interested in helping out with x86 and the mobile herd, and if I get this quiz done right (after learning so much!), then maybe that will be even more of a reality.

I had fun last night doing some testing and confirming of a bad patch that was added to madwifi-ng (the lifeblood of my connection) along with dsd and steev, as well as troubleshooting baselayout "problems" (that largely weren't, thanks UberLord -- and that's just a bit of all the ways I can and would like to help out.

And when I get around to building this amd64 machine (soon-ish?), maybe a long way down the road I can help out there, although I bet initially I'll need a lot of help getting used to a completely different arch, and not starting out with many of "the answers" to setting up, using, and maintaining it. I can do it for x86; it's all I've used with Gentoo. Problem-solving is pretty straightforward, given enough time to learn this stuff over and over again and apply experience. AMD64, though . . . whole new pickle. Once I get my feet under me, though, I intend to help where I can, where I'm wanted.

I'm now a step closer to all that, I hope. tsunam, here's to you!

Thanks to rane on #gentoo-doc for linking this. Especially the Italian one.

. . . or at least, that's the assumption drawn by this CNN article on the top 10 people and companies that just don't matter anymore. The story also lists the 50 that do matter, and of course media favorites like Apple and Google made the cut. Curiously, Microsoft appears on both lists. Unsurprisingly, CNN.com is busy playing favorites, and even as they deride some technologies (Linux, DVDs) for being outdated etc., they pick and choose from the rest. Maybe they're getting paid advertisements from these folk: Skype, Oreilly, and Flickr beat out Vonage, Slashdot, and Facebook, so know knows? When CNN starts praising people & groups for their part in the "Web 2.0 movement", you know CNN is just throwing crap around, as no one has the foggiest idea what the hell "Web 2.0" even means (answer: nothing; it's just a irritating buzzword).

Anyway, I have here Mr. Torvalds' response to this story. It's revealing, even incriminating.

Fortunately, I'm pretty sure Gentoo will emerge intact from the rubble of the tech wars.

There's a new guide now available on setting up DVB & VDR in Gentoo. The document comes from a user, Norman Golisz. Thanks to Dimitry Bradt and Peter Weller for doing some preliminary editing, and to zzam for reviewing.

All you home theater types might want to check out this guide to streaming video paradise.

I've been working on my fortune-mod-gentoo-doc package today, and after a fair amount of fixes, it's quite installable. Considering it's my first (and only) "maintained" package, I think it's coming along well. Very installable and runnable. Not responsible for breakages, though. I got a weird unresolved symbols error, but adding a closing % to the quotefile and recompiling fortune-mod solved this. Error didn't come back after that.

I still need more quotes for the quotefile (with the respective speaker's permission). Yeah, #gentoo-doc is not as busy as #gentoo-dev, but still. GDP is the life of the party! My favorite so far:

<rane> i hate gentoo because i'm out of beer

Anyway, this is my first real foray into the world of ebuild creation (shamelessly yoinked from avenj) and maintainance. Once I buy my new Athlon64 system and have a real machine to do some dev work on, I'll see about lending a hand to some projects. Of course, I still need to take the ebuild quiz, which tsunam has graciously offered to review.

Side note: is there any way to let users know that there's an updated version of a package in their overlay? Or is that automatically handled by Portage?

Anyway, I'm off to work on three hours of sleep. I'll need some good fortune to stay awake.