| From the department of wasting time |
[Jul. 10th, 2008|12:25 pm] |
This is shiny but pretty much useless if you ignore the geek factor.. Not one to ignore the geek factor I've made a quick movie of arbor commits :)
There's movies of the Apache, Postgres, Eclipse and Python projects available on the authors homepage. |
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| Never heard of Exherbo? You will in the future |
[Jun. 7th, 2008|04:21 pm] |
The last couple of days I've seen a bunch of links to 'Never Heard of Exherbo? Never Will, Either.' pop up all over the internet and people have asked me about it on freenode as well.
The short answer is that yes, I've seen it and I've even made a couple of comments on that website. (Their comment system is horrible by the way and removes any line breaks making longer comments a big mess). But since I keep getting comments about it I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions from that article and some of the comments.
- Exherbo is not intended as a user distribution
- Exherbo is not currently intended to be used by users but we're only concentrating about the current status. Saying that Exherbo is not intended as a user distribution completely misses the fact that we only have a very small part of the distribution at this point and clearly can't start to support users in this stage of development.
- We play only with our friends
- That's not really true either. We state fairly clearly that we don't want users at this point in time as it would be a waste of everybodys time but quite a few developers from different distributions have shown interest in what we're doing and are actively following our development to see if there's anything they might benefit from. A good example of this is Gentoo bug 33544 where Gentoo apparently wants to copy some of our code for a future EAPI. Making our code available to other developers is a basic part of what open source is all about and we're doing so even if we're not yet ready for users.
- Usability, error checking and formatting comes from user requests
- A huge part of the user requests I've seen during the years as an open source developer haven't been for any of those things - quite the opposite in fact. Many users keep requesting that we (open source developers that is) skip tests, ignore errors and so forth so silly things like that doesn't get in the way of installing applications. Never mind that the exact same users later complain that the applications doesn't work (big surprise there..). We definitely don't want any of that advice even if users believes it's good advice. We're well aware of how to build reliable software that's easy to use and make a big point of that already.
It's really not that we don't want users or developers - it's just that the time for that hasn't come yet and I wish people writing articles and commentaries about Exherbo would understand that or at least ask us about our intentions before spreading these misconceptions any further. Hopefully I've made it a little more clear now. |
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| Back from FOSS Aalborg |
[Jun. 6th, 2008|07:57 pm] |
I got back from the FOSS Aalborg conference yesterday evening after spending a couple of days with several friends from the Exherbo project and enjoying the conference immensely. The talks were interesting and the speakers were quite good as well. And for my own talk about Genesis I got lots of positive feedback throughout the day and people seemed to like my ideas quite a bit. Slides for my presentation is available now and the video will be available on the FOSS Aalborg website as soon as the video editing and conversion is finished. The slides are probably not very interesting without the video however.
I found Martin von Haller Grønbæks talk about the legal aspects of reverse engineering quite interesting as well as that's a fairly important issue to software developers in general. He was talking about danish law that's derived from the EU directives so it should (mostly) be the same in the rest of the european union as I understand it. His points can be summed up like: "reverse engineering is legal if it's used to improve interoperability and it's needed due to lack of documentation" (my words, don't blame Martin for oversimplifying things this much). He kept mentioning interoperability frequently throughout his talk which made me think of companies using reverse engineering and whether they did it to support interoperability or not.
This of course lead me to ask how much you can stretch the interoperability paradigm as antivirus companies are among the few types of companies using reverse engineering in their day to day operations. This question (while very serious as I like to tinker with reversing malicious code myself from time to time) made everybody laugh and Martins very clear answer was that it's not legal to use reverse engineering for anti-virus purposes as that's not an interoperability issue (more like the opposite I guess). This is an interesting issue for many people and/or companies and it might be worth contacting a lawyer if you think you can possibly be hit by this as Martins answer is definitely not to be taken as legal advice - I'm sure there can be all kinds of details making it less black and white than the very general situation (completely void of any details) that I sketched in my question. |
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| Guess which Linux distribution kloeri is using |
[May. 23rd, 2008|10:29 pm] |
Since nobody guessed it last time I played this game on my blog I'm going to give a few more hints :)
1. The distribution is still very experimental and rough around the corners.
2. It supports exactly the architectures I need.
2. There was recently quite a bit of talk about it on sites such as Slashdot, Linux Weekly News, The Register and several other big news sites.
3. It's advertised as not working at all and the developers don't seem to want any users yet.
4. One of it's features is going to be a new initsystem.
Can you guess the name? :)
More seriously, the response to my announcement was far bigger than expected and in some ways I'd rather have been without all that fuss. On the other hand it was awesome getting so much positive feedback and seeing a huge amount of interest in what is really just a few developers dream.
If at some point other people than ourselves can benefit from our work that's great of course but we'd do all this work even if there wasn't the faintest chance of ever getting any users. And on the subject of (possible future) users - please read everything you can on our mailing list archives and feel free to ask further questions on irc. But *please* don't grab too much of our time as we really need to focus on our development work instead of discussing how it might be possible to install Exherbo in the future or some other thing that's not currently a focus at all. |
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| Announcing Exherbo! |
[May. 19th, 2008|04:50 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  excited | ] |
Open source is said to be about scratching your particular itches - and I've
been working my butt off for the last several months along with a small,
select team of developers doing just that.
All our hard work have so far resulted in a very experimental linux
distribution that's definitely not ready for users yet (or even developers)
but does have quite a few interesting ideas and features.
In particular we've been working on and continue to focus on:
Packaging format:
- our current package format is somewhat similar in idea to Gentoos ebuilds but is completely incompatible due to the many technical differences.
- our naming of variables, phases and libraries describes the concepts much better compared to Gentoo.
- we have several new phases allowing much better control of the build process.
- our options handling is much improved compared to the USE flags of Gentoo.
- the default functions provided for various phases removes the need for explicit phase functions from most packages.
- we're not afraid of huge changes to the package format.
Toolchain:
- Most distributions sucks badly in the way they handle crosscompiling, multilib and other fun stuff
- work is ongoing on this topic and there'll probably be huge changes but we have a fairly decent idea how to handle all the multi stuff sanely.
Initsystem:
- We're writing a completely new initsystem free of all the weird, useless legacy stuff and based on user needs in the 21st century.
- I'll be talking about this at the FOSS Aalborg conference in Aalborg, Denmark on june 4th. Slides will be made available after the conference.
Management and politics:
- we take a no bullshit approach to our work and aren't afraid to tell each other when something sucks and take it at face value.
- we keep the developer team small on purpose - there's much less bullshit this way and we can all agree on the direction needed for Exherbo.
We have lots of additional features and ideas for the future planned that we
haven't even started on yet so Exherbo is expected to be in turmoil for quite
a while yet. That said I think we have an interesting base already and
interested people are encouraged to take a look at it. Just don't expect
anything to work (seriously!). Ongoing development is pretty fast and we're
still at a stage where we happily break everything without second thoughts to
installed Exherbo systems or users.
More info:
More info is available on http://www.exherbo.org. More specific questions can
be asked in #exherbo on the freenode irc network (point your irc client at
chat.freenode.net) or by /msg'ing me directly (I'm using the nick 'kloeri') or
emailing me at kloeri@exherbo.org. Please keep in mind that I'm usually fairly
busy and might take a little while before I'm able to answer your questions. |
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| Gentoo Foundation reinstated, Gentoo Council goes out with a fizzle |
[May. 16th, 2008|09:29 am] |
Some important things for Gentoo happened over the last few days. First of all we have a bit of good news as all the paperwork for the Gentoo Foundation was filed and approved a few days ago, see Gentoo Foundation, INC. From my understanding the Gentoo Foundation was administratively dissolved due to required paperwork not being filed over quite some time but it's good to see that this problem is now resolved.
This news is unfortunately followed by a minor Council crisis. Last weeks council meeting that they decided to postpone some items to this week. This was decided by the council at last weeks meeting and also mentioned in the meeting summary that was sent out. The blemish comes from only two council members showing up for the meeting yesterday when GLEP 39 requires minimum 50% attendance (that would be 4 council members as the full council has 7 members). According to GLEP 39 this situation calls for a new election for all places.
In short: the Council has invalidated itself by the poor attendance yesterday.
Now, some people are already trying to avoid a new election but it's my hope that the letter and intention of GLEP 39 will be followed and that this situation will serve as a bit of a wake-up call for future councils and that their meeting discipline will be better. The low attendance yesterday is extraordinaire of course but it's not uncommon for (some) council members to be an hour late for council meetings. Let's hope that this will improve and some good comes from this silly situation after all. |
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| Planet exgentoo is live! |
[May. 14th, 2008|07:47 pm] |
Due to a recent policy update on Planet Larry (a planet run by Steve Dibb for gentoo users) former gentoo developers are no longer allowed to be syndicated there. So to provide a central place for former gentoo developers to talk about gentoo and other things on their mind Alexander Færøy have now started Planet Exgentoo - the planet for people not allowed on either Planet Larry or Planet Gentoo.
There's only a few users as it's only just started but I hope many people will join and make their voice heard on interesting and/or important issues. Just comment below or contact me on freenode if you're a former gentoo developer and want to be added to Planet Exgentoo.
Note: I know that the link to the Planet Larry policy update is broken - Steve Dibb is aware of it but I don't know if he plans to fix it. You can find a copy of the announcement on the archive though. |
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| Good news, everyone! |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|11:11 pm] |
I just had to use that phrase :)
So.. This news isn't actually for everybody - I suspect it'll only be interesting for a small part of my readers. And it's not so much news as recounting some experiences I've had lately with Gentoo Forums and some small bits of advice that I can offer based on that.
A few weeks ago some user claimed in a largish forums thread that genone (Marius Mauch) had absolutely no idea how portage worked and that he should let other people who did take over his job as portage developer. This is fairly silly as Marius have been working on portage for at least 4 years now and he in turn asked who should take over his job. A well-known paludis user suggested that the paludis developers should take over and this post was quickly reported as trolling.
I saw this as clearly being a joke (nobody knowing the portage and paludis teams would ever seriously suggest the paludis developers should work on portage or vise versa) and stated so on the complaint thread. That was my first clear offence on gentoo forums and I got a warning for replying to the complaint thread.
It should probably be noted that I help run a fairly big irc chat network called freenode and that we actively encourage users to help explain simple misunderstandings and smooth out/resolve possible conflicts. Freenode calls this catalysing and I thought I was doing everybody a favour by explaining how it was a joke.
My second offence occured today when I abused the 'report' function. Some user had suggested that the report function be changed in such a way that not just the post being reported but every post by the user would be marked as reported. This looked to me like a seriously bad idea that would make it much easier to harass other users - 'report' a random post (even if 2 years old) and every post by that user would now look like they'd been reported. In fact, I thought this idea was bad enough that it needed the forums admins/moderators attention so they could reject it as suggested and hopefully have a discussion about the purpose of that idea - and maybe implement a different meassure that would fit the purpose without leaving such potential for abuse.
And as one forums admin/moderator told me later: rules are rules. And as this was my second offence I got banned from forums.
Now, I'm perfectly happy that they banned me. As a forums user I was a guest in their house and have to respect their rules. And even though I can't say I understand how my behaviour have been bad it's clearly unwanted and I fully support the forums admins hard work to get rid of troublemakers. I even went as far as requesting to be banned after my first offence as I was convinced that I'd behave bad again in my folly, not understanding the rules.
To sum things up: I completely support my ban as I've somehow behaved badly on several occasions and I'm quite happy to see that no favours was done just because of my status as a retired gentoo developer or similar. Keep up the good work and ban people that keep breaking the rules as I did.
And finally a few bits of advice as promised in the beginning.
1. Never, ever try to explain misunderstandings when a post is reported and if you really need to explain how it was all just a misunderstanding create a completely new thread with no link at all to the post containing the misunderstanding. It's much less confusing for forums admins if you create a new thread rather than replying to the thread in question (I was told this by one of the forums admins/moderators so I trust this advice to be accurate and good).
2. Always consult a forums admin/moderator off forums before using the report function. This way you know for sure if the situation calls for using that feature or it will be an act of abuse if you do so.
If you follow those two simple advises I hope you'll be able to stay out from trouble and will be able to enjoy using the gentoo forums for years to come. |
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| Goodbye Gentoo |
[Oct. 14th, 2007|10:01 pm] |
So... I think this has been coming ever since I retired as a Gentoo Developer. I've become more and more happy about that decision (mostly because I feel more and more at odds with Gentoo and the developer community surrounding it) so I finally took the plunge a couple of weeks ago and removed Gentoo from my laptop.
All my other boxes will follow slowly as I have time to reinstall them. I have no ill feelings towards Gentoo but simply see it as a project that's failed in many ways and I most certainly wish the new council luck with bringing Gentoo back on track.
And for the curious among you: no, I'm not going to spoil the surprise by telling you what I'm using now. I'd much rather see you giving some serious thoughts to what's wrong with Gentoo and how to fix it. Heck, even if you come to the conclusion that I'm just a crazy old guy at least you've given it some thought :) |
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| Linuxparty.dk, get your tickets while they last! |
[Sep. 25th, 2007|11:07 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
Ever since I retired from Gentoo I've been staying out of the spotlight (Ok, I might not have been completely successful at that..) which also means that I haven't been blogging. I think it's time to change that so I'll try to blog a bit about what I'm doing now over the next couple months or so.
First up is this years linuxparty in Roskilde, Denmark. It's only a month away and there's plenty of free tickets left. The party starts friday afternoon and ends sunday and will have quite a few interesting talks. I'm doing a talk about the Freenode network and another talk about bug reports together with Sune Vuorela.
The current program also includes talks on Penetration testing, Amarok 2 and KDE 4 among others. Make sure to register soon if you're interested in any of these talks or want to meet some of the local open source heroes.
And if you want to have a talk on your favorite open source subject I'm sure that can be fitted in as well. Just e-mail linuxparty or visit the #linuxparty.dk irc channel on irc://irc.freenode.net. |
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[Jul. 14th, 2007|03:36 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
For those of you that don't follow the gentoo-dev mailinglist there's some insights to be gained from this active thread on Gentoo management. I've been somewhat outspoken against this proposal although I've mostly talked about it in semi-random irc channels instead of actively participating on the mailing list.
Personal opinions aside I'm sure the Council members are doing what they believe are in the best interests of Gentoo but some of their responses to critique still reminded me of this old quote:
"Politicians logic:
We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore we must do it."
--Quote from the "Party games" episode of "Yes Minister". :)
And now back to playing with iwlwifi. |
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| My last mail to gentoo-dev mailinglist? |
[Jul. 12th, 2007|10:33 pm] |
Is this going to be my last mail ever to gentoo-dev mailinglist?
For those not in the know the gentoo-dev mailinglist is the primary list for development oriented discussions in Gentoo. Gentoo have always prided itself on being a community oriented project where user contributions are worth just as much as contributions by official developers. User contributions aren't guaranteed to go into the portage tree, documentation etc. of course but at least Gentoo values the efforts by it's user community to improve the distribution and have several projects like Bugday and User Relations towards that goal.
But according to this post users are likely to be degraded to "second class" citizens in the future in which case I refuse to take part in any discussions on the -dev mailinglist anymore. I sincerely hope the council rejects this suggestion but realise that I have no influence on important decisions after retiring. Let's all hope that the council makes a sane decision instead of getting scared by the flamefests that occasionally infests the mailinglist and make a (in my opinion) very bad decision. |
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| Responses to my retirement and a few thoughts on what's wrong in Gentoo |
[Jun. 3rd, 2007|11:15 pm] |
It's been 4-5 days since I announced my retirement from Gentoo but I'm still getting mails and messages on IRC wishing me luck and in many cases asking for further information on why I retired. I've told some of those people that I would probably follow up with a bit more indepth blog post so that's what I'm trying to do now that I've cleared my head and have taken care of most of the things I still needed to do like given whatever advice I can to my former teams.
What's wrong with Gentoo..
I've contributed to Gentoo in two major areas. One being the technical side of things as an ebuild maintainer and arch team member. As an ebuild maintainer things have always been pretty calm and there's been no major problems (a few annoying technical issues but nothing related to my way of maintaining ebuilds). As an arch maintainer it's been very different and Gentoo have established a culture where it's legitimate to accuse arch teams of breaking the tree or packages all the time - especially if they get a bit behind on stabling packages. Now, arch teams have a lot of concerns to take care of and they're constantly trying to test an ever changing portage tree so they can stable new versions. For some reason many ebuild maintainers don't believe this takes time (and apparently don't understand just how many packages most arch teams handle).
The other major area I've contributed in is what I'd like to call the community area. I'm bundling up all my work with the Bugday project, my work as a Gentoo Group Contact for freenode and all my work in Developer Relations (Recruiting, conflict resolution and otherwise) and even my work as a member of the Gentoo Council. As for the Bugday project most developers simply don't pay attention to it at all despite repeated cries for more developers and needing more help maintaining ebuilds.
But the real problems start when we get to Devrel and Council work. Here we have two teams with a lot of power that's trusted to solve conflicts and decide on many important decisions. Members of the Council are elected on a yearly basis where as Devrel works like most other teams with members leaving and joining on a fairly random basis. But one thing they have in common is that just about every decision they make is met with cries of being unfair, stupid, wrong or other negative outburst. Being the lead of Devrel for quite a while and quite active in conflict resolution I have subjected myself to even more attacks and outbursts like that and that's what eventually led me to retire. But there's some important lessons to be learned from this I think.
Here's a short list of things that really have to stop:
- Being disrespectful towards other developers or teams because you think they're being too slow
- Being disrespectful towards other developers because you don't agree with them - disagreement is fine and something that can be solved where as being disrespectful is plain wrong and only makes the situation worse
- Distrusting other people - there's a big tendency of thinking that some other people have hidden agendas that's steering all their decisions and work and that they must be lying if they say otherwise
- Threatening other people with devrel or proctors - try to work out your differences and accept that some people might see things a different way than you do yourself
The above list describes some pretty broad issues but they are very fundamental issues that I've seen on a pretty much daily basis. I've asked more people than I care to remember to reconsider their ways but those issues still play a very big part in Gentoo in my opinion.
Random responses to my retirement..
As noted in the beginning of this post I've received (and continue to receive) a lot of responses. There's been a lot of interesting responses and I'd like to respond to some of them here. They can broadly be divided in responses that thanks me for my work and wishes me luck in future projects, responses that say how much they respect me etc. and ask me to reconsider and responses that deserves entire categories for themselves (that's where things get really interesting :).
I'm thankful that the major part of responses falls in the first category and that most people accept that I've thought hard about this before retiring as I mentioned in my retirement announcement. It's not a decision I've made lightly and there's no need to question it as far as I'm concerned. So a big thanks to all the people who has wished me luck in whatever project(s) I might end up in.
The second category is the mails where people have asked me to reconsider. I expected to get quite a few mails like that but I can't help but wonder whether people really didn't think I've thought it through even though I said in my announcement that I'd been considering it for 6 months? I understand why you'd want a developer that you like or think is important to stay but it's often quite hard to make the decision to retire in the first place and it gets much harder for old and very active developers like myself. I don't hold this hopeful attitude against anybody but I wish people would pay more attention towards what's best for the retiring developer instead of the project in these situations.
As for the third category I had some (to me) quite interesting responses.
Michael Cummings wrote a great mail to me and Alexander with all kinds of fascinating details about the Gentoo Fungi that I'd never heard of before. This is probably the only response that have really made me laugh and I definitely needed it in all my gloominess :)
Another interesting response was when a developer decided to apologise to me. It's interesting because that person apparently felt he had done me some wrong but in that case he should probably have appologised when doing that and not after I retired. That said I don't think anybody owes me an appology and I said so to this person. If anything I think the people that's sometimes making Gentoo a miserable place should appologise to Gentoo instead of the devrel person trying to solve conflicts and people problems.
Another response I'd like to talk about is somebody who said (paraphrasing) "So now the idiots won" after seeing my announcement. I can somehow understand that sentiment but I rather think that everybody lost when I retired. Gentoo lost a fairly active developer and I lost being a part of a project I used to love. I don't think there's any winners in this particular game.
Finally, I'd like to mention one response that really got to me for various reasons. A developer who's known me for a long time and that I've worked with on and off asked me strongly to reconsider my retirement. He obviously knows me fairly well because he wrote a lot about how I'm a fighter and how I love taking on challenges. And he's absolutely right about those things and that's a big part of why I stayed in Developer Relations - I really did like those challenges most of the time and it could be very rewarding when I managed to solve some conflict between developers. So why am I not going to reconsider? The reason is that he's only partly right about me. I'm certainly a fighter but sometimes I think I take things a bit too far in that regard. Like I said to one developer "Sometimes I think I'm a bit like the knight from Monty Python that gets arms and legs cut off and still continues to fight".
And on that note (and with all the free time I have now) I think I should spend some of my vacation from open source development rewatching all my Monty Python DVDs :) |
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| Bye Gentoo! |
[May. 31st, 2007|03:34 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  blah | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Porcupine Tree | ] |
It's with a bit of sadness and some relief that I'm finally retiring from Gentoo.
I've been a Gentoo developer for nearly 4 years now and I like to at least pretend that I've made some important contributions to Gentoo during that time. I've had a lot of fun but my frustrations have grown these past several months and I've been entertaining the idea about retiring for probably 6 months now. The past couple months the desire to leave Gentoo have become much stronger and I think it's finally time for me and Gentoo to go our seperate ways.
I think I've put my "fingerprint" on Gentoo in quite a few important ways but lately I've come to the realisation that I probably can't do any more for Gentoo. No matter how hard I try fighting for what I feel is right we seem to end up with petty fights, flamewars or what I consider even worse - people simply ignore what I'm working hard towards.
So I think it's high time that I leave the project and start looking for another project where I can contribute something important and not just try to keep the project from going in what I think is bad directions.
I'll try to reach all the projects I'm leaving over the next few days and see if I can pass off my work in a reasonable manner. I probably won't be around much on irc but if you really need to contact me you can do so at bryan.ostergaard@gmail.com.
Good luck to all of you and may Gentoo development be as much fun as it used to be for me. |
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| Ombudsman project ending |
[May. 23rd, 2007|10:02 pm] |
|
The Ombudsman project has grown thinner with some members leaving Gentoo and others not having as much time for it as they used to. Ombudsman and Developer Relations have therefore made a joint decision to end the Ombudsman project and instead move conflict mediation to Developer Relations itself.
It is our hope that the decision to close the Ombudsman project and incorporate the mediation function more directly in Developer Relations will help strengthen that part as more people will be able to help on any given case.
We've made a few small changes to the Conflict Resolution policy to reflect these changes and make sure that mediation is still an important part of resolving conflicts. The updated policy is available at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/policy.xml.
Finally I'd like to thank Grant (g2boojum), Seemant and Michael (marineam) for their great work as Ombudsman and welcome Michael as an official member of Developer Relations conflict resolution team. |
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| More graphs of developer activity! |
[Oct. 19th, 2006|11:02 pm] |
The (very quick, ugly and mostly useless) graph of developer activity I had in my last blog post attracted quite a bit of interest and I promised to post some new graphs. So I did a bit of scripting to extract even more data on developer activity and got the following graphs from that scripting + openoffice. At some point I'm probably going to script it all so I can have monthly updated graphs or something like that.
But on with the graphs :)
The first three graphs shows activity from all the cvs and subversion repositories including repositories on http://overlays.gentoo.org. The graphs covers 362 different people, all having at least one commit in some repository. In numbers the top 10 most active developers is doing 34% of all changes and top 25 most active developers are doing 51% of all changes.
  
These numbers tend to favour old developers though as I'm looking at the full history of the repositories and not limiting it to more recent history. If I limit the data to only cover the year 2006 I get the following graphs:
  
In numbers the top 10 most active developers makes up for 38% of the changes and the top 25 most active developers makes up for 55% of all the changes. As Gentoo have grown quite a bit in numbers of developers we must also have gotten a few more highly active developers to account for the increased activity among those few developers.
Finally, I've made similar graphs for overlays. I won't explain those except to say that they cover a lot fewer committers than the above graphs.
  
   |
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| Gentoo World Domination, curiosity and silly graphs.. |
[Oct. 5th, 2006|12:28 am] |
Ok, so Thomas Cort started a new thread on the gentoo-dev mailing-list today called "Gentoo World Domination. a 10 step guide". While I disagree on a lot of his ideas in this thread one comment caught my eyes (and curiosity!). In one of the many sub-threads people were discussing the fact that a few developers seems to do a disproportionally big part of the work and comparing that to old times where lots of development was done in #gentoo.
Chris Gianelloni said in one of his replies that he'd be interested in seeing some statistics (dis)proving this commonly held belief. I've been interested in this myself for at least a year now, so I finally took the time to run the numbers and make a quick graph of it.
The X axis plots all the devs currently marked as 'active' in ldap. At the time I collected these stats this included 330 developers. The Y axis maps the number of file changes for that developer.
Of course there's a number of reasons this graph is slightly silly. For one thing I'm plotting changed files instead of commits as cvs isn't atomic. I'm also not taking into account that not all devs are ebuild devs, some devs are rather new etc. But the trend is very obvious from the graph and I don't believe trying to account for these things would change the graph very much.
I'm sure there's other important points to be taken from this graph and I'd like to hear some comments on it. But for now I'm going to be satisfied that I finally got around to doing some commit stats for all devs :) |
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| Meeting old friends for the first time.. |
[Jul. 7th, 2006|02:05 pm] |
So in a few hours I'm getting on a plane headed for London. This is pretty exciting as I'm going to meet lots of UK based Gentoo developers, most of which I've never met before. As I've worked with several of them on projects like Release Engineering, Developer Relations and Gentoo/Alpha I talk to many of them almost daily on irc.
Saturday is going to be my first chance at meeting most of the Gentoo UK 2006 conference participants face to face and besides several interesting talks there's also going to be time for beer drinking, random chit chat and so on.
Thanks to everybody participating and especially to Daniel Drake for organising this event. I'm sure it's going to be quite enjoyable.
/me goes looking for his passport and an umbrella :) |
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| Is Gentoo dying? |
[Jun. 17th, 2006|11:40 pm] |
Mark Twain is quoted as saying “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” after his obituary was mistakenly published.
In the same spirit I’ve been hearing whispers (or sometimes shouting) of Gentoo dying for at least 2 years now. I’m happy to say that I think that’s greatly exaggerated and I’ll explain why I don’t believe that contrary to all the ‘evidence’ presented to me all the time.
First of all, I don’t think we have nearly as many flamewars on mailinglists as people often claim. We often have heated discussions but most of them don’t turn into flamewars even though many tend to be rather long. However, I often see discussions lasting more than a day as being positive as it means people (users and developers alike) care about Gentoo and the subject(s) covered by the discussion.
Let’s look at a few recent discussions that was quite positive in my opinion.
1. The Project Sunrise discussion.
Project Sunrise was announced as a user driven portage overlay hosted on overlays.gentoo.org. As there had been no prior discussion about this project most developers was taken quite by surprise at this announcement. As such it met rather fierce opposition from a few developers that had several important concerns about the implications of having such a project. After a while I was contacted by one of the Project Sunrise managers and tried to explain the issues as I saw them.
What we ended up with was a new proposal that answered many of the concerns. As it didn’t answer all concerns adequately the Gentoo Council decided to suspend it as a official project until those concerns can be handled in a sufficient way. After the council decision I had a nice discussion with the sunrise developers and Henrik Brix, one of the primary opponents. We tried to come up with a new proposal that would fulfil the goals of project sunrise while at the same time solve all Henriks concerns.
Discussions are sure to continue but I think everybody involved will readily agree that sunrise has improved a lot from these discussions.
2. Paludis / alternate package manager discussions
Stephen Bennett asked for some profile changes to make it easier to use the Paludis package manager. A long discussion followed ending up in two different GLEPs (GLEP 49 and GLEP 50). Despite a great potential for turning into a flamewar the discussion was kept to technical issues by all parties and many important points was brought up. The Paludis team, Portage team and others all participated in the discussion trying to work out issues as they came up.
The latest development on this issue is that both GLEPs were rejected by the Council and that Stephen is instead going to work on a ebuild specification with help from the portage team. I’m sure we’ll benefit greatly from a proper specification in the future.
Another topic that comes up frequently is that Gentoo is bleeding developers because of all the flamewars and bad attitudes between developers. Being one of the lead recruiters and also the devrel member doing all retiring of developers I can safely say that while some developers are leaving us we’re still gaining developers at a great rate.
The last year or so I’ve been retiring inactive developers as well as any developer announcing their retirement themselves. I’ve probably retired about 65 developers during that time. During the same time Gentoo Recruiters have added about as many new developers I think and the important thing about these developers is that they’re still being active.
In the past we often saw developers doing one or two commits and then disappearing forever. This trend seems to have stopped and I’d like to thank mentors and recruiters for improving the “quality” of new developers greatly.
It makes “Gentoo” more passionate with all the discussions that follows from that but I’d like to see passion as something very positive. Gentoo builds on passion and people wanting to scratch "itches". If we didn't care we would likely be better off running one or another commercial operating system.
We’re also seeing new projects and ideas flare up at a rapid pace trying hard to improve various aspects of Gentoo. As an example the User Relations project was recently brought back to life by Christel Dahlskjær together with several other people. And now Christel is even thinking about possibly setting up a project like Debian Women.
Likewise, the Bugday project has some great improvements in the pipeline that should help bridge the gap between developers and users in a better way than Bugday already does.
So while I agree that we need to improve some aspects of Gentoo I wanted to remind everybody that some things are already seeing great improvements even if much is hidden from plain sight. And if anybody are considering other exciting projects that might help fix people oriented problems in Gentoo I’d love to hear about it and help if possible. And to help focus a bit more on the big improvements I'm seeing I'm going to try writing a few articles about related issues for Gentoo Weekly News.
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| Lots of Developer Relations activity |
[May. 19th, 2006|01:09 pm] |
A short time ago Jon Portnoy proposed a new Conflict Resolution policy on the gentoo-devrel mailinglist. It looks like everybody agreed with that proposal (or at least nobody said otherwise) so that's on it's way to be implemented. In that regard we're currently having a proposal up for discussion on how to select the members for the conflict resolution board.
And just to keep us all busy Mike Doty filed a proposal for Etiquette Enforcement on mailing lists yesterday. This has already seen some discussion but I'd like to see more opinions/comments on this as it's a big step from how gentoo mailinglists has traditionally been handled in my opinion. I'll be commenting on the proposal later today.
News from Gentoo/Alpha land (the more important project :)
Infra just set up an http://alpha.gentoo.org redirect leading to our new, much improved Alpha project page. The new page features Alpha specific documentation, description of the Alpha Arch Tester project and various other bits of important information. Most of the Alpha project members have worked hard at the new page and I think it's a big improvement on the old page. Thanks for all the work on this. |
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