Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
El jue, 07-01-2010 a las 15:59 -0700, Denis Dupeyron escribió: 2010/1/2 Pacho Ramos pa...@condmat1.ciencias.uniovi.es: [...] I failed to see if, finally, an approval from the council is needed for merging [multilib] to portage-2.2 or not The only approval that's required to merge anything to an official portage branch is Zac's (zmedico). He may have to follow some rules and wait for some vote from the council when for example EAPIs are concerned but whether to merge code or not is his decision and responsibility. That said I've never seen him refusing to merge anything that was worth it. if [multilib] will be discussed finally on this meeting. Technically we don't need to (I'll explain that in another email) but we may. I'm just starting to work on the agenda for the 18th and I don't have everything in place yet. Denis. OK, thanks a lot for the information :-) Best regards signature.asc Description: Esta parte del mensaje está firmada digitalmente
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Saturday 02 January 2010 13:21:05 Pacho Ramos wrote: El vie, 01-01-2010 a las 13:31 +, Mike Frysinger escribió: This is your monthly friendly reminder ! Same bat time (typically the 3rd Thursday at 1800 UTC / 2000 CET / 1400 EST), same bat channel (#gentoo-council @ irc.freenode.net) ! If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. Keep in mind that every GLEP *re*submission to the council for review must first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum) before being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days before the meeting. Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be notified at least 14 days before the meeting itself. For more info on the Gentoo Council, feel free to browse our homepage: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/ I would like to know what was finally decided about Adding real multilib features from current multilib-portage to currently hardmasked and testing portage-2.2*, as I failed to see if, finally, an approval from the council is needed for merging it to portage-2.2 or not and, if needed, if it will be discussed finally on this meeting. the multilib discussion hasnt moved past the development stages yet, so there's nothing to be discussed by the council or merged by the portage team. -mike signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
2010/1/2 Pacho Ramos pa...@condmat1.ciencias.uniovi.es: [...] I failed to see if, finally, an approval from the council is needed for merging [multilib] to portage-2.2 or not The only approval that's required to merge anything to an official portage branch is Zac's (zmedico). He may have to follow some rules and wait for some vote from the council when for example EAPIs are concerned but whether to merge code or not is his decision and responsibility. That said I've never seen him refusing to merge anything that was worth it. if [multilib] will be discussed finally on this meeting. Technically we don't need to (I'll explain that in another email) but we may. I'm just starting to work on the agenda for the 18th and I don't have everything in place yet. Denis.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 01:31:44PM +, Mike Frysinger wrote: This is your monthly friendly reminder ! Same bat time (typically the 3rd Thursday at 1800 UTC / 2000 CET / 1400 EST), same bat channel (#gentoo-council @ irc.freenode.net) ! If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. Kindly put VDB modification timestamp on the schedule- http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_6b3e00049a1bf35fbf7a5e66d1449553.xml ~harring pgpCmBnnGNshW.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:54:47 -0800 Chris Gianelloni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 09:25 -0500, Caleb Tennis wrote: I never even mentioned any specific arch in my original request, nor did I call any developer out. So please, nobody needs to take this personally. Correct, you did not. What I find absolutely *damning* is the fact that as soon as any arches *were* mentioned, everybody was talking about the same one. It's rather funny that everybody seems to have the exact same impression of what architecture might be a slacker and would be affected by this. I wonder why that is? Because we all know it's a euphemism, like state rights. -- Ciaran McCreesh signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Why taking it against arch teams? How is that different from certain maintainer not taking care of a bug that holds stabilization of certain package by some time measured in months ? I'll tell you my answer: 'no difference at all'. You are right, there's not much difference. However, I brought up the topic because I felt like this particular situation was a bit of a problem that needed to be addressed. Yours is also one that can/should potentially be addressed, and I advise you to recommend the council discuss it as well. My goal wasn't to point fingers or to call anyone lazy. My goal was to address that if development in this certain area has stagnated, how can those of us who it affects continue to move forward? This is simply an area that is gray and needs to be discussed. There are many other gray areas that need to be discussed too. I understand we all have real lives and are volunteers. But if there are areas that we are responsible for and we aren't able to meet the needs/demands of the other developers in those areas, it's only fair to let them continue moving forward. I never even mentioned any specific arch in my original request, nor did I call any developer out. So please, nobody needs to take this personally. Caleb -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 09:25:11AM -0500, Caleb Tennis wrote: Why taking it against arch teams? How is that different from certain maintainer not taking care of a bug that holds stabilization of certain package by some time measured in months ? I'll tell you my answer: 'no difference at all'. You are right, there's not much difference. However, I brought up the topic because I felt like this particular situation was a bit of a problem that needed to be addressed. Yours is also one that can/should potentially be addressed, and I advise you to recommend the council discuss it as well. Well, while discussing what you brought up, they should _also_ consider what I said as part of the same (so-called) problem. My goal wasn't to point fingers or to call anyone lazy. My goal was to address that if development in this certain area has stagnated, how can those of us who it affects continue to move forward? This is simply an area that is gray and needs to be discussed. There are many other gray areas that need to be discussed too. I understand we all have real lives and are volunteers. But if there are areas that we are responsible for and we aren't able to meet the needs/demands of the other developers in those areas, it's only fair to let them continue moving forward. I never even mentioned any specific arch in my original request, nor did I call any developer out. So please, nobody needs to take this personally. I didn't take it personally myself, honestly, I couldn't care less. Wonder why there is almost no non-mainstream arch team people contributing to this thread? - ferdy -- Fernando J. Pereda Garcimartín 20BB BDC3 761A 4781 E6ED ED0B 0A48 5B0C 60BD 28D4 pgpOiXoZzRjqH.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
I wanted to take this thread in a slightly different direction so that the council has a little more to work with tomorrow. Obviously there are multiple opinions on whether a problem currently exists - and the council will need to decide on this. If no problem currently exists they will likely take no action. However, if a problem does exist, what would be a reasonable solution? Here's a proposal. Maybe not a great one - feel free to come up with others (other than just do nothing - if we are going to do nothing we don't need to work out what that will be). I think it gives arch teams a fair amount of time to keep up with stable requests, but also allows package maintainers to eventually get rid of cruft. The exact timeframes are of course the easiest and most obvious things to modify. My hope is that this will give everybody something to think about so that if a decision to enact policy is made tomorrow the policy is a good one... Ebuild Stabilization Time Arch teams will normally have until the LATER of the following two dates to stabilize ebuilds for non-security-related issues: 1. 60 days from the day the last substantial change was made to the ebuild (clock resets if a non-trivial change is made to the ebuild). That's 30 days to allow the package to be proven stable, and 30 days to do something about it. 2. 30 days from the day a bug was filed and keyworded STABLEREQ and the arch was CCed and the maintainer either filed the bug or commented that it was OK to stabilize (clock starts when all of these conditions are met). Perhaps the guideline should be one week on both time periods for security bugs. Technical Problems With Ebuild Revisions If an arch team finds a technical problem with an ebuild preventing stabilization a bug will be logged as a blocker for the stable keyword request. The bug being resolved counts as a substantial change for the purpose of #1 above. Removing Stable Ebuilds. If an ebuild meets the time criteria above and there are no technical issues preventing stabilization, then the maintainer MAY choose to delete an older version even if it is the most recent stable version for a particular arch. If an ebuild meets the time criteria and there IS a technical problem preventing stabilization, but the package is subject to security issues, the maintainer MAY choose to mask the vulnerable versions in package.mask. If an ebuild does not meet the time criteria or there is a technical problem preventing stabilization and there isn't an outstanding security issue, then the maintainer must not remove the highest-versioned stable ebuild for any given arch. Spirit of Cooperation Ebuild maintainers and arch teams are encouraged to work together for the sake of each other and end users in facilitating the testing and maintenance of ebuilds on obscure hardware or where obscure expertise is needed. Package maintainers are encouraged to use discretion when removing ebuilds in accordance with this policy. -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 09:25 -0500, Caleb Tennis wrote: I never even mentioned any specific arch in my original request, nor did I call any developer out. So please, nobody needs to take this personally. Correct, you did not. What I find absolutely *damning* is the fact that as soon as any arches *were* mentioned, everybody was talking about the same one. It's rather funny that everybody seems to have the exact same impression of what architecture might be a slacker and would be affected by this. I wonder why that is? -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering Strategic Lead Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams Games Developer signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
В Срд, 09/01/2008 в 13:13 +0100, Fernando J. Pereda пишет: Why taking it against arch teams? How is that different from certain maintainer not taking care of a bug that holds stabilization of certain package by some time measured in months ? I'll tell you my answer: 'no difference at all'. No. There is difference. If you see maintainer does not care, you can ask him and fix bug by yourself. In case of arch teams bugs, you must have access to hardware. -- Peter. signature.asc Description: Эта часть сообщения подписана цифровой подписью
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Correct, you did not. What I find absolutely *damning* is the fact that as soon as any arches *were* mentioned, everybody was talking about the same one. It's rather funny that everybody seems to have the exact same impression of what architecture might be a slacker and would be affected by this. I wonder why that is? Righto. I also have specific mips related issues, and while I'm certain all of the mips conversation will play on lots of people's minds, I think it also is helpful from the council point of view to address this generically as it may be a problem for a different arch in the future. In other words, if people want to use mips as an example, then so be it, but whatever resolution eventually comes to play shouldn't be mips specific. -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. I would like to request the council discuss, though not necessarily take action or vote on, the idea of slacker arches and what ebuild maintainers are allowed/can do to a package versions that are languishing due to not getting stable keywords on those arches. I'm not trying to pick on any specific case, but I am hoping to find out if there's an allowable/acceptable period of time to which if an arch team is unable to stabilize a package to a newer version, for non-technical reasons, that it's okay to drop older unstable ebuilds. I realize this is open to lots of debate and dicussion, and I'm just trying to have a dialogue as to what is acceptable and hopefully get concensus as to some kind of guidance that could be added to the devmanual. Thanks, Caleb -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Caleb Tennis wrote: If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. I would like to request the council discuss, though not necessarily take action or vote on, the idea of slacker arches and what ebuild maintainers are allowed/can do to a package versions that are languishing due to not getting stable keywords on those arches. I'd suggest something like if nobody could test your update in a timely way you should ask and possibly get an account on an arch box in order to test it and bump if the minimal test pass sounds fair? lu -- Luca Barbato Gentoo Council Member Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:54:50 +0100 Luca Barbato [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'd suggest something like if nobody could test your update in a timely way you should ask and possibly get an account on an arch box in order to test it and bump if the minimal test pass sounds fair? Sounds like a great way to get more broken packages, which means more work for arch teams fixing them, which means less time available for fixing important bugs. -- Ciaran McCreesh signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thursday 05 January 2006 17:20, Patrick Lauer wrote: But it's already getting too bureaucratic ;-) It's getting more and more difficult to get things done, more and more people / groups / herds to wait on to decide obvious things. They shouldn't. If there is anything I learned is that a mailing list never comes to a decision. At some point the principal stakeholder (the person waiting for the decision) must make a conclusion, and get to work. It works. The support was there, people will follow, end else there is repoman to force them to ;-). For example - our baselayout supports UML and vServer (almost fully) native. Most of you won't see that, but to those that do it's something that's really nice. One of the reasons that gentoo is still my favourite distro. Paul -- Paul de Vrieze Gentoo Developer Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net pgp5goZauTR0f.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thursday 05 January 2006 18:03, Patrick Lauer wrote: Exactly :-) But I guess many among us have become a bit disillusioned and try to stay away from what is perceived as useless trolling and silly infights. So things either stall in discussion or get implemented with the obvious flawed approach (early webapp-config and portage are good examples) and then take a long time to become fixed. There's still a lot of good stuff happening, but as someone else said in this thread, we suck at execution :-( I guess, the council should be more brave, and make decisions like rejecting flawed approaches. Even when discussions have not been thrown up and re-eaten again. Paul -- Paul de Vrieze Gentoo Developer Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net pgpcPZHhp4dPQ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thursday 05 January 2006 13:42, Greg KH wrote: On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:56:30AM -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote: You guys are more than welcome to go apply at Red Hat or Novell. Some of us already work for companies that produce other Linux distributions or support the companies that do. :) i know i would if i could get hired ;) -mike -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Sunday 08 January 2006 01:38, Brian Harring wrote: Asking people to focus on cleaning the tree? Sure. Generate a list of candidates would help. Blocking new packages? No... I can't say I did not expect negative replies and generating a list of candidates is at least a suggestion. But a very weak one if you think about it; It would presume that most devs are too dumb to use bugzilla or to grep the tree. Carsten pgpSXFvfSUmGI.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Sunday 08 January 2006 01:35, Stuart Herbert wrote: I agree that some cleaning is needed (and some of my packages are desperate for it!), but I'm totally opposed to this idea. I think the idea of shutting up shop for three months (presumably with a closed for refurbishment sign on the door) would let down our users who rely on us for regular package updates, and would be a massive PR disaster. Cleaning is something that has to happen all the time; it needs to be a natural and sustainable part of what we do every day. As Donnie already pointed out, I did not mean version bumps, but only new packages. How about this idea: Everyone who adds a new package, has to check and fix an unmaintained package before. This should be a non-issue for seasoned developers, but would slowdown those, who continually add new packages without caring for what they should maintain as well as those who become new devs, add a bunch of packages and hide again, leaving the maintenance to others. This would also have the benefit of continuous QA of unmaintained stuff. Regarding PR: The quality of parts of the tree is more than enough bad PR. If you feel so strongly about this, why not setup a cleaning crew project that goes around doing exactly this? Don't you think that it is pretty much barefaced to let a small group do the dirty, boring and annoying work, while those who don't care a bit can continue to do so?! Carsten pgp5SDO90yfHE.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Carsten Lohrke wrote: On Sunday 08 January 2006 01:35, Stuart Herbert wrote: As Donnie already pointed out, I did not mean version bumps, but only new packages. How about this idea: Everyone who adds a new package, has to check and fix an unmaintained package before. This should be a non-issue for seasoned developers, but would slowdown those, who continually add new packages without caring for what they should maintain as well as those who become new devs, add a bunch of packages and hide again, leaving the maintenance to others. This would also have the benefit of continuous QA of unmaintained stuff. In my opinion such prohibition will kill gentoo portage as there were no new apps and dev's will be sitting with old toys like in a closed room without windows and doors. If some package is unmaintained it's surely because users and devs forgotten it, upstream is dead and noone cares if its actual or not. - -- Paweł Madej aka Nysander http://quanteam.info | http://forum-farmaceutyczne.org http://nysander.quanteam.info | http://wiki.quanteam.info GPG key: 5861680B | keyserver: http://pgp.mit.edu key fingerprint: 34A9 B8BB DFA2 4F0B EFB5 CE50 82F4 8C82 5861 680B -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDwR87gvSMglhhaAsRAleVAKCr7yxxDUUMExfL+r5QGoC5cIaD7gCglvp1 tAjLoNf2k9WqB+D1fSnz7VQ= =1F6t -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Sunday 08 January 2006 15:01, Brian Harring wrote: Guessing you missed the previous flame war about how trying to force people to do something doesn't actually work? When it's not common sense, that every dev is supposed to do a minimal on general QA, Gentoo has a problem. You're assuming seasoned devs don't occasionally go MIA on QA/maintenance? It's not the case... I did not assume anything, I propose better QA. but would slowdown those who continually add new packages [ snip vitriolic opinions ] Thanks for calling something a vitriolic opinion, I did notice a few times, so it's a description of what's happening, but does not imply the majority of devs do so. If you've got an issue with certain devs (seems to be the case from your statement), take it up with QA/ombudsman, not the loop around attempt you're doing here. If you're after trying to decrease the unmaintained packages, like I said, generate a list _from the tree_, compare it to bugs, etc. Do the legwork, kick off the effort to cover the gap. Basically, you want to decrease bugs for unmaintained, decrease the gap of maintained vs unmaintained, work on _that_ rather then trying to force everyone to drop what they're doing and fix an issue they're already working on at their own pace. Folks *are* handling retirement of unmaintained packages, and taking on maintainance of packages already- just watch -dev for the occasional announcements if you think otherwise. To answer this paragraph in a short sentence: No, it doesn't work at the moment, and yes I'd like everyone would be urged to care a bit more, not leaving the legwork to a single person or small group, accepting that devs can feel as irresponsible as they like. Carsten pgpnK5iAULCHw.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Sunday 01 January 2006 06:30, Mike Frysinger wrote: Keep in mind that every resubmission to the council for review must first be sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list 7 days (minimum) before being submitted as an agenda item which itself occurs 7 days before the meeting. Simply put, the gentoo-dev mailing list must be notified at least 14 days before the meeting itself. I think I'm too late for this month, but want to put it on the table before I forget about it. I'd appreciate a three months moratorium, disallowing everyone to add new packages to the tree (despite new dependencies of existing packages), so everyone is forced/asked to put his energy in existing ebuilds, especially unmaintained ones. Sort of spring-cleaning, because parts of the tree look like a dump. Carsten pgpx5P5M5jnLM.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 06:31:42 + Ciaran McCreesh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 04:31:30 + Kurt Lieber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | We haven't done anything interesting or innovative over | the last...year? Codswallop. We've done lots of large, innovative changes. You've just not been paying enough attention to have seen them, and the people doing the changes haven't been going around screaming about it from the rooftops. If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start by looking into how we can make it easier for developers to advertise what they've been doing. planet.g.o? -- Tom Martin, http://dev.gentoo.org/~slarti AMD64, net-mail, shell-tools, vim, recruiters Gentoo Linux signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 12:09:09 + Tom Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start | by looking into how we can make it easier for developers to | advertise what they've been doing. | | planet.g.o? No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say rather than the truth of what's going on. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 19:57 -0800, Greg KH wrote: On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 03:58:57AM +, Kurt Lieber wrote: On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux. Gentoo is not anything more than a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a collaborative and collective manner. You cannot use corporate thinking to manage such a beast. We don't have mission statements. We don't have road maps. We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections. We simply exist. Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow decline. Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline? Pander to the enterprise crowd, of course. You know, take away all of the stuff that makes Gentoo what it is and slow down development with more committees, peer review boards, and meetings. We need to all take a step back and make sure that we're all a part of the big picture for Gentoo. You know, subscribe to the group think. Personally, I *love* the fact that the Hardened team has differing goals from Release Engineering. I also don't see how our goals could ever really be guided by a single vision. That doesn't keep us from working together to each accomplish our individual goals. Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement so not allowed? Yes, absolutely. We need a mission statement first :) Our mission: To seek out new life and civilization, and to bring Gentoo to them, by force, if necessary. *grin* -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Here are my random two cents On 1/5/06, Chris Gianelloni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 19:57 -0800, Greg KH wrote: On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 03:58:57AM +, Kurt Lieber wrote: On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux. Gentoo is not anything more than a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a collaborative and collective manner. You cannot use corporate thinking to manage such a beast. We don't have mission statements. We don't have road maps. We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections. We simply exist. Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow decline. Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline? Pander to the enterprise crowd, of course. You know, take away all of the stuff that makes Gentoo what it is and slow down development with more committees, peer review boards, and meetings. We need to all take a step back and make sure that we're all a part of the big picture for Gentoo. You know, subscribe to the group think. Personally, I *love* the fact that the Hardened team has differing goals from Release Engineering. I also don't see how our goals could ever really be guided by a single vision. That doesn't keep us from working together to each accomplish our individual goals. Apparently it does. How many huge threads have you seen lately that accomplished nothing? How many threads have people started with great ideas, only to give up in disgust because people cause a huge fuss about small details, and nothing ever gets accomplished? Quite a few. Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement so not allowed? Yes, absolutely. We need a mission statement first :) Our mission: To seek out new life and civilization, and to bring Gentoo to them, by force, if necessary. *grin* -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 23:33 -0500, Andrew Muraco wrote: I like your idea of having gentoo not being a distro, but moreso a collection of tools. Mostly because gentoo's method of dealing with problems (problems that binary distros tend to have, like keeping software uptodate) are handled in a way thats just a tad more managable, plus when multiple repo support gets added, its just another way that gentoo can be customized and reflavored. +1 for that thinking I have to completely agree. I see Gentoo as what it is, according to our own web page. We are a meta-distribution. We are a collection of tools and services that can be customized to be what you want it to be. That does not imply limiting what we can and cannot do in any way. If I wanted to make an arm-only source-based hardened distribution utilizing uclibc entirely, I could do so utilizing only the work that has been put into our portage tree. The problem seems to be that there are certain people who want things to happen, but can't drum up the manpower to do so. Rather than work harder at drumming up support, they wish to instead create a system where our *volunteer* developers are *forced* to do what they want. I'm sorry, but screw that. You guys are more than welcome to go apply at Red Hat or Novell. Hey, I hear SCO is still distributing Linux, too. They'll gladly give you the mission statements and direction that you so desire. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 06:00 +, Kurt Lieber wrote: On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 12:39:05AM -0500 or thereabouts, Alec Warner wrote: I think some people have attempted things that are interesting or innovative, although they may not have gotten off of the ground quite yet. That's the problem. Lots of folks have great ideas. Our execution sucks, though. We also have projects working against each other (or, at least, not in step with each other) Cite examples. The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that is being worked on. I agree, but it's been in development for...I dunno..almost two years now I think and it's still not released. I'm not slamming the -installer team -- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does point to our inability to execute. Really? I seem to remember a nice news story with 2005.1's release about an Installer LiveCD for x86. I also remember one for 2005.1-r1 for both x86 and amd64. For 2006.0, the Installer will be considered the default method for installing Gentoo on x86, and possibly even amd64 (if they want). I also was planning on producing at least one more LiveCD for another architecture for 2006.0... The Portage project has some cool stuff coming up. I realize that the 2.X codebase scares a lot of people away due to it's nature but recently there has been a lot more active development in features and planning. Again, lots of talk, some code, but nothing we can point to and say, look! see that? We did that!! and be proud of it. Funny. I can. --newuse. That alone has been one of the best features in portage in a long, long time. I find it absolutely amazing, as before it was a nightmare to maintain Gentoo. Of course, this nightmare was during your glory period of innovation. You can't really say well your interest is useless so work on something else instead and expect them to comply. No, but you can say, this is the direction we've decided to go in. We'd love to have you as part of the team, but if you want to go a different direction, please take a copy of the source code, along with our blessings and we wish you the best of luck. Sounds like you'd rather take Gentoo back a few years to the days before Hardened/Embedded/Alt. I guess we really should just be Gentoo Linux and ignore all of the progress and work that has been made in all of these other areas simply because it doesn't fit with your goals. I'd like to also propose that we drop support for sparc, mips, sh, m68k, s390, arm, and alpha, since they detract from our main goals of providing amd64/ppc/x86 releases. After all, who really uses those other arches anyway but a bunch of guys that never have good ideas or improve quality of the distribution as a whole and constantly distract us away from getting anything constructive done? It's great to tinker and experiment with new things, but at some point, those tinkerings will have interdependencies on other parts of the project. So what? People will need/want features added to foo in order for them to be able to continue. If those features don't adhere to the overall direction that has been chosen for the project, then they're taking time and resources away from that direction, regardless of who does the actual coding. So if I were to add some great new whiz-bang feature to portage that would only be used in building releases for Hardened, it is a waste of time even if I do all of the coding myself simply because that might not be the overall direction where we are heading? Dude, pass the pipe. I want some of what you're smoking. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 07:49:21 -0500 Dan Meltzer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | Apparently it does. How many huge threads have you seen lately that | accomplished nothing? How many threads have people started with great | ideas, only to give up in disgust because people cause a huge fuss | about small details, and nothing ever gets accomplished? Quite a few. Most of them get somewhere, eventually. They'd get there a bit faster if we booted you, Duncan, Nathan and Alec from the lists, but I guess the cost of doing that wouldn't be worth the gain. Sure, the odd thread ends up going nowhere, but that's usually when the original idea isn't implementable. Look at the news GLEP, for example. Half the replies are worthless drivel from morons. The remainder is extremely useful input. The GLEP in its original form wouldn't have worked -- heck, I knew that when I posted it for review. But it's getting there, and after another round or two we'll end up with something that will work first time when it's implemented. Better to spend a bit of time now having an extended technical discussion (which differs from a flamefest, but only when you look closely) than to go ahead and screw up the tree... -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Corey Shields wrote: GLI a third direction (while kicking anyone who wishes to run with them in the nuts). What is your problem with the installer project? Over the past year or so, there have been *2* people that complained about us treating them badly. The first person was the genux guy. While he may not have deserved it then, I think most of us can agree that he deserved it now :P The second complaint was from a person that definitely deserved what he got. He was harassing us trying to use the GPL to *force* us to give him the spec files used to generate the experimental X LiveCD. We wouldn't give it to him because 1) we didn't have it (wolf31o2 did), and 2) it would not work with the released version of catalyst. What you don't see is the interaction with releng and the portage folks, the people that are building their own CDs with the installer, the patches and suggestions we accept from people who have used the installer, etc. Unless you're actually going to do some research into our project before bitching about it, please pick another project to harass. -- Andrew Gaffneyhttp://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/ Gentoo Linux Developer Installer Project -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 07:18:40 -0600 Andrew Gaffney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | What is your problem with the installer project? Over the past year | or so, there have been *2* people that complained about us treating | them badly. Hrm, have the arch teams really left you in peace for an entire year now? -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Kurt Lieber wrote: I agree, but it's been in development for...I dunno..almost two years now I think and it's still not released. I'm not slamming the -installer team -- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does point to our inability to execute. If you're not going to do some basic research before you go spouting off, then shut up. The installer has had *2* releases so far (0.1 released with 2005.1 and 0.2 with 2005.1-r1). There were announcements in the GWN, on the -installer and -dev MLs, and even on Slashdot! Have you been under a damn rock? -- Andrew Gaffneyhttp://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/ Gentoo Linux Developer Installer Project -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 07:49 -0500, Dan Meltzer wrote: Personally, I *love* the fact that the Hardened team has differing goals from Release Engineering. I also don't see how our goals could ever really be guided by a single vision. That doesn't keep us from working together to each accomplish our individual goals. Apparently it does. How many huge threads have you seen lately that accomplished nothing? How many threads have people started with great ideas, only to give up in disgust because people cause a huge fuss about small details, and nothing ever gets accomplished? Quite a few. Sure, and how many are going on in the background without so much as a peep because people are working together? Take *any* Gentoo release and you'll see that an awful lot of work gets done without flame wars and name calling. Sometimes bad things happen. Most of the time, everything goes as planned. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:51:39AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: This is what I don't get. So what if Gentoo is an amoeba? Does it really matter? Would you rather that we dropped Gentoo/ALT, Hardened, Embedded, and anything else interesting just so we can focus on a core technology of some sort? Remember that we are not out to make money. We are a not-for-profit for a reason. We don't have to answer to investors and shareholders. Gentoo will cease to be relevant if we continue as-is. Maybe not tomorrow or next month, but within a couple of years, we'll be Just Another Slackware. Personally, I don't want that. If other folks do, then that's OK. I welcome you to fork Gentoo to do this. I'll be glad to assist you in any way that I can without giving up my ideas for where I want to take my projects within Gentoo. I respect that you should do the same, rather than hijack the distribution as a whole for your own purposes. my own purposes are simply that Gentoo remains relevant. I think it has some great ideas and a great core technology. I'd hate to see for all that to be relegated to some hobbyist distro that people tinker around on but nobody takes seriously. Maybe you have a different vision for Gentoo. If so, I respect that, but please don't accuse me of trying to hijack anything. I expressed an opinion and you took my words and twisted them against me. This is a perfect example of why Gentoo's never going to go anywhere. We fight too much amongst ourselves. --kurt pgp4Fs8Vr4Hg1.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 14:22 +, Kurt Lieber wrote: On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:51:39AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: This is what I don't get. So what if Gentoo is an amoeba? Does it really matter? Would you rather that we dropped Gentoo/ALT, Hardened, Embedded, and anything else interesting just so we can focus on a core technology of some sort? Remember that we are not out to make money. We are a not-for-profit for a reason. We don't have to answer to investors and shareholders. Gentoo will cease to be relevant if we continue as-is. Maybe not tomorrow or next month, but within a couple of years, we'll be Just Another Slackware. Personally, I don't want that. If other folks do, then that's OK. What makes you think this? What empirical evidence do you have that proves that Gentoo is dying? All I see is more and more people using Gentoo for more and more things. Sure, Gentoo is no longer the talk of the town that it used to be, but that's going to happen with any distribution as it comes to age. It gets replaced in the news by the new kid on the block that is the flavor of the week. Then again, I don't see what's wrong with Slackware, so perhaps I simply can't follow your train of thought. I welcome you to fork Gentoo to do this. I'll be glad to assist you in any way that I can without giving up my ideas for where I want to take my projects within Gentoo. I respect that you should do the same, rather than hijack the distribution as a whole for your own purposes. my own purposes are simply that Gentoo remains relevant. I think it has some great ideas and a great core technology. I'd hate to see for all that to be relegated to some hobbyist distro that people tinker around on but nobody takes seriously. Who doesn't take us seriously? For that matter, who does? You want to be taken seriously? Spend money on marketing Gentoo. The only real issue I see with Gentoo's market penetration is that we don't have the mind share necessary to continue to grow at the pace that we once did. This is due to not only our reaching a certain critical mass, but also because of relative newcomers such as Ubuntu that will always pull a certain group of people. Once the next new hotness comes out, those same people will jump the Ubuntu ship to whatever that new flavor of the week happens to be. This is a pretty constant and continual cycle within Linux. Again, I see you focusing solely on the Linux aspect of Gentoo. So what is Gentoo to you? Portage? Gentoo Linux? Maybe you have a different vision for Gentoo. If so, I respect that, but please don't accuse me of trying to hijack anything. I expressed an opinion and you took my words and twisted them against me. This is a perfect example of why Gentoo's never going to go anywhere. We fight too much amongst ourselves. Really, I don't have any vision for Gentoo and I like it that way. I work to improve Gentoo. If that ends in Gentoo becoming the premiere distribution for the enterprise, or simply the best distribution for basing your own distribution from, I don't care. I work on Gentoo because I enjoy it, not because I ever expected it to go anywhere at all. Yes, I twisted your words against you. I'll freely admit it. Why did I do it? I did it simply to prove a point. I am attempting to show that what you are proposing is not very well thought out and really reads to many people, not just myself, as You should play ball my way, or get off the court. Whether that was what you intended or not, that is how it reads at least to me. I can now see that your intentions are not quite what you originally implied, so I do apologise for it only insofar as where I have misrepresented you, but my statements still stand in all other regards. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thursday 05 January 2006 13:24, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say rather than the truth of what's going on. planet.gentoo.org/universe ? I have yet to see anything, from rants to personal notes, that didn't got there (for what I've wrote). -- Diego Flameeyes Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/ Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE pgpcnx7l89XtO.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thursday 05 January 2006 15:59, Stuart Herbert wrote: Page title: Gentoo Linux - Gentoo Linux News Yeah ok, let me end up these holidays, and I'll prepare a written request to change the Linux part in something else (Land if you want to keep the L, or I'll try to find a name we can use)... we deserve it as Gentoo/FreeBSD is at a level not so far from Gentoo Linux, and Gentoo for Mac OSX is still going on. -- Diego Flameeyes Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/ Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE pgpQhT5tU53jB.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 17:20:09 +0100 Patrick Lauer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | It's getting more and more difficult to get things done, more and | more people / groups / herds to wait on to decide obvious things. Hrm, it is? Seems to me that it's no worse that it used to be. It's just that the stalling points are in different areas. As for obvious... For any problem there's at least one solution that is both obvious and wrong... -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On 01 Jan 2006 05:30:01 Mike Frysinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even | vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole | Gentoo dev list to see. Could you discuss adopting one of the clauses I proposed in the RFC: disallowing multiple votes per person in council meetings thread? http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=11346783302r=1w=2 -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 15:51 +, Kurt Lieber wrote: On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 08:07:14AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: Sounds like you'd rather take Gentoo back a few years to the days before Hardened/Embedded/Alt. I guess we really should just be Gentoo Linux and ignore all of the progress and work that has been made in all of these other areas simply because it doesn't fit with your goals. I've never stated any specific goals. I've simply said we should have some. Please stop putting words in my mouth. On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 03:58 +, Kurt Lieber wrote: On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement so not allowed? Yes, absolutely. That says to me exactly what I stated that you said. Whether that was your intention or not, I honestly do not know. However, I am not putting words into your mouth, I am simply restating what you are saying after my interpretation of it. On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 04:31 +, Kurt Lieber wrote: That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up. S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out where the best direction is for it to proceed. They should then be responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes according to this direction. Folks who disagree with the vision will be able to go their own direction and start their own projects. That's the beauty of the GPL. Right here you are explicitly stating that *everyone* should follow the party line. How exactly is what I have said false when your own words say it? Play ball or go home comes to mind. At any rate, I had already apologized for the impression that you were given of me putting words into your mouth, however the continued attacks afterwards have made me reconsider and decide to go back and quote your *actual* words to keep from causing any confusion on the matter. I'd like to also propose that we drop support for sparc, mips, sh, m68k, s390, arm, and alpha, since they detract from our main goals of providing amd64/ppc/x86 releases. After all, who really uses those other arches anyway but a bunch of guys that never have good ideas or improve quality of the distribution as a whole and constantly distract us away from getting anything constructive done? straw man argument. Maybe the best direction for gentoo is focusing on embedded, maybe it's focusing on x86, maybe it's dropping Linux entirely and moving over to OpenSolaris and building tools around that. I never stated any opinions in this area so why are you trying to state them for me? ...and at what point in that paragraph did I say that you said any of it? Also, I'm finding it hilarious to notice that a fellow native English-speaking American is unable to recognize good ol' sarcasm in its simplest form. It's pathetic that we, as a distribution, cannot have a civil discussion of any kind. We have them all the time. We also have flame wars all the time. It's simply a matter of doing business with over 300 people with a vested interest and countless numbers of users, all with differing opinions. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 09:42 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: Chris Gianelloni wrote: Really, I don't have any vision for Gentoo and I like it that way. Amazing words to come from Gentoo's release manager. We might as well call our releases 'maintenance updates' then if thats the case. Why not? Does it really matter? They *are* maintenance updates. That still doesn't change the fact that it is a release of some sort. Our release media are simply better versions of past media. They offer more hardware support and hopefully fewer bugs, but there isn't exactly a whole lot else going on with them. Even the new Installer LiveCD images that we are moving towards is nothing more than a slow evolution from our current InstallCD/PackageCD setup. It is a natural progression more than a huge leap. Sure, it makes things much easier on new users, but it isn't exactly revolutionary. I also am not so presumptuous to say that what I do within Release Engineering specifically impacts on what you guys do in infra on a day to day basis, or what the portage team does, or what hardened does. We all have our own directions. When our paths overlap, we cooperate. When they do not, we stay the hell out of each other's hair. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Hi Lance, You started this thread by proposing that: (1) Gentoo is lacking a direction/goal, (2) this is supported by the lack of ground breaking enhancements in the past couple of years. Later in the thread you proposed that (3) the solution may be to appoint a single person to provide a global goal/direction for the project. Looking first at 1 and 2, I think your assumption that ground-breaking enhancements are dependent on direction/goal is false. IMHO any single project within Gentoo can bring ground-breaking enhancements to the distribution without being given prior direction from a higher authority. The places where Gentoo needs improvement are generally well-known, and any developer has the power to bring a design and implementation to the table. The problem here isn't a lack of direction, it's a lack of action, particularly in the areas that *you* consider ground-breaking. What in particular would you like to see? So, keeping in mind that any developer can bring a plan to the table, my understanding of the council is this: In cases where a plan requires broader changes, the role of the council is to make sure that the plan makes sense in the context of Gentoo, where context is defined as history, philosophy, and the collection of goals defined by the other projects. It is not the role of the council to cook up the plan, that can be done by any developer(s), including council members if they have any brilliant ideas. ;-) Finally, looking at 3, that statement depends on the relationship between direction/goal and ground-breaking enhancements. If that relationship does not exist, then 3 is moot: Appointing a single individual to lead the project will not have an effect of generating ground-breaking enhancements. Personally, I agree with Grant's and Chris's comments in this thread. There have been some positive changes in the past couple years, and there are people working hard to bring more about. Hopefully we're cultivating an environment where the next major enhancement is just around the corner. What will it be? I'm in favor of leaving that to the individual projects to determine. Regards, Aron -- Aron Griffis Gentoo Linux Developer pgpvoPZyPCxiA.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 11:37:32AM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: That says to me exactly what I stated that you said. Then it's apparent we're not communicating well. I'll leave it at that, thank you for sharing your opinions and put this thread to bed. --kurt pgpjVmOU25lrv.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:56:30AM -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote: You guys are more than welcome to go apply at Red Hat or Novell. Some of us already work for companies that produce other Linux distributions or support the companies that do. :) thanks, greg k-h -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thursday 05 January 2006 16:46, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote: Yeah ok, let me end up these holidays, and I'll prepare a written request to change the Linux part in something else You should also contact the folks working on the gentoo.org redesign. While there was a bit of fuss about the infinity symbol, I always wondered why no one lost a word against the Linux below, given that we claim to provide a meta-distribution. Carsten pgpMV9UKLyfL3.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Hi Kurt, Kurt Lieber wrote: [Wed Jan 04 2006, 11:31:30PM EST] Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline? Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO, leader, boss, manager, etc. (you know, all those corporate-type words that raise the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.) I think there is a Post Hoc fallacy happening here: A happened before B, therefore A must be causing B. In the case at hand: A = loss of leader, B = lack of progress. While A might be the cause of B, it is dangerous to jump to that conclusion without more than the sequence as support. I don't think I can solidly refute the possibility of a relationship, but here is some food for thought: First, Gentoo's developers are not going to follow a leader's direction unless they sincerely agree with it. Since we're all volunteers, the only cooperative work we're going to see is when people agree with a goal. Therefore it doesn't matter whether you name somebody our leader or if they're just another developer, either way they're going to have to convince people to play along. Our current model already allows for centralized leadership via meritocracy: any developer can step up to the plate and be king for the day, they just have to have a good idea and convince others to go along with it. Second, I think the factualness of B is in question. A few people have brought up examples of progress being made within Gentoo. The problem here appears to be that the progress being made is not in the same areas where some people are looking. Which brings up the question: How is Gentoo falling short in your eyes? Are you certain that those specific areas are related to the non-existence of a boss? Regards, Aron -- Aron Griffis Gentoo Linux Developer pgp1SClWDTdd2.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 17:04 -0500, Curtis Napier wrote: Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 12:09:09 + Tom Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start | by looking into how we can make it easier for developers to | advertise what they've been doing. | | planet.g.o? No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say rather than the truth of what's going on. Censored? Please expand on this, how is it censored? I thought we were allowed to put anything Gentoo related we want to in our Gentoo blog? I dare you to say something about how Genesi sucks and your Pegasos is a piece of junk... :P -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thursday 05 January 2006 23:04, Curtis Napier wrote: No, that's censored to only display what certain people want it to say rather than the truth of what's going on. Censored? Please expand on this, how is it censored? I thought we were allowed to put anything Gentoo related we want to in our Gentoo blog? It's censored in the sense, that you limit the audience. Blog's are not suited for general information/discussion, because no one wants to monitor dozens of them and follow multiple threads on different web pages on one and the same topic. Weblogs are useful for people who feel it's necessary to have their own prominent place to raise their voice - a self-projection thingie, that's all. And therefore 99,5% of all the blogs are superfluous. Also a blog owner controls the comments and can delete them as he likes (less important, since it lets him not look good, but he can). To make it short: When you really have something important to say, post it to the appropriate mailing list - and post the whole text, not a ridiculous link to your blog, most people are not interested in and won't read! The same goes for our userbase: They're right to expect a single source of general information and one for security information, but not being forced to follow lots of blogs. Carsten pgprGqPXMeFme.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Carsten Lohrke wrote: On Thursday 05 January 2006 16:46, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote: Yeah ok, let me end up these holidays, and I'll prepare a written request to change the Linux part in something else You should also contact the folks working on the gentoo.org redesign. While there was a bit of fuss about the infinity symbol, I always wondered why no one lost a word against the Linux below, given that we claim to provide a meta-distribution. Carsten I was thinking the exact same thing when I was reading this thread. Removing the linux from the logo would only take a few minutes if it's decided to drop it. I'll follow this and make the change if/when it's necessary. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 04:31:30AM +, Kurt Lieber wrote: On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 07:57:06PM -0800 or thereabouts, Greg KH wrote: Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow decline. Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline? Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO, leader, boss, manager, etc. (you know, all those corporate-type words that raise the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.) Right now, Gentoo is this gigantic, obese amoeba that just sort of sits in one place. Different parts of it try to go in different directions, with the net result being that the whole body never goes anywhere. We haven't done anything interesting or innovative over the last...year? two years? We have no effective leadership whatsoever. We spend far too much time arguing amongst ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common goal. Like others have pointed out, I think the problem is you either are: - not looking in the proper place - have the goals you want to see happen, happen. The first one can be handled in a variety of different ways, and is sometimes easily overlooked due to the slow incremental improvements that happen over time. One only has to look back over a longer period of time to see the changes and realize how good they are (as an example, I _love_ the baselayout stuff that has happened over the past year or so, it's flexible and works very well, much nicer than any other rc based system I've seen for a Linux distro. Huge props out to those developers.) The second one can be easily handled by getting out there, stating your goals, and working to solve them yourself. Like any opensource project, people work on what they want to work on, and you can't tell anyone what to do, without resistance (well, there are ways to do this, but that's for another time...) We should appoint one person to lead the project. Make sure that person knows WTF they're doing, are respected by the right developers, has a good vision for Gentoo and then let them make decisions. Expect people to adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other opportunities for their creative outlet. Decisions are one thing. Results are another. Decisions are easy to make, but convincing others to do your bidding is tough :) That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up. S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out where the best direction is for it to proceed. They should then be responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes according to this direction. Folks who disagree with the vision will be able to go their own direction and start their own projects. That's the beauty of the GPL. Ok, for example, the enterprise stuff for Gentoo? I think the only thing holding that back are getting the work done. All of the infrastructure is there to do it, it will only take a lot of time and effort to achieve it. So, gather the people who want to do it, and go do it, that too is easily achievable due to the beauty of the GPL :) But that doesn't require a great leader to accomplish. And I think our current mis-mash of director board is actually good for us in that it handles the things we need to have handled (pissing matches between developers, infrastructure things, etc.) and keeps out of everyone else's way :) Anyway, I have no illusions of this idea ever being implemented in the current Gentoo environment. /shrug. It was a good ride. I hear Debian is still looking for developers. Oh wait, they are having worse problems for real than people are perceiving we are having :) Thanks for your comments, hopefully some good will come of this thread. If not, I'm sure the developers who are actively working on integrating good things into Gentoo will continue to do so. thanks, greg k-h -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 04:31:30AM +, Kurt Lieber wrote: appoint a CEO, leader, boss, manager, etc. all those corporate-type words that raise the hackles of nearly everyone on this list. We have no effective leadership whatsoever. We spend far too much time arguing among ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common goal. We should appoint one person to lead the project. Make sure that person knows WTF they're doing, are respected by the right developers, has a good vision for Gentoo and then let them make decisions. Expect people to adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other opportunities for their creative outlet. That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up. S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out where the best direction is for it to proceed. They should then be responsible for making sure everyone executes according to this direction. I have no illusions of this idea ever being implemented in the current Gentoo environment. /shrug. It was a good ride. /spectate After reading -- quickly -- this thread for a day or two, to see what Gentoo devs are thinking, I'm surprised anyone has been taking this rubbish seriously enough to reply at length. The final line suggests the writer has no serious interest in Gentoo. A boss owns the company or at least has been appointed by its owners to manage it on their behalf. He hires pays employees to do his bidding. Gentoo is not a company, has no employees no money to pay them with. Appoint one person to lead: the Germans did that back in 1933 -- as did the French in 1799, the Russians in 1917 the Chinese in 1949 -- we have had a long time to reflect on the kind of thing which results. The community which achieved the most with the least in human history was ancient Athens, which was even less directed than Gentoo. Democracy ? Consensus ? Co-operative efforts ? Rational discussion ? Apparently they are of no interest to the OP. As soon as anyone starts to order Gentoo devs to do anything, they will leave not come back the project really will die a prompt death. What makes it work is precisely arguing among ourselves. All this should be utterly clear to anyone involved in developing Gentoo. Can we please get back to something important, like the news GLEP ? spectate -- ,, SUPPORT ___//___, Philip Webb : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Centre for Urban Community Studies TRANSIT`-O--O---' University of Toronto -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 11:23:07PM -0500 or thereabouts, Philip Webb wrote: The final line suggests the writer has no serious interest in Gentoo. Do your research. You know not of what you speak. Appoint one person to lead: the Germans did that back in 1933 Excellent. I declare Godwin's law. Can we please all move on now? --kurt pgpe1y4qc4vnd.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Tuesday 03 January 2006 11:05, Grant Goodyear wrote: Henrik Brix Andersen wrote: [Sun Jan 01 2006, 05:35:26PM CST] On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 05:30:01AM +, Mike Frysinger wrote: If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. I would like GLEP 45 [1] - GLEP date format - to be discussed and voted on. I doubt that GLEP 45 really needs a vote by the full council. The lead GLEP editor's decision should probably suffice for something this trivial. (Recall that the GLEP process is that the GLEP author let's the GLEP editors know when a GLEP is ready to go up for approval, and that it is generally the editors who work out precisely who needs to approve the thing.) that's fine by me ... although i doubt anyone on the council would be against it and it'd be voted in with little to no discussion ;) -mike -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux. Gentoo is not anything more than a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a collaborative and collective manner. You cannot use corporate thinking to manage such a beast. We don't have mission statements. We don't have road maps. We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections. We simply exist. Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow decline. Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement so not allowed? Yes, absolutely. --kurt pgpeFu6JyPJUR.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 03:58:57AM +, Kurt Lieber wrote: On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:17:06PM -0500 or thereabouts, Chris Gianelloni wrote: Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux. Gentoo is not anything more than a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a collaborative and collective manner. You cannot use corporate thinking to manage such a beast. We don't have mission statements. We don't have road maps. We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections. We simply exist. Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow decline. Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline? Do you want to be a part of a project that doesn't allow you to implement some cool new feature because it might make Gentoo slightly harder to use for some people and that's against the mission statement so not allowed? Yes, absolutely. We need a mission statement first :) thanks, greg k-h -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 07:57:06PM -0800 or thereabouts, Greg KH wrote: Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow decline. Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline? Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO, leader, boss, manager, etc. (you know, all those corporate-type words that raise the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.) Right now, Gentoo is this gigantic, obese amoeba that just sort of sits in one place. Different parts of it try to go in different directions, with the net result being that the whole body never goes anywhere. We haven't done anything interesting or innovative over the last...year? two years? We have no effective leadership whatsoever. We spend far too much time arguing amongst ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common goal. We should appoint one person to lead the project. Make sure that person knows WTF they're doing, are respected by the right developers, has a good vision for Gentoo and then let them make decisions. Expect people to adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other opportunities for their creative outlet. That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up. S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out where the best direction is for it to proceed. They should then be responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes according to this direction. Folks who disagree with the vision will be able to go their own direction and start their own projects. That's the beauty of the GPL. Anyway, I have no illusions of this idea ever being implemented in the current Gentoo environment. /shrug. It was a good ride. --kurt pgpxE9IlSPU3x.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Lares Moreau wrote: On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 18:19 +0100, Simon Stelling wrote: My point is, either you have to generalize each project's goal to a real triviality or you have to define a goal which doesn't match some project's goals. Conclusion: Let it be. Maybe we are looking at this problem the wrong way. Instead of trying to have Gentoo be the distro, perhaps Gentoo can be thought of as a provider of infrastructure and tools to allow 'sub-distros' to flourish. THere are many projects which now are trying to pull Gentoo in many different directions, such as bianary distro vs. enterprise distro. If we remove Gentoo as distro from out thinking and replace it with Gentoo as provider of tools and infrastucture, These two seemingly contradictory goals can each flourish in their own way. Haveing sub-distros, lack of a better term, is not new to Gentoo. Hardened has their own LiveCD, profile and tools. I feel this can be nurtured. Allowing the Binanary group to move in one direction, and 'tweakers' in an other, and die-hard security people in yet another, while not severely conficting with each other. Maybe what we need is a clearer definition of what each herd does? I am considering writing a GLEP about this, having each herd answer three questions periodicly (say 6mths). - What do we want to do? - How are we going to get there? - How to we measure success? and /maybe/ add a section about current devs and AT/HTs. Just a thought. I like your idea of having gentoo not being a distro, but moreso a collection of tools. Mostly because gentoo's method of dealing with problems (problems that binary distros tend to have, like keeping software uptodate) are handled in a way thats just a tad more managable, plus when multiple repo support gets added, its just another way that gentoo can be customized and reflavored. +1 for that thinking Tux -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Kurt Lieber wrote: On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 07:57:06PM -0800 or thereabouts, Greg KH wrote: Which is why Gentoo has jumped the shark and is now on a long, slow decline. Ok, then what should Gentoo do to fix this percieved decline? Exactly what a lot of folks will have kittens about; appoint a CEO, leader, boss, manager, etc. (you know, all those corporate-type words that raise the hackles of nearly everyone on this list.) Right now, Gentoo is this gigantic, obese amoeba that just sort of sits in one place. Different parts of it try to go in different directions, with the net result being that the whole body never goes anywhere. We haven't done anything interesting or innovative over the last...year? two years? We have no effective leadership whatsoever. We spend far too much time arguing amongst ourselves instead of working as a team towards a common goal. I think some people have attempted things that are interesting or innovative, although they may not have gotten off of the ground quite yet. I think for instance, that Stuart's webapp-config project is a good idea, and while I also think his first attempt sucked, that perhaps in the future it could be a great tool, especially for large virtual host places. I think it sucks that he has gotten the flack from it here. The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that is being worked on. I think many distributions lack tools in this area and we can be interesting and helpful here. The Portage project has some cool stuff coming up. I realize that the 2.X codebase scares a lot of people away due to it's nature but recently there has been a lot more active development in features and planning. Plus there is code in the savior branch to do some interesting things :) snip adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other opportunities for their creative outlet. This sounds to me like if they don't like it then send them on their merry way which is kind of a bad attitude IMHO. If they are working on something it usually is because they are interested. You can't really say well your interest is useless so work on something else instead and expect them to comply. If they are either going to work on something they enjoy and contribute to Gentoo or do nothing at all...well I'll take the former :) That person should figure out what Gentoo wants to be when it grows up. S/he should carefully consult the various stakeholders, look at the strengths/weaknesses of Gentoo as it stands currently and then figure out where the best direction is for it to proceed. They should then be responsible for making sure everyone (and I mean *everyone*) executes according to this direction. Folks who disagree with the vision will be able to go their own direction and start their own projects. That's the beauty of the GPL. If this Gentoo project fails/falters (like you seem to think it is heading) you are free to do the same, form your own project with it's own set of rules and leader if you so choose. Anyway, I have no illusions of this idea ever being implemented in the current Gentoo environment. /shrug. It was a good ride. --kurt I would agree overall that inter-project communication is lacking in many areas. I also think that people are uncompromising. Everyone is over-worked, everyone has no time, if you want thing X done, get cracking...etc... I don't think that is an especially healthy attitude to getting larger/cooler things accomplished. If there is an entity that can help persuade projects to listen to one another that would be great, but in the end what can you really do? Partially I ( as currently still a user at this point ) would like to see a bit more project management. I see that webapps posted a monthly meeting reminder to -dev, but how many projects really have meetings that often? Do they accomplish anything? Should we have someone that tries to attend most meetings to make sure things are going smoothly, or going at all? Do we need to have slacking projects that get killed off by the council as well as slacker council members? More things to consider ;) Alec Warner (antarus) -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iQIVAwUBQ7yw+WzglR5RwbyYAQK4og/+PYsiv3BsbcUZhfF1UG5RLj/OtJckNO/D B/FT4lvux06EcoyOtKlZUQTb6b95cP7UTHWT1x+HHTamwljNo1GVDFB7OXvYInLK npcL+cEe23+792sNCm4ldpN3+rhosVW2fqIBD6lHBNJ9cXhf7B+ftz+lHXV78gWB GXMSLkqtaZ3/lxLYhPHPeC6RwFtYDxTF6SnlRlsGQsr0KMb//EzIuaO5CDVcmTR9 amkajrrsBIqhTNz6xWXAF8AHNQhxQLiuRsqSqc8MV7X7/VSPFEdX8LNHYXCCdnIc YdoRNQQaohOdb2XEXOXynqOWh4VeqqfIJyjS0Edy9yqes80Isq52hudKPdwVtRrG 53zV1/jb+yXO0UMHGNGDxXshNSESvYBPOnK5jt9tekStENXjSNGQ86mqSm0SgHnl d3uOIA+bQg936+GtDeh0yCf7efTtINpREmvWpz6+E6FYZ+1AGPRGgU8xPoRi2oea
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
[snip]
Thanks for your comments.. As for management, anyone who reads Five
Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni[1] will see all of the problems
that Gentoo has, as well as the potential Gentoo has if it worked well.
[/snip]
OK granted it is a shameless plug, but this book is so on point that I
finished it in one night. Not to say that that is any major accomplishment
it's a pretty short book. But it basically lays out in black and white what
is wrong with the way things are, and what could be done better. It really
was rather frightening how very much like Gentoo the small 'Board of
Directors' in this book is.
--
Daniel Ostrow
Gentoo Foundation Board of Trustees
Gentoo/{PPC,PPC64,DevRel}
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
pgpD27FoRXXBc.pgp
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Kurt Lieber wrote: | On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 12:39:05AM -0500 or thereabouts, Alec Warner wrote: |The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the |graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that |is being worked on. | | | I agree, but it's been in development for...I dunno..almost two years now | I think and it's still not released. I'm not slamming the -installer team | -- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does point to our | inability to execute. It's actually had a 0.1 and 0.2 release. See http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/. Thanks, Donnie -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDvLvYXVaO67S1rtsRAjVOAJ99w3kjejDBM5owoRS5WaHQT1YiBwCgtuR9 hBfLXu/MgZr9FqNCHflEuMo= =IEXy -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 04:31:30 + Kurt Lieber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | We haven't done anything interesting or innovative over | the last...year? Codswallop. We've done lots of large, innovative changes. You've just not been paying enough attention to have seen them, and the people doing the changes haven't been going around screaming about it from the rooftops. If you'd like to see more interesting or innovative changes, start by looking into how we can make it easier for developers to advertise what they've been doing. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 10:05:52PM -0800, Corey Shields wrote: Where is the centralized vision that everyone is working together here that people not directly related to each project will buy in to and therefore do what they can to see it succeed? We've had centralized visions for a long while. Recall use/slot deps? See them available anywhere? Vision ofr an installer? Yes, underway now, but the centralized vision really didn't do jack for actually acquring folk to work on it, did it (feel free to chime in agaffney since it's effectively yours now a days). Where is the collaboration between groups to make it happen? How many projects actually require collaboration amongst multiple groups to pull it off? Yes, if it's infra related we're stuck waiting on you guys to move, but where else is the intricate dependencies between groups y'all seem to be seeing? Don't get me wrong, there *are* dependencies between groups (everyone reliant on toolchain fex). What I'm getting at is that the angle of blaming communication for lack of progress is daft- the issue isn't lack of communication, it's lack of _actual_ work being done. Portage team is running in one direction, webapps another, GLI a third direction (while kicking anyone who wishes to run with them in the nuts). Examples would be lovely. In any structured environment I have worked in, you have a heirarchy where everyone, down to the grunts, know where they are heading as an organization, why they are heading that way, and what they can do to help. Even though groups work on differing things, they know how those things are directly affecting the end goal (mission statement, whatever) Right now, Gentoo has it's cliques that come up with their own things, and to get assistance from another clique you're gonna have to have some ties or work real hard to sell your idea to them. It's too flat of a model to work for any real innovation, else, as Kurt pointed out, we would have seen some cool stuff in the past couple of years. If this Gentoo project fails/falters (like you seem to think it is heading) you are free to do the same, form your own project with it's own set of rules and leader if you so choose. Gentoo won't fail.. I don't believe that is what Kurt or Lance are saying. I think the point was that Gentoo is not moving at the typical pace of OSS development, and we believe that it is the organizational structure that is holding it back. Actually, here's where I'm going to get lynched- (both for bringing up anon* after pissing y'all off by asking about it less then 24 hours previously, and stepping on other toes). Typical foss project is optimized for one thing, and one thing alone- maximal usage of available resources. It has to be *easy* for folks to contribute whatever time they have- this means eliminating as much menial/manual work as possible. Immediate access to most current source so they can raid it and patch it, rather then splitting against an old version, then the maintainer forward porting the patch to head fex is a huge issue. It wastes both the maintainer's time and the random patch submitters time having to juggle between revisions. Further, foss has something of a rapid release cycle. We're actively trying to move in the opposite direction if you consider the actual implication of trying to widen the unstable keywording gap- I'm not stating QA is bad, what I'm stating is that QA explicitly requires delays built in (whether via multiple reviews by devs, or letting the changes sit for a while). End result of it is that it takes longer to get stuff out, with the result waterfalling across the tree- cool nifty package x that has bleeding edge dep y, with dep y sitting due to QA concerns for example. I've not yet actually touched on communication/sync'ing up between volunteers either- that's further delays. For example, you've got crazy/nifty feature X that must be glep'd. You've got realistically a wait of a month before it's worth starting the actual work for it. Yes, a month. Reason being that glep can be ixnayed, thus those with half a brain aren't going to do work that could be shot down, they're likely going to wait till the proposal is accepted *then* start the work. Probably pissing a selection of people off here (pardon, deal), but the point is that this notion that introducing more communication/sync up points isn't going to accomplish anything. Yes, it's required, but foss is not your typical business work place (thank god). Why has gentoo gotten slower as it's gotten larger? Because the lone wolf developer has less bullshit to deal with, they can just hammer towards their goal. Introduce more folk into it, waste more of their time syncing up with each other, more time of those who see their goal, know how to get their, having to run it past everyone who wants to be know what's afoot. Essentially, the more
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Lance Albertson wrote: Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now. Looking back at the last two years, what are the major changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder about any ground breaking enhancements. Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006 and beyond. [...] Yes, the Gentoo Council can / should set some global goals for 2006, and should probably discuss about this in the January meeting so that they can be set in stone by the February meeting. That said, we weren't elected as managers but as global visioners, so we don't really have any power to force people to do some work in an area in which they don't want to. We can say it would be good to reach that then follow progress using the regular meetings, but we can't make it happen just by saying it must be done. One example of such point is the portage signing thing, which the council already set as a global goal and for which is follows progress at every meeting, but we can see that doesn't mean a lot of work is done. We still need a group to coordinate such goals, much like what the security team does with security bugs (call the right people at the right time rather than doing any committing work). That's what I called the MetaBug taskforce in various metastructure proposals. If we don't have people that want to form (and work in) such a group then we can set as many global goals as we want and follow as much progress as we want... it won't get us very far. In brief, we need the team to coordinate such goals, even more than we need global goals. -- Thierry Carrez (Koon) Gentoo Linux Security Gentoo Council Member -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Henrik Brix Andersen wrote: [Sun Jan 01 2006, 05:35:26PM CST] On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 05:30:01AM +, Mike Frysinger wrote: If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. I would like GLEP 45 [1] - GLEP date format - to be discussed and voted on. I doubt that GLEP 45 really needs a vote by the full council. The lead GLEP editor's decision should probably suffice for something this trivial. (Recall that the GLEP process is that the GLEP author let's the GLEP editors know when a GLEP is ready to go up for approval, and that it is generally the editors who work out precisely who needs to approve the thing.) I'll happily approve GLEP 45, with the exception that I don't know how to implement part of it. The GLEP Last-Modified string is autogenerated from CVS, so it's not in the -mm-dd format that the GLEP requires. Help? Thanks, g2boojum -- Grant Goodyear Gentoo Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76 pgpZWN8eS1mJq.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Hi, Lares Moreau wrote: need to have some form of Governance board. A board that doesn't worry about implementation details; a board that gives a long term vision to our project. This sounds very scary to me. Perhaps that's because I'm not sure how detailed such a plan would be. If our goal is... * Make Gentoo the best distro 0n 73h p14n37 I can only say what a lame marketing. * Make Gentoo the most customizable distro I'm pretty sure some users with silly ideas will ask us to implement the feature/whatever. If we reject their idea, they come up with something like But Gentoo is all about customisation!!!111. (Actually, I was already confronted with such a situation in a real-world meeting, it was pretty annoying.) Also, this might not be where everybody wants to go. * Let's implement $foo with $bar. Oh well, then we already have implementational details, which don't belong into a 'general goal'. I am a big believer is having a common goal to unite all people who work with an organization. I'm sorry If I am repeating myself, but I feel this is an issue that is vital to the continued success of Gentoo. If you replace 'organization' with 'project', I agree. There should be something like a common goal. However, I don't think Gentoo has to have one single goal. I'm pretty sure everybody of us has his own ideas where Gentoo should go and his own motivations which make him contribute. So why make generalisations? Just as an example: Taken from the project listing page: The developer relations Project is an effort to recruit, train, and manage developers for Gentoo's development structure. Now let's have a look at the three possible goals I stated above. * Make the best distro 0n 73h p14n37 Obviously devrel's goal somehow supports this, as you can assume that people spend more time on Gentoo-related work if there is a good climate, but do you really need a global goal for such a trivial thing? I don't think so. * Make Gentoo the most customizable distro I can't see how devrel contributes anything to this goal. Oh, wait a sec, it doesn't contribute anything to Gentoo's goal? Let's drop it! /sarcasm * Let's implement $foo with $bar. See above. My point is, either you have to generalize each project's goal to a real triviality or you have to define a goal which doesn't match some project's goals. Conclusion: Let it be. Regards, -- Simon Stelling Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Co-Lead [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Simon Stelling wrote: | My point is, either you have to generalize each project's goal to a real | triviality or you have to define a goal which doesn't match some | project's goals. Conclusion: Let it be. Not necessarily. I just wrote on my blog [1] about this, and got a constructive comment [2], which I'll talk a little about. Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of Gentoo and increase its usability. This goal would involve a number of projects: - - Releng would work to ensure that installing Gentoo is as easy as possible. - - The documentation team would continue working to make its docs easy to follow and find. - - The installer project (as part of releng) will continue making Gentoo faster/easier to install. - - The portage team could conduct usability studies of portage (perhaps with the help of openusability.org?). - - Similar goes for some GUI / curses interfaces to configuration files and portage itself, such as porthole, ufed, etc. - - Others Thanks, Donnie 1. http://www.livejournal.com/users/spyderous/68149.html 2. http://www.livejournal.com/users/spyderous/68149.html?thread=117301#t117301 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDurQ4XVaO67S1rtsRAsMPAKDlw3hGO4IAoJeAt1Wm8GHQB59gnQCg/cjr BcwZe7U/8N+eHlv8UoeXiC0= =er6e -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:28:24 -0800 Donnie Berkholz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of | Gentoo and increase its usability. That goal is silly and oxymoronic. Reduced learning curve decreases usability. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Ciaran McCreesh wrote: | On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:28:24 -0800 Donnie Berkholz | [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | | Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of | | Gentoo and increase its usability. | | That goal is silly and oxymoronic. Reduced learning curve decreases | usability. I disagree. I see that something _could_ become less usable as people remove more and more features to make it easier to learn, but that's certainly not a requirement. As the saying goes, make the common tasks easy and the uncommon ones possible. Making common tasks easier doesn't necessarily decrease usability of the whole. Thanks, Donnie -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDur3pXVaO67S1rtsRAguaAKCissKCx8hf4t/k5rwMzcKPPWSDEQCfY9j6 txotNc7h1K+vcOw8iJEnBWU= =G95t -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 12:14:05PM -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006 and beyond. I couldn't agree more, yet I'm afraid Gentoo has grown too large to do this efficiently. Many ideas are easily marked as WONTFIX (due to resource restrictions), CANTFIX (since it would mean a rewrite of Portage) or WORKSFORME (when /your/ way works). And when a proposal makes it to the mailinglist, only a small number of developers is interested in participating. The majority doesn't care, and a vocal minority tries everything in its power to prevent the project from succeeding. What could Gentoo bring out as a global goal for 2006 which isn't part of a single Gentoo project? Things like Have an automated installer (Installer Project), Document enterprise usage of Gentoo (Documentation Team), Port Gentoo to ReactOS (Gentoo/ALT), Introduce signing of all Portage Tree files (Portage Team), ... are all great accomplishments if they succeed (note: some of the above are hypothetical, in case you are wondering :) but only span one project. In my opinion, all projects should bring out global goals for themselves. The Gentoo Global Goals for 2006 would then be an overview of those goals. Yet the Gentoo Council doesn't bring any input here. There are some interesting ideas on the Gentoo Forums that aren't situated in any of the current projects, such as Top-100 Feature Requests [1], Gentoo Binary profile [2], Gentoo Knowledge Base [3], USE-flag triggered software installation [4], etc. Wkr, Sven Vermeulen [1] A site where the community can vote (one vote per bugzilla account?) on feature requests (or bugs), could be integrated in bugzilla if that's possible, but can also be a separate site where the feature request is formed dynamically (wiki?) or by discussion (forum). [2] A profile that freezes CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/CHOST/USE/... and uses a build server to build binary packages for that binary-package profile. The project should not focus on the end result itself but rather on how all this is accomplished using Gentoo and how companies and organisations can easily implement a similar environment [3] Something like Microsoft's KB where common issues are well explained, resolutions documented and where a good search mechanism is in place to help find the right solution. Would require moderation so that solutions are correct. Could provide dual solutions: one community-written (open wiki), one developers accepted (moderated wiki). [4] Setting a USE flag triggers the installation of some recommended software so that novices don't need to search for the right software. Fex: USE=kde cdr - kde-meta + k3b -- Gentoo Foundation Trustee | http://foundation.gentoo.org Gentoo Council Member The Gentoo Projecthttp://www.gentoo.org pgp1ZnN3wBD2G.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 06:21:39PM +0100, Sven Vermeulen wrote: There are some interesting ideas on the Gentoo Forums that aren't situated in any of the current projects, such as Top-100 Feature Requests [1], Gentoo Binary profile [2], Gentoo Knowledge Base [3], USE-flag triggered software installation [4], etc. [...] (Sorry, pressed send too soon). However, having such proposals is great, but they need to be worked out by one or more users and formed into a GLEP. Such GLEPs can then be discussed on the mailinglist and sent for approval to the Gentoo Council. Now this is where the Gentoo Council comes in: its role is to /advise/ Gentoo's development, not regulate. If GLEPs come occasionally, there is barely any reason not to positively advise to implement GLEP. After all, if there are issues with it they would either be broken down during the mailinglist discussions, or they are broken down when the teams themselves refuse to implement them. When several GLEPs require (immediate) attention, the Council will try to advise where the priorities should be placed (which GLEP goes first). When several GLEPs interfere with each other, the Council will try to advise which GLEP is most beneficial for Gentoo and its community. Some people hope to see the Council as a regulating body. Forget it, developers are the brains that lead Gentoo's evolution, voluntary work is the blood that keeps Gentoo rolling, the community is the heart for which we all work. As such, there is no single regulating body. And as much as I hope to see a select few bring bright ideas, coördinate projects and make everyone's work easier, I have seen too many attempts that kill bright ideas to know far from everyone would be happy with such a situation. Wkr, Sven Vermeulen -- Gentoo Foundation Trustee | http://foundation.gentoo.org Gentoo Council Member The Gentoo Projecthttp://www.gentoo.org pgpcsHpspmPGL.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Gianelloni wrote: | As a prime example, I strongly believe that making Gentoo as easy as | possible can only come about by reducing its usability. If there is a | large number of choices, no matter how well documented, it isn't easy | for a beginner. The only way I can see to make installing Gentoo as | easy as possible is by removing choice and functionality to the point | of it being a few clicks of the mouse and everything being done for you. | The problem is that anything that is stated generally can be taken to an | extreme. If you say as easy as possible then I think unattended | identical installations for all Gentoo machines. After all, what's | easier than that? | | I would *never* agree to this, nor force any member of any project that | I am a part of to participate in such an endeavour, so you now already | have at least one person opposed to it. Would action be taken against | me? Who knows. The point is that we do not get paid. You cannot force | volunteers to do things they do not want to do. This isn't about forcing you to do things a certain way. It's about if somebody asked you to make Gentoo easier to learn and use, what would you do as part of releng? How would you do it? Perhaps you would have to make some sort of choice of usability over easy to learn, or vice versa. That's your decision. The council would just suggest what it would like to see happen to Gentoo. You're focusing too much on forcing people to do this or that. Why wouldn't you want to make Gentoo easier to use, or learn how to use? That's my question. Thanks, Donnie -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDutcLXVaO67S1rtsRAqS6AKDGtHunoKyN9xgqhU1e9ouDOcMcSQCg0JBX hhruT2HR4kqknDsXn8d4mXA= =AgU5 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Grant Goodyear wrote: Lance Albertson wrote: [Mon Jan 02 2006, 12:14:05PM CST] Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now. Looking back at the last two years, what are the major changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder about any ground breaking enhancements. Assuming that we can ever get GLEP 42 out the door, I think that will constitute ground-breaking. There has actually been a considerable amount of progress on the Portage front, as well, although not all of the new stuff is out yet. Similarly, the slowly-rolling website redesign is truly on the verge of being released. We also have had excellent modular X11 support for some time now, and it appears that gcc-4.x support is doing quite well, too. Oh, and we've also retired an amazing number of no-longer-active devs, so I don't know if it's actually true that we've added numbers. All of those of course are true. I guess I'm thinking more in the large picture of things. Retiring non-active devs isn't something I'd exactly call 'ground breaking' :-). I know there are things being worked on now that will probably be in that category. I was mainly looking at the long term flow of ground breaking progress we've made. Sure, we've made lots of great improvements, but I'm concerned that we have too many subprojects all working in their little world and no one really looking over the whole project making sure things flow together well. There's no one out there who's responsibility is to track all these subprojects and make sure things are flowing right. I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be better than distroA or distroB. Okay, so you're not happy with Gentoo's direction, but what are you actively doing to change it? (Other than starting this discussion, that is?) I don't mean that question as an attack, although it may well appear that way. It's also not directed at you, since others have made similar comments. Instead, I'm suggesting that the reason that Gentoo lacks a leadership position right now is that, at least where Gentoo is concerned, effective leadership generally means an individual who is putting in a _lot_ of hard work writing code and implementing changes. That's one of the reasons that drobbins could be effective--he had the time to extend portage, work on the website to fit his vision, and make sweeping changes to the tree. In that respect, I would argue that Gentoo's most leader-like person right now is vapier, because he's a dev who actively enacts wide-ranging changes. Similarly, flameeyes, ciaranm, and the portage team all deserve credit for having a significant impact on where Gentoo has been going recently. (Yes, I also realize that people may not agree with some of what those devs have been doing, but they have been out there getting their hands dirty, and it makes a huge difference.) Sigh, I get the impression that you think I wrote this email just to start another long drawn out debate. I know what you're talking about above and I somewhat agree on what you're saying there. We all have our limited amount of time and energy to work on things. There are days I wish I could just devote 100% of my time to Gentoo to improve those areas I want to. But sadly, I cannot do that so this is my one attempt at getting a feel for our group to see where they see us going. If I had more time and energy, I would try to do more active things. *Shrug* My feeling is that Gentoo is not advancing all that quickly right now, but that it's being maintained fairly well. More importantly, we still ensure that people _can_ make sweeping changes, if they want to put in the work to do so. I'm actually fairly confident about Gentoo having a decent future. I have no worries about people actually getting things done. What I'm concerned about is that there's no true direction of where things will go. Everyone has their own way of doing something, without any kind of proper overall plan. I know the GLEP system is designed to help with that (which is it). I'm looking at more of overall direction in Gentoo, not specific things. We all have different opinions on how things should be done and nothing ever seems to be totally decided on. Sure we have the council, but I really haven't seen any direction from them on where Gentoo should go. We have debates on the mailing lists that seem to never go anywhere. Is everything that's debated on there needing to go through a GLEP, or how do such things get decided with a final say? I dunno, I just get the impression that people fear
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Simon Stelling wrote: | Donnie Berkholz wrote: | - - Releng would work to ensure that installing Gentoo is as easy as | possible. | | | This is very vague too. Easy for who? Easy for a user who is too lazy to | read docs and doesn't have any experience or easy for a sysadmin with | plenty of experience trying to setting up Gentoo on a cluster with 100 | boxes? I think this makes it pretty clear that there is not simply one | implementation referring to one idea, but I'm afraid that these 'goals' | could be misused to force a common direction instead of having multiple | efforts addressing the same idea in different ways. I'm guessing that the vast majority of our users have Gentoo installed on one or a few computers, and are typical hobbyists. That's who I would target with making things easier, while trying to avoid regressions in the other cases. That could certainly use some research though. | | - - The portage team could conduct usability studies of portage (perhaps | with the help of openusability.org?). | | | 'to conduct usability studies' sounds great, but it's IMHO not much | more. I don't need studies to point out annoying things from a user | perspective, I'm a user myself. Sure, feedback is good, but we already | get feedback, in the form of bug reports. OK, but you're one user. Maybe you are very unusual and 99 out of 100 other Gentoo users would do things totally differently. | How do e.g. arches fit into this scheme? Yeah, sure, they make Gentoo | easier to use because they keyword stuff. Great. I'm really glad | somebody tells me why I am doing the stuff I've been doing for more than | a year. | | So, the 'easy to learn/use' goal might be a goal that quite some | projects already are trying to attain, but it really isn't *THE* goal | for Gentoo, is it? Who said we can only have one goal? Thanks, Donnie -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDute0XVaO67S1rtsRAmhBAJwJ5m7jXuhutvQmBr+5pJZOL6LX0gCg/1zJ +XPdMpWHtIA6bLg3n/7e000= =36So -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Lance Albertson wrote: | All of those of course are true. I guess I'm thinking more in the large | picture of things. Retiring non-active devs isn't something I'd exactly | call 'ground breaking' :-). I know there are things being worked on now | that will probably be in that category. I was mainly looking at the long | term flow of ground breaking progress we've made. Sure, we've made lots | of great improvements, but I'm concerned that we have too many | subprojects all working in their little world and no one really looking | over the whole project making sure things flow together well. There's no | one out there who's responsibility is to track all these subprojects and | make sure things are flowing right. Shouldn't that be the council's job? | I dunno, I just get the impression that people fear having a goal to | work on and would rather just let things work out in a random way (like | they have been for a while now). I'm not wanting to take the fun out of | this, but I feel more structure and less redtape would help make us move | forward faster and better. More structure and less red tape ... How do those two work together? I feel like they're connected -- a more structured organization will have more bureaucracy and more red tape. Thanks, Donnie -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDuuAIXVaO67S1rtsRAuEtAJ0c+WO0EGbIURhk+LQFl/sKp938/wCdFqJU i8ID3a3B/FoAq1FVFzlNjLw= =OxkM -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 12:35 -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote: More structure and less red tape ... How do those two work together? I feel like they're connected -- a more structured organization will have more bureaucracy and more red tape. To me red tape means that there are odd and peculiar steps in the process. Make the tape clearly defined, and have no exceptions; everyone plays by the same rules, no back doors. Perhaps - more structure with easy-to-use tape - would be a better way of phrasing it. -- Lares Moreau [EMAIL PROTECTED] | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org lares/irc.freenode.net | Gentoo x86 Arch Tester | ::0 Alberta, Canada Public Key: 0D46BB6E @ subkeys.pgp.net | Encrypted Mail Preferred Key fingerprint = 0CA3 E40D F897 7709 3628 C5D4 7D94 483E 0D46 BB6E signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Lance Albertson wrote: [Tue Jan 03 2006, 02:09:43PM CST] Sure, we've made lots of great improvements, but I'm concerned that we have too many subprojects all working in their little world and no one really looking over the whole project making sure things flow together well. There's no one out there who's responsibility is to track all these subprojects and make sure things are flowing right. That's quite true. Of course, I would argue that it's true because nobody has volunteered to do that job. Of course, there'd be no real authority with that sort of position, since if devs don't want to work on a project they probably will not do so, so all that could really be done would be to have a group of people tracking the various projects and encouraging or cajoling progress. That said, having either an informal or formal group in that role could still be quite useful. Sigh, I get the impression that you think I wrote this email just to start another long drawn out debate. No, I actually think you wrote this e-mail to voice your concerns, and that your motives are pure. *Shrug* I have no worries about people actually getting things done. What I'm concerned about is that there's no true direction of where things will go. Everyone has their own way of doing something, without any kind of proper overall plan. I know the GLEP system is designed to help with that (which is it). I'm looking at more of overall direction in Gentoo, not specific things. We all have different opinions on how things should be done and nothing ever seems to be totally decided on. Sure we have the council, but I really haven't seen any direction from them on where Gentoo should go. We have debates on the mailing lists that seem to never go anywhere. Is everything that's debated on there needing to go through a GLEP, or how do such things get decided with a final say? I agree with many of these statements, but I disagree to what extent there's an actual problem here. Yes, there is little real direction to Gentoo. I think that's a reality of having a mid-life volunteer distribution. Our devs choose the parts of the distro that are fun for them to work on, and consequently it is difficult to motivate people to work towards any particular plan if that plan involves not-fun things. As such, the best way to get something decided with a final say is to provide not just an idea, but a working implementation. Then it's easy, since either the implementation is good enough, or it is not. That sets the bar rather high, though, so the second best method is to have a strong advocate who's willing to keep slogging away at an idea. I dunno, I just get the impression that people fear having a goal to work on and would rather just let things work out in a random way (like they have been for a while now). I'm not wanting to take the fun out of this, but I feel more structure and less redtape would help make us move forward faster and better. I really don't believe that fear of goals is much of a problem. I think the problem, instead, is a lack of sufficiently exciting goals, and a concomitant lack of people sufficiently motivated to shepherd those goals to a successful conclusion. I think I'll stop here, since I'm not expressing my thoughts all that well. *Sigh* -g2boojum- -- Grant Goodyear Gentoo Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76 pgpSSwFcVV2nQ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Chris Gianelloni wrote: [Tue Jan 03 2006, 12:17:06PM CST] I think part of the problem is that many people are forgetting exactly what Gentoo really is. Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux. Gentoo is not anything more than a loosely bound group of developers all doing their own thing in a collaborative and collective manner. You cannot use corporate thinking to manage such a beast. We don't have mission statements. We don't have road maps. We don't have quarterly earnings and market projections. We simply exist. The only way we can give Gentoo a direction is by restricting what we, as developers, are allowed to do. The only real restrictions we have right now are be civil and don't break stuff. Anything beyond that is inhibiting one of our greatest strengths, our individuality and individual ideas. [remainder snipped] Well, that was said much better than I managed. -g2boojum- -- Grant Goodyear Gentoo Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76 pgpmJcDuGxEXn.pgp Description: PGP signature
Moderated WIki - ( Was Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January )
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 I've actually been tinkering with this idea for a whole mostly due to the gross amount of crazy crap that is posted to gentoo-wiki.com ( no offense to the site which otherwise does a great job ). However I was under the impression that the docs team wanted things GuideXML'd and not wikified ( cvs stuff and all ). Are you willing to host Quasi-official docs ( ie dev approved ) on something not GuideXML, or how exactly would that work, and I realize we should probably move this to the docs list so I'll cross-post and subscribe ;0 [3] Something like Microsoft's KB where common issues are well explained, resolutions documented and where a good search mechanism is in place to help find the right solution. Would require moderation so that solutions are correct. Could provide dual solutions: one community-written (open wiki), one developers accepted (moderated wiki). -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iQIVAwUBQ7sOb2zglR5RwbyYAQKlHBAAnd5Q3gOXft2mWicW5967Dk3Ybly/CxZw a3lHemiKAflzrvdY1ERXhR4NdQc/OkoxZQkZFBDKIgNQZIyVigJFkBlBx8UTvoKd mTH+AaCxh+m2BwppCwa9QQacwa0QY5O1OZjucaZ2aoqToCxxpdtr2HCfluNPWH4O mAZlVafORHvx/v2msziBNru0tG40aXv+VpENoYzhskRW8KUlEpHXd5Hv3iNf3v8q GJ6/b4DwWpe0D25CmcixJdHzo8Cw9WCwIMbnWDP7sYJXryY4aOk2Kvj0oyejWc/y f4bS+ujlcWXNKMFY48vCz7St8JmUgYcvbPfv2WgrzChL/1xvdEA1J0QegS1nWDOe 6Bp8rGjSsnJ+V2sOI3o/sr4fi/pztIdgjFmAe9u4XKN9YomAIQ8kspqbGOS2AW35 QO2Aj0YGdLpg41JiJAnQxf0ApnfBubCA6tkADIxrm+1DtBPUgjqu1ZBKhmAb7aUp Rlt7G7jD0moPRUpdkH2RG2sVHtUFeliMJCsJnxIVJZe9OFMMfNat068ElL/Cg74F ZFjU8aDlFzAtcbDxyT6qsYEaQCfq4jJPIXAHhxBNEf/LP+qXpjpBMtOQVO+h/cJw LgI69P44YgU/lsw1olFARtJOOu1Gu7eUyfqyYRsoHEyxLHSDoD2O/hRIgc+coP44 XhyAA+BjZjU= =ZdSD -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Mike Frysinger wrote: If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now. Looking back at the last two years, what are the major changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder about any ground breaking enhancements. Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006 and beyond. You don't need to come up with goals by this meeting if you haven't had time, but at least by the February meeting. Each group can have their own goals, but we lack any overall binding goals or direction. We've brought on numerous devs in the past year, and I have yet to see a huge improvement in QA or anything else. Numbers aren't everything. If anything, it makes it harder to maintain good QA. There's a lot of people out there frustrated with Gentoo because of the lack of QA and direction. Package foo changes a bunch of config locations, package bar gets upgraded and causes a bunch of QA nightmares. At least from an admin point of view, Gentoo has gotten harder to maintain. Granted, thats a question for Gentoo itself. Who exactly are we catering to? Power users? New users? We can't satisfy everyone out there and need to draw a line of how much we'll devote to keeping the new user from destroying their system, etc. I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be better than distroA or distroB. Ok, thats all my ranting for today. Hopefully I didn't start off the next world flamewar :-) Cheers- -- Lance Albertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager --- GPG Public Key: http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1 4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742 ramereth/irc.freenode.net signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:14 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: Mike Frysinger wrote: Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now. Looking back at the last two years, what are the major changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder about any ground breaking enhancements. Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006 and beyond. You don't need to come up with goals by this meeting if you haven't had time, but at least by the February meeting. Each group can have their own goals, but we lack any overall binding goals or direction. We've brought on numerous devs in the past year, and I have yet to see a huge improvement in QA or anything else. Numbers aren't everything. If anything, it makes it harder to maintain good QA. There's a lot of people out there frustrated with Gentoo because of the lack of QA and direction. Package foo changes a bunch of config locations, package bar gets upgraded and causes a bunch of QA nightmares. At least from an admin point of view, Gentoo has gotten harder to maintain. Granted, thats a question for Gentoo itself. Who exactly are we catering to? Power users? New users? We can't satisfy everyone out there and need to draw a line of how much we'll devote to keeping the new user from destroying their system, etc. I'm not sure of the exact solution. Its just been pretty frustrating lately hearing folks complain about this and that when I know that we could do so much better. Maybe we're just happy with being where we're at. I know I'm not. There's a niche that Gentoo fits really well and I think we should focus on perfecting that niche instead of trying to be better than distroA or distroB. Ok, thats all my ranting for today. Hopefully I didn't start off the next world flamewar :-) Cheers- I have been involved with many Volunteer organisations over the last couple years. Not all computer related. Something Gentoo is notably missing is a Mission Statement. IMO a Mission statement acts as a beacon on the horizon, allowing us to have a gauge against which to measure our progress. In the process of discussing and generating this statement the issues mentioned above, can be ironed out and/or flamed about. -Lares -- Lares Moreau [EMAIL PROTECTED] | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org lares/irc.freenode.net | Gentoo x86 Arch Tester | ::0 Alberta, Canada Public Key: 0D46BB6E @ subkeys.pgp.net | Encrypted Mail Preferred Key fingerprint = 0CA3 E40D F897 7709 3628 C5D4 7D94 483E 0D46 BB6E signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Lares Moreau wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:14 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: I have been involved with many Volunteer organisations over the last couple years. Not all computer related. Something Gentoo is notably missing is a Mission Statement. IMO a Mission statement acts as a beacon on the horizon, allowing us to have a gauge against which to measure our progress. In the process of discussing and generating this statement the issues mentioned above, can be ironed out and/or flamed about. A mission statement only goes so far. The underlying leadership has to make sure that statement is upheld and kept alive. Too many folks have a mission statement, but no one ever remembers what it is or abides by it. I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo. It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying lets strive to do this. The main problem is, too many people fear about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this could ever happen. This person would be in constant contact of all the groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the workload. Stuff like that essentially. We need a good visionary. If such a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them to keep those other duties. Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this... -- Lance Albertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager --- GPG Public Key: http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1 4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742 ramereth/irc.freenode.net signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: A mission statement only goes so far. The underlying leadership has to make sure that statement is upheld and kept alive. Too many folks have a mission statement, but no one ever remembers what it is or abides by it. I guess there isn't one driving force behind Gentoo - we have many differing opinions on things like QA, handling of bugs, ... It's just that usually Gentoo gets the least in your way when you're trying to do something :-) I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo. There was this Robbins guy ... remember him? ;-) It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying lets strive to do this. The main problem is, too many people fear about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this could ever happen. I wonder if any single person would be accepted? After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve the issues. This person would be in constant contact of all the groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the workload. Stuff like that essentially. Communication ... should happen anyway, but it seems to get more and more difficult. Another layer of bureaucracy won't help that ... We need a good visionary. If such a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them to keep those other duties. ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this... Maybe a bit idealistic, but I mostly agree :-) Patrick -- Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 20:03 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: A mission statement only goes so far. The underlying leadership has to make sure that statement is upheld and kept alive. Too many folks have a mission statement, but no one ever remembers what it is or abides by it. I guess there isn't one driving force behind Gentoo - we have many differing opinions on things like QA, handling of bugs, ... It's just that usually Gentoo gets the least in your way when you're trying to do something :-) I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo. There was this Robbins guy ... remember him? ;-) It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying lets strive to do this. The main problem is, too many people fear about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this could ever happen. I wonder if any single person would be accepted? After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve the issues. This person would be in constant contact of all the groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the workload. Stuff like that essentially. Communication ... should happen anyway, but it seems to get more and more difficult. Another layer of bureaucracy won't help that ... We need a good visionary. If such a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them to keep those other duties. ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this... Maybe a bit idealistic, but I mostly agree :-) Upon doing some reading about what _exactly_ Gentoo council does, it seems to me that Gentoo Council is an operations board. I think what Patrick and Lance are getting at (correct me if I'm wrong) is that we need to have some form of Governance board. A board that doesn't worry about implementation details; a board that gives a long term vision to our project. I am a big believer is having a common goal to unite all people who work with an organization. I'm sorry If I am repeating myself, but I feel this is an issue that is vital to the continued success of Gentoo. -Lares -- Lares Moreau [EMAIL PROTECTED] | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org lares/irc.freenode.net | Gentoo x86 Arch Tester | ::0 Alberta, Canada Public Key: 0D46BB6E @ subkeys.pgp.net | Encrypted Mail Preferred Key fingerprint = 0CA3 E40D F897 7709 3628 C5D4 7D94 483E 0D46 BB6E signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Lares Moreau wrote: Upon doing some reading about what _exactly_ Gentoo council does, it seems to me that Gentoo Council is an operations board. I think what Patrick and Lance are getting at (correct me if I'm wrong) is that we need to have some form of Governance board. A board that doesn't worry about implementation details; a board that gives a long term vision to our project. No, we don't need yet another board for this. Just a single voice. Operating everything by a committee will get us no where but more bureaucracy and headaches. See my previous email about where this person would fit in. I am a big believer is having a common goal to unite all people who work with an organization. I'm sorry If I am repeating myself, but I feel this is an issue that is vital to the continued success of Gentoo. Yup, I agree there. I think Gentoo is dying a slow death right now because of the lack of vision in the past few years. Thus why I brought this topic up because I'd like to see us move forward with progress. -- Lance Albertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager --- GPG Public Key: http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1 4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742 ramereth/irc.freenode.net signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On 02-01-2006 20:03:54 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo. Or call it proper hierarchy. Management. Probably all evil words, in this context, but they for sure apply. It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying lets strive to do this. The main problem is, too many people fear about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this could ever happen. I wonder if any single person would be accepted? If it isn't one person, then you would need to find two persons or even more that are completely aligned and have the same visions. Since leaders usually are charismatic and controversial where necessary to achieve their goals, it is hard to find two that don't get conflicts, stalling any vision to become a mission. After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve the issues. ...or only resolve the ones that you care about. Your first sentence forms the basis of the problem, IMHO. This person would be in constant contact of all the groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the workload. Stuff like that essentially. Communication ... should happen anyway, but it seems to get more and more difficult. Another layer of bureaucracy won't help that ... Call it bureaucrazy, or whatever you like. I think it has nothing to do with bureaucracy at all. It's just a matter of having communication on a high level, in order to get an overall view of Gentoo. IIRC this is one of the tasks of the council, to align teams somehow, for example. We need a good visionary. If such a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them to keep those other duties. ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think Depends on the person. Lance is just putting a lot of Mintzberg and probably (work) experience on the table to apply it to Gentoo. But ok, fine, if that's the case, gives a nice refresh rate :) (j/k) Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this... Well, you're not alone for sure ;) However, the amount of measures to take, why and what are a bit of an open question to me. I do, however, share your concerns of a missing 'Mission Statement'. It is a commonly known problem and primary point of concern (ie. Heene). -- Fabian Groffen -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 20:49 +0100, Grobian wrote: On 02-01-2006 20:03:54 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo. Or call it proper hierarchy. Management. Probably all evil words, in this context, but they for sure apply. Well ... it's like every dev has a special title - Gentoo/MIPS gcc senior integration specialist and stuff like that ;-) Doesn't resolve the communication / hierarchy issues, but makes us all feel warm and fuzzy inside. (I know I'm a bit evil here, but ...) what I think is needed is more communication. Not more discussing, trolling, yelling etc. etc. but general info. Quite some time ago I tried to get some info from all subprojects what they had been doing - security and docs replied, then a bit later I think Alt and Toolchain gave a short we're not dead yet. If all projectss could agree to deliver a mission statement, progress report or whatever you wish to call it every $TIMEUNIT (3 months? 6 months?) it'd be really nice ... (and would make the GWN really exciting *nudge nudge wink wink*) If it isn't one person, then you would need to find two persons or even more that are completely aligned and have the same visions. Since leaders usually are charismatic and controversial where necessary to achieve their goals, it is hard to find two that don't get conflicts, stalling any vision to become a mission. To extrapolate from that ... council etc. are incapable of doing real work? ;-) Or in other words, a person is smart, people are dumb After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve the issues. ...or only resolve the ones that you care about. Your first sentence forms the basis of the problem, IMHO. There are ways to get people to do what you want, but they are quite limited. For example for QA reasons you can make people fix their ebuilds, but that's about the limit of influence you can have right now. Call it bureaucrazy, or whatever you like. I think it has nothing to do with bureaucracy at all. It's just a matter of having communication on a high level, in order to get an overall view of Gentoo. IIRC this is one of the tasks of the council, to align teams somehow, for example. I don't know if the council is the right group to get project progress reports collected, but the point stands - communication is good :-) ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think Depends on the person. Lance is just putting a lot of Mintzberg and probably (work) experience on the table to apply it to Gentoo. But ok, fine, if that's the case, gives a nice refresh rate :) (j/k) troll I say we put ciaran first to that job ... /troll Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this... Well, you're not alone for sure ;) However, the amount of measures to take, why and what are a bit of an open question to me. I do, however, share your concerns of a missing 'Mission Statement'. It is a commonly known problem and primary point of concern (ie. Heene). I guess we should decide on a problem before solving it :-) Is the problem the lack of a mission statement? I don't see the need for that, we all have our own definitions what a Gentoo is and why it's cool. Trying to get that defined will be really tricky (and I predict a smallish flamewar) We already have a mission statement - to produce the best software distribution, ever ;-) Wether it should be Linux only, GNU-based or a metadistribution is a rather touchy subject, so please try to keep the discussion civilized ... wkr, Patrick -- Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Patrick Lauer wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:50 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: A mission statement only goes so far. The underlying leadership has to make sure that statement is upheld and kept alive. Too many folks have a mission statement, but no one ever remembers what it is or abides by it. I guess there isn't one driving force behind Gentoo - we have many differing opinions on things like QA, handling of bugs, ... It's just that usually Gentoo gets the least in your way when you're trying to do something :-) See, thats the exact problem we have. Its too opinionated with no ground rules. Nothing ever gets done, and flame wars just go on. Sure we have the council, but minor things shouldn't have to wait on the council to meet each month. Such a person would only have one vote on the council IF it were ever decided they even had a vote on there. (Perhaps a tie breaker type of thing, though I think we already have an odd number of council members) I guess I'm almost hinting at that Gentoo needs a single entity that's sole purpose is to drive/research the direction and goals for Gentoo. There was this Robbins guy ... remember him? ;-) Of course, but that was then, this is now. We can't play by the same rules as when Daniel was around. It'd be almost ceo-like, but the council is still top dawg. Right now, I view our group as a bunch of chiefs with no real single leader saying lets strive to do this. The main problem is, too many people fear about such a person could turn into a dictator, so I'm not sure if this could ever happen. I wonder if any single person would be accepted? After all there is noone capable of forcing anyone to do anything as far as I can tell - worst case you fork Gentoo (again) and don't resolve the issues. That's what I fear might be the only solution because of the indecisiveness we are as a group. This person would be in constant contact of all the groups and try to muck together what everyone is doing. They could suggest things to help minimize user impact, maybe try to join two projects if they are both working on a similar goal, thus minimizing the workload. Stuff like that essentially. Communication ... should happen anyway, but it seems to get more and more difficult. Another layer of bureaucracy won't help that ... Its not another layer of bureaucracy. Its the bonding part of the communication that will help. We can't assume that everyone will communicate everything they need to. This person would ensure they got in contact with every group regularly. They won't govern what those groups do, just summarize and report back to the council who has the authority. We need a good visionary. If such a position were created, I also think that person's sole focus should be that focus within Gentoo. (i.e. they aren't a major contributor for a subproject in Gentoo). This position would take too much time for them to keep those other duties. ... and you'd burn out a capable person within half a year I think Possibly, I mean look at what happened to Daniel. Of course, there were other reasons going on, but I do realize such a position would be demanding. Why else do CEOs get paid the big bucks in the corporations? :) (Since they essentially do the same type of work). Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this... Maybe a bit idealistic, but I mostly agree :-) Yeah, maybe so :-) Reflecting on this more, I see that most of the council members are a very important part of the active Gentoo development model (toolchain, etc). They need to keep those roles active as much as possible, then help on the council. I guess I view this person as a sole chairmen of the board that just focuses on council type duties and roles. I think the current council has lots of great people, but they're all busy with their subprojects and can't take on a role like this. We really need a single voice to bind everything together, but doesn't have total control like Daniel did. Hopefully I'm making sense... -- Lance Albertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager --- GPG Public Key: http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1 4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742 ramereth/irc.freenode.net signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On 02-01-2006 21:12:03 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote: If it isn't one person, then you would need to find two persons or even more that are completely aligned and have the same visions. Since leaders usually are charismatic and controversial where necessary to achieve their goals, it is hard to find two that don't get conflicts, stalling any vision to become a mission. To extrapolate from that ... council etc. are incapable of doing real work? ;-) Or in other words, a person is smart, people are dumb Your words here. I don't follow your logic, and I don't see where your statement comes from. I want to make explicit that -- in any case -- I didn't mean my words like that. Dunno, maybe I'm the loner here thinking this... Maybe a bit idealistic, but I mostly agree :-) Well, you're not alone for sure ;) However, the amount of measures to take, why and what are a bit of an open question to me. I do, however, share your concerns of a missing 'Mission Statement'. It is a commonly known problem and primary point of concern (ie. Heene). I guess we should decide on a problem before solving it :-) Is the problem the lack of a mission statement? I don't see the need for that, we all have our own definitions what a Gentoo is and why it's cool. Trying to get that defined will be really tricky (and I predict a smallish flamewar) I reinserted your first response. It looks like you changed your mind inbetween to me, and that you probably don't agree 'mostly' anymore? We already have a mission statement - to produce the best software distribution, ever ;-) Wether it should be Linux only, GNU-based or a metadistribution is a rather touchy subject, so please try to keep the discussion civilized ... Lance mentioned something about what he sees is a niche where Gentoo does quite well. Produce the best software distribution, ever sounds a bit vague to me. That's why I agree with Lance for now. Maybe after a little research, trial and error period it turns out to be better to keep the target vague. -- Fabian Groffen -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Grobian wrote: On 02-01-2006 21:12:03 +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote: We already have a mission statement - to produce the best software distribution, ever ;-) Wether it should be Linux only, GNU-based or a metadistribution is a rather touchy subject, so please try to keep the discussion civilized ... Lance mentioned something about what he sees is a niche where Gentoo does quite well. Produce the best software distribution, ever sounds a bit vague to me. That's why I agree with Lance for now. Maybe after a little research, trial and error period it turns out to be better to keep the target vague. Yeah, if we're content to being a hobbyist distro, then that mission statement will work. But, the technology behind Gentoo has far broader benefits for various things. Especially with the recent work of the alt related subprojects, embedded, etc ... its changing. Like for me, I would love to use the portage technology to build packages for solaris machines I maintain at work. We have a build system currently, but its nothing like portage. Gentoo is more than just Linux now and we should have goals that fit that. When I say we have a niche we're perfect at, I'm mainly referring to the source-based nature of our OS. There isn't another distro out there that does it as well as us and we should improve on that fact. Let the other distros get better at being binary-based. Anyways, thats my thoughts. -- Lance Albertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager --- GPG Public Key: http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1 4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742 ramereth/irc.freenode.net signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Chandler Carruth wrote: Lance Albertson wrote: Yeah, maybe so :-) Reflecting on this more, I see that most of the council members are a very important part of the active Gentoo development model (toolchain, etc). They need to keep those roles active as much as possible, then help on the council. I guess I view this person as a sole chairmen of the board that just focuses on council type duties and roles. I think the current council has lots of great people, but they're all busy with their subprojects and can't take on a role like this. We really need a single voice to bind everything together, but doesn't have total control like Daniel did. Hopefully I'm making sense.. As perhaps a good way of thinking of this, the common term used in commitees (as I have interacted with them in various beaurocratic situations) is a non-voting chair. This person would organize, schedule, direct, communicate, and facilitate the work of the committee, to allow the voting members to more effectively handle the issues arising for the committee. The voting members need not take on much of a workload to vote and serve on the committee because most (if not all) of the time consuming tasks and aspects of the committee are handled by a non-voting chair. Simultaneously, the singular nature of the chair is less of a concern because they are non-voting. The lack of a vote checks their singular power, while still allowing them to very efficiently organize and direct information in and out of the committee. *shrug* I'm not entirely sure that I agree or disagree with this solution, but wanted to give an example of what (I think?) Lance is getting at here. I'm not sure if this would apply, but in the US Government System, the supreme courts are basicly a committee (or council, which ever word you like better), the leader (Chief Justice) of the supreme court doesn't have any extra power, but has extra duties, and has senority over the other Justices. Perhaps a situation like that would the Gento Council, or maybe it should stay in the Justice System. wkr, Andrew -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 15:03 -0600, Lance Albertson wrote: Lance mentioned something about what he sees is a niche where Gentoo does quite well. Produce the best software distribution, ever sounds a bit vague to me. That's why I agree with Lance for now. Maybe after a little research, trial and error period it turns out to be better to keep the target vague. Yeah, if we're content to being a hobbyist distro, then that mission statement will work. But, the technology behind Gentoo has far broader benefits for various things. Especially with the recent work of the alt related subprojects, embedded, etc ... its changing. Like for me, I would love to use the portage technology to build packages for solaris machines I maintain at work. While I do agree with you here there's still the problem that each and every one of us has his (or her or its) own idea what we should do. Some want the ricer flags and tweakability. Others want to see one package manager to rule them all. Then there's the because we can group. The enterprise-oriented persons. I wonder ... can we have one precise mission statement without alienating a big part of our user base? We have a build system currently, but its nothing like portage. Gentoo is more than just Linux now and we should have goals that fit that. I guess some people would like to disagree there. (Not me, I like that whole metadistribution thingy, it's the way to world domination) When I say we have a niche we're perfect at, I'm mainly referring to the source-based nature of our OS. There isn't another distro out there that does it as well as us and we should improve on that fact. Let the other distros get better at being binary-based. Why would one prevent the other from happening? Maybe someone finds an elegant way for Binary Gentoo ... should we stop that person because it conflicts with a weird mission statement? -- Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 10:52:43PM +0100, Patrick Lauer wrote: I wonder ... can we have one precise mission statement without alienating a big part of our user base? To copy another opensource group's mission statement, Total World Domination Hey, it's been working for them so far, and I don't think they would mind it if it was copied by others :) thanks, greg k-h -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Lance Albertson wrote: | Mike Frysinger wrote: | | |If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even |vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole |Gentoo dev list to see. | | | Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now. | Looking back at the last two years, what are the major | changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has | been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder | about any ground breaking enhancements. | | Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd | like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006 | and beyond. You don't need to come up with goals by this meeting if you | haven't had time, but at least by the February meeting. Each group can | have their own goals, but we lack any overall binding goals or | direction. We've brought on numerous devs in the past year, and I have | yet to see a huge improvement in QA or anything else. Numbers aren't | everything. If anything, it makes it harder to maintain good QA. Why don't we start at a smaller level and see where we get? In other words, we can build the big picture goals from where our projects and subprojects are going. Now that projects can be freely created, I see no reason that any herd or any developer in Gentoo cannot be part of a project. Each project could come up with its goals and directions, and we could see how (or whether) they fit together. Thanks, Donnie -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDug0zXVaO67S1rtsRAmUJAJsHZs+tP0ERWd2Y/TpxPLvCAVWuugCfXCyC G3ppfRUH0AcSNyqUnFs8c/Q= =400/ -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 05:30:01AM +, Mike Frysinger wrote: If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. I would like GLEP 45 [1] - GLEP date format - to be discussed and voted on. Regards and a Happy New Year, Brix [1]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0045.html -- Henrik Brix Andersen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Metadistribution | Mobile computing herd pgpfLL1mTa3Lf.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January
Henrik Brix Andersen wrote: On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 05:30:01AM +, Mike Frysinger wrote: If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. I would like GLEP 45 [1] - GLEP date format - to be discussed and voted on. [1]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0045.html I am not a full time dev, so I cannot vote, but I am for this change. For the last several years I have been fighting with all possible software and OSes and even appliancies to implement/display/store ISO-8601 dates. I realized how good it is since I came to Japan which uses ore or less the same date format. 2006-01-02T13:10+0900 Kalin. -- |[ ~~ ]| +- http://ThinRope.net/ -+ |[ __ ]| -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
