Well I’ve had a rant building for a week and as I try to avoid it as much as possible, I think its time for yet another issues posting. Hopefully this time I won’t get misquoted by distrowatch.

However, I’d like to talk about a interview I was involved in recently. The first of course is that the interviews that Scott did about open culture and the Internet are up on his site http://openroadtrip.net. Both Michael Cummings(mcummings) and myself were interviewed during the month long trip that they took. Most of the interviews are between 20 and a hour long and cover a wide variety of topics. Its well worth going and looking at, even if its only to go O_O that’s what tsunam looks like without the hat! I’ve not watched it yet so I can’t quite remember what we talked about for a hour but I’m sure I’ll have made people look at me differently, and quite possibly gotten myself sued. Woo!

Now here comes the rant:

As we know gentoo is a fairly large group of diverse people. With all the different backgrounds there is bound to be conflict, however I have a expectation that even if you don’t agree with what someone is saying that you will at least listen to their side of the story. If its rhetoric about something that isn’t qualitative then we should ask for something that you can actually actively look at and say hmm that could happen. We’ve had a few people lately that I’ve noticed quite prominently doing the complete opposite on both sides of the issue. I won’t name people’s names and if you’ve followed the discussion about sunrise you will know who they are. I’ve in some ways tried to bring people together to actually talk about it instead of sitting entrenched about the issue.

I’ve stated my views about it both publicly and privately. I will however reiterate my points here as well.

For those, who don’t know sunrise is a attempt to get users more involved with the project by giving them another way to interact with the core of the system. As it stands now its a overlay of ebuilds that are not in portage, because no developer wants to take on that package, and as a testing ground for stuff before it goes into the tree. All the submissions go through some checks to make sure someone doesn’t try to slip in a rm -rf / into a ebuild and wipe out everyones system who emerges that package. Concern is coming up because of the fact that some people want it to be a official project. From what I’ve read so far, the concerns that are concrete are such.

1) Users will see it as part of gentoo and thus supported as such and bugs.gentoo.org will be filled with bugs for sunrise instead of what in the actual tree.

I see that this can be a issue, however you have to use layman to check out the checked sunrise tree which separates it from the core tree that makes up gentoo. This also means that it should be apparent that it is in some way different from the tree that emerge –sync uses. I don’t think that it too hard of a concept for the users to grasp. Its also not something that is going to be forced onto people. They will have to emerge layman to even bother to get to it. Now that isn’t to say that we won’t have bugs in bugs.gentoo.org that are from sunrise, its already happened actually. One thing to help stem it would be to create a Sunrise flag for bugzilla so that those who want to only deal with the core tree can, and those who wish to deal with sunrise may as well. Its a bit more work for our bug-wranglers but I’d like to hear what they say about it.

2) A general quality assurance issue that doesn’t have anything standing behind it really. However, there’s been voiced concern over the leaders of the projects ebuild ability.

This is one that actually really annoys the heck out of me. I try to stay a calm person most of the time. I like discussing matters with people. However, when you imply that someone is not to be trusted without justification or proof. I will simply and hopefully rightfully ignore your entire comment on the matter. Asking me or any other person to not trust a fellow developer is crazy and even more likely to destroy any organization then any other problems it will have.

On less annoying issues, include the fact that Xorg is sucking on my server that is also becoming a mythtv server, which means I’ve not been able to get my mythtv setup either. Next I’ve had issues with rrdtool and graphing some statistics for a internal bind9 setup. Its working out quite well, but I’m not having a graph show up, and I know I’m not the only one having the issue.

I’m still looking for cases as well…once I have time that is.

Well, I’m in a bit of a pickle currently. I’ve outgrown my mini-itx case which is similar to the Travla C150. As such I’m on the hunt for something that will allow for some expansion, as the web server/print server/file server, is about to become a mythtv box as well. I’ve found my hauppauge Wintv-PVR 350 and installed it into the box. However much to my chagrin after I installed it into the above mentioned case. I realized that the 3.5 inch hard drive did not clear the signal converters.

So, currently my server is up without its top on, and that isn’t what it should be. So this is a question to see what people are using for their cases. As it is also going to be a mythtv box I’ll no doubt have to add some storage to it. I’ve looked at even a 1u type of chassis for it but all the ones I’ve seen are 250 bucks and I just don’t feel that its worth spending that much for a case.

So let me hear what you have, what you use, and what you’d recommend for someone who wants to keep a small footprint but be able to have a few hard drives, as I’m not sure how much space I’ll ultimately take up. If I do  add hard drives, I know that I’ll start moving dvd’s over to a compressed format, which will probably at this point be h264.

So please let me know what you think.

Oh, on a additional note. I’d like to thank a very gracious vendor, Global Netoptix, who has donated some hardware to us recently. Which should hopefully improve bugzilla once the system is up and running. *cracks a whip across the back of infra*

This is not to say that we don’t appreciate every donation no matter the value, we do as its people backing us up with more then words, its coming from their own pockets. However, in some sad way its always the ones who do the larger donations of hardware and the like that get the verbal thank you from the community.

So as a personal thing, thank you to all of you who’ve donated blood, sweat, tears, cash, hardware, and bandwidth to the project. Its appreciated even if we’re not always saying it out loud.

Well I just got the call from scott that they’ll be in town tonight, so I get to go treat the travelers to a bit of what makes the area what it is, and no..that isn’t hookers and strippers. As well I get to be one of last people on their interview list. I’m trying to get blackace to come down or head up towards his place for the interview instead so that it’d be one more person they’d get to talk to about open culture. For those interested, the trip is documented at http://www.openroadtrip.net. Scott will be uploading the videos that they took from the road once they get home under a creative commons license.

There’s been a few interviews with cshields, spyderous, and other gentoo dev’s already when Scott was down at Oregon State University a month or so ago.

In other news I’d like to give a thank you to a few people for their work with gentoo and the x86 team specifically. Christian has recently become a full fledged Arch Tester and one of the most dedicated with testing almost every bug that comes our way. Another interesting one is JWK who’s currently being mentored by Kloeri to become a full fledged developer. He’s the first to go from the AT’s to heading towards a full developer from the x86 AT program. So those who are not sure, please do remember that the AT program is here to help you decide if its the right thing for you. As Gentoo needs you. *points at everyone*

Many might not be noticing but there’s a push to get gcc 4.1.1 stable for the next release of the gentoo cd’s. I’ve been working quite hard on this with release engineering to ensure that almost everything has a stable version that works with a new stable gcc. A lot of the work that went into getting gcc is thanks to Halcy0n so please of course thank him for his efforts in getting us this close to taking it stable.

In the forums there’s been a lot of talk about binary packages holding back xorg-7.1 from going stable. I’ll be clear about this now for all the users out there. Stable has a meaning to me, and that includes with binary drivers that we have no control over. With xorg, the binaries are broken because they didn’t update them in time for the new api. Until they are updated, the 7.1 won’t be ready for stable as far as I’m concerned. Asking stable users to mask a stable xorg 7.1 is not a option either. There is a reason why we have ~arch keywords for things like this. It is far easier for you to do that then it is for people who run arch to know that something will break their system. This can take 6 months for all I’m concerned and with ati probably will.

This also brings up a point about ~arch. Many users have come to believe in my opinion that it is the new arch stable version. This is not the case and has never been so. Because of that expectation by a lot of users, the ~arch area has become a good bit more conservative then it used to be. If you run ~arch, you should expect things will and do break. We love people who test it and submit bug reports but expecting it to be perfect just helps to alienate the developers from the community. We can’t do everything perfect the first time and shouldn’t be expected to. This isn’t a commercial distro where that will mean the difference between us floating and going into a massively red spike.

Developers are here of their own free will to work on something that we all enjoy. However, the community has to take responsibility for their own ability to affect the way that developers feel about the project.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a developer, its that there is never a shortage of things to do. There is however a shortage of time. While its a good thing to keep me busy and out of trouble. It does tend to take away from my ability to do projects that I want to do. Even with the ability to multitask I’m generally doing more then one thing that is related to gentoo and those personal projects get shelved for quite some time.

Things that are on the list include reinstalling my email server..as I killed it in a update once upon a time ago, and never bothered to set it back up. I’ll also probably use it as the main source of collecting all my email and run some kind of spam filter on it as well. Next is snort which worked at one point..but again I killed it somehow and never bothered to try and get it fixed. Something I probably should fix.

Third, I’ve been meaning to play around with squid and just get it setup as something that I want to see how it works and how well it does its job, even with only a few clients. Fourth, is setting up bind which I started but haven’t had time to debug. It will start but the daemon doesn’t actually come up, and I’ve yet to actually see if I can find out why its dying.

I have a hauppauge card somewhere in the house that I should plug into my mini-itx machine and setup mythtv as well. I got the card for that purpose quite a while ago..when it was going to go into the old p3 500 server..and set it aside. In doing so i got all sorts of responsibility with gentoo…and it got knocked down on the list.

After all that, of course I’ll want to set up graphing of all the nice new toys I have to see how they are performing overall. So I would have to create or modify some cacti graphs to give me a nice display of the performance over time. I hear many groans as I mention this.

Finally, I want to start working on getting gcc-4.1 stable on x86 at least. Getting the time for that is a serious laugh though as I can’t seem to find the time to work on any of the stuff I have up above.

So basically if you wonder why most developers are somewhat abrupt with you..this is probably a good consideration of why. I’d guess that most dev’s have a similar list of things to do, be it working on some code or personal projects that will allow them to test a wider range of things. I’m going to go be abrupt with someone to keep up that perception, instead of being the one who’ll sit down as much as I possibly can and have a actual chat with you. Even if you come to me to bump a version of a program I don’t personally maintain. For everyone’s relief, when you want a program version bumped, look in the metadata.xml file that is in the same directory with the ebuilds. Its a simple short file that will tell you who maintains it and the herd that it belongs too. Those are the people who take responsibility for it directly, not the person who’s name is in the header.

I am no longer the grandest of slackers when it comes to getting my laptop repaired. As I’ve actually sent it on the path to being repaired. A indirect route of going through the company that sold me the laptop but it will get fixed one way or the other. I’ll be happy when I get it back though as I’ve grown quite used to being able to lay down on the couch and do the gentoo work I need to remotely. Xnest still rocks for that feature.

So for the time being I’m using works laptop which is also a gentoo machine for the most part. I have windows installed for visio but such is life. Its amazing to me that we’re a linux shop and yet everyone’s desktop is windows. Just boggles the mind in weird ways.

Also excuse the note to myself to look over a couple of quizzes that I have to look at.

P.S enjoy this as this is the shortest note I’ve ever done I think.

Well as some of you might of noticed I’ve been taking weekends off from gentoo for a few weeks now. This is a effort to stem off in part burning out. Yes Diego, you keep saying I should go and take a full week away but,I just don’t have the luxury to do it without some real concerns. This isn’t because I feel that I’m that important to the project. As what I do anyone could really do, its not really that difficult. Its because of the fact that no one really cares to take care of the things that need to be taken care of while I’m gone.

I’ve also been surprised by the dedication of some of the recent pre quiz arch testers as well. They’ve been managing to cover most if not all the bugs and a few I’ve notice on almost all bugs that I’ve personally gone to work on. We even have a few who’ve started working on their quizzes before I’ve given them to you, those overzealous crazy cats.

In addition I’ve actually sent a hackergotchi to beandog to add to planet for yours truly. Everyone will get to see part of what I look like. I’ll still be the wacky crazy one who does all the anime smiley and will have a unique picture for people to go O_o at.

The laptop trials continue actually, as its been far too long that I’ve been avoiding actually getting it fixed, I’m getting on the ball of that and getting it hopefully taken care of fully. I’ve turned from dealing with Asus directly to dealing with the seller, who’s been more then helpful. They’ve basically said that they’ll deal with asus for me if I send the machine back to them. All this came about because asus said that there’s a possibility that they’d charge me to replace the motherboard even if it is under warranty. I laughed at the technician for telling me that and said that I’d send them a bill for the same amount if they were to even attempt that. Now who wants to buy a Asus product from now on? Oh did I mention that the keyboard went kaput about 7-8-9 months after I got it? To top it off the power transformer that charges the laptop has gone out as well in the last week. Therefore I have a nice expensive paperweight.

This has just convinced me to go with a ibm, sony, dell, or apple laptop in the future. Its a bit more money, and I might not get the exact choice I want, but even on their worst days’ the customer support is at least decent. I’m sure this won’t affect people buying from asus at all but, perhaps it’ll give them a second of pause.

Back to bugs and removing those I can though.

P.S I’m working on a new theme for my site finally. I have elements that I’m not sure about yet…I’ll have to see a bunch more of it together before I decide if its what I’m going for..or just something to scrap. Give me something like 6 months and you might actually see it.