Will I lose my dignity? Will you still care?

Funtoo by Daniel Robbins: A Gentoo Developer’s Reply…

I received a pretty remarkable comment from a Gentoo developer that I thought I’d share. It’s amazing on so many levels. Here it is:

Daniel,

Please DO give up on Gentoo. Gentoo has grown beyond the ability for one man to manage, as your proposal seems to indicate you want ultimate authority. Many developers spoke against your return and few in favor of it, particularly in light of your stringent conditions.

Gentoo was established 1999, not to be confused with the previous Enoch Linux and the number of developers you managed before leaving in 2004 was around 100. Number of developers currently is around 300. Please dont assume that you can come back and things will be your way or the highway or that you can just nestle back into your previous position.

Your offer to help did not spawn the momentum for change that many see now; your offer was in fact AFTER developers began work to rectify the situation. This started when developers spoke up on our internal developer only list and work began there.

We have quite a number of developers who have been Gentoo developers longer than even you were, please allow those folks to continue to run the distribution. Like it or not, Gentoo keeps running and moving forward without your vision or interference. We’ve gotten by just fine for the past 4 years without you, we’ll be just fine. kthxbuhbye.

Posted by Daniel Robbins

So, going on 2 assumtions here 1) that this was an actual developer that sent this and 2) that it actually was sent and isn’t made up (not that I disbelieve Daniel… just can’t believe there is someone out there with that much idiocy…)

Could the asshat please stand up? And then exit stage left? Thank you, goodbye.

P.S. I don’t actually expect it to happen… as the note was obviously sent to Daniel in private, I expect said developer to not have the balls to actually take credit for it.

UPDATE: Just so its clear (this is Gentoo land after all) – I do not support the stance taken by the developer that sent the message to Daniel. Just wanted to be sure that was out there… what with all the mis-quoting and so forth that goes on. (Also, I supported Daniel coming back in the interim, unlike others, I don’t moan about my freedoms being taken away or that I will be “ruled” over by some king or whatever asshattery nutjob paranoid idiotic statements people want to make about it)

So, last night (well, the early morning – at least my time) welp and I were talking, and he linked me 2 articles that I found interesting…

Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

and then

Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Hint: It Happened in College)

Okay, so I was talking with Patrick, and he said “you should blog this!” and I thought, eh, maybe… so I’ve decided to go ahead and do it, perhaps someone out there will actually implement it while I work on other things and I can benefit from the fruits of their labor

First off, issues that tend to crop up, keywording packages. Sure some arches are more responsive than others, and you can usually keyword it ~ if you have the hardware and can test it… but what if you don’t? You have a few different options – you can find someone who does, and beg them to do it, you can open a bug and beg them to do it, you can join an irc channel and beg them to do it, you can request an account on a box that infra controls and see if it works and do it…

I sumit… my idea…
Koji, Mock, and Xen.

Koji and Mock are a couple of Fedora projects that ease building of packages, with a web interface to request and see the status of builds… creating chroots to do so…
What if you took it a step further with Xen? You could then use domU’s to run the various arches (I think – this is just an idea, I have no idea of the feasibility of it, comments are more than welcome to flesh it out!) and get things compiled and keyworded…

But you could also take it a step further. You could integrate it into Bugzilla as well, perhaps even submitting ebuilds themselves to be tested to the build machine(s). Automatically submit bugs for keywording requests including the logs and possibly the package(s) as well so that rather than having the developer keyword it on his machine, he can install the binary package, and USE the program to see if it works without waiting for the package to compile…

Another usage would be… BINHOST – Gentoo’s portage DOES support installing from binary packages, and its quite easy to do so as long as you keep everything built with the same settings as whatever the BINHOST uses. So these packages could be synced somewhere for *anyone* to download and use as well. Which would give the packages more testing (since sometimes a developer of an arch might have no idea what to do to even test the package, but a user out there might want to – might even have already keyworded it on their machine and are already using it but hadn’t tested it. Along with the web interface, you could perhaps submit that you use the package, and any issues with it – if there are any bugs associated with it, these comments would get forwarded to the appropriate bug….

Thoughts? Comments?

Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL, Developer of the World’s Most Popular Open Source Database

Interesting – Sun already has PostgreSQL, wonder why they want MySQL as well…

(hat tip drac who unfortunately, I don’t have a link for)

J5’s Blog » [ANNOUNCE] D-Bus 1.1.3 (1.2.0RC1) – “Quit nagging, it’s comming ” released
Woot… the release note that I’ve been waiting for… so I go to update it in cvs… and forgot to install cvs on this machine. Should be finished any minute now and I’ll be checking the tree out, hopefully, this should be in the tree tonight, I just need to verify all the patches that I’ve been using have been applied, I saw that quite a few from fdo’s bugzilla were, so we will see. Quite a few goodies in this release.

Update: This is now in Gentoo CVS (and should be on the mirrors by now) – Please test!
Also, for clarification, yes I know that dbus is in git – I meant the gentoo-x86 cvs tree that we Gentoo dev’s use to commit our ebuilds