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.