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.