Hi guys. Sorry that I did not reply yesterday, I had a presentation to prepare for today :).
I actually moved to a new place already. I am in Switzerland at the moment (Geneva/Lausanne, anybody around?), starting a new postdoc position (somebody might remember my email to -core or -dev some time ago). I am getting back up to speed, however I am still in much flux and everything official takes soo long in Swiss :(. Pluss the stress of starting new work (and getting all the equipment together :))... There are a few points to address, so I'll structure my reply: 1. Anyway, as far as the leadership goes, I have been a lead of the sci herd ever since I created it (few eyars already, was that really that long ago? :)). Unfortunately things were rather quiet lately and, as I am not completely "on" yet, I am willing to give the leadership off to somebody who will have enough time on his hands. That, or at least I think we should have an active co-lead or may be even some more involved structure. Well, lets start with a co-lead first, so that we get at least somehting done :). 2. It would be good to have more devs involved in Scientific Gentoo. I can honestly say, that it surpassed my original expectations (it started out as a single category with a herd attached) and seems to have attained a status of an important project at the intersection of science and Linux. Looks like we have people recommending others to run Gentoo because of science apps we carry. Well, at least I saw few reports to that effect some time ago :). I used to put out calls for new/interested devs to help Scientific Gentoo, when I was more active, and the responce was rather positive. However recently I did not have enough time to devote to training of new devs, so that slipped by. I think it would be usefull to reinstate that initiative, but first we need to get a head-count of who feels like doing the training. Should we have a 1 year as a dev requirement for the trainers? (not the trainees of course! They are even better picked up from science than from Linux althogether :)) I would think so, given complexity of Gentoo nowadays and that last thing we want to do is to screw our comprehension by scientific community :). 3. Blas/lapack move. Large part of it has been performed, new ebuild are in portage like for ages now. In fact so long, that I no longer feel we can just pick up from the point it was left at, but rather do another round of retesting (or even rethinking the concept) first. The part it staled at was to move all the dependant packages to a new blas/lapack system. I started adjusting some of the ebuilds a year or so ago, but I did not have that much time back then and did not want to step on the toyes of maintainers of these packages. I'll try to check the situation with blas/lapack ebuilds soon and then issue another call for adjustments (for dependant packages). Can we please get those adjustment done this time? Pretty please ;). Then (and only after that) the old versionf of blas/lapack will be masked and, eventually, removed. The bug tracing the status of blas/lapack move is #30453. Should we may be start a new, clean tracker bug? The mentioned one is pretty long, but it has a lot of essential info. 4. I am for the regular meetings. It is probably good to try to settle on some time (may be easier if we go through with the "more involved unfrastructure", but the real need for it will only be there if we get 2x more devs than we have now (I mean in Scientific Gentoo)). However I agree, that reviving [email protected] mailing list is a more realistic (and less stressful) option. In fact, everything is setup, lets just use it! (To give an example, I am CC'ng this message to that list. Sorry for dups, if you receive it twice). 5. Anything else? George -- [email protected] mailing list
