There are only a few things with Gentoo that will irk me and that is when people say that its unstable. The reason behind this is that I work with an amazing team who its their primary goal to ensure that arch (notice a lack of ~) is as stable as it can be and that if you emerge any application it will just work. I will say that the team does an amazing job of that task. Beyond api changes that you will hit eventually with any source based distribution. Course our documentation team always seem to have an accompanying guide of how to resolve any issues you might run into as you make the move past that API change ready to go. The logical, at least to me, assumption is that most people actually run ~arch as their tree of choice.

I’ve got a few things to ask and hope you consider why this might just be so and some of the consequences that are caused by this.

Do you really need the latest version of hal?

Really, this is a serious question. Can you actually tell me the changes off the top of your head between the stable version and the latest development release thats in the tree? If you can then I can see you actually needing it.

If you can’t then why do you actually run unstable?

I’m curious actually. I don’t personally feel that I’m behind on anything I really want to be. I have on multiple machines with less then 10 packages that are ~arch. Of which I would say that all 10 packages can have stable bugs marked for them. I will in fact go put in the requests tomorrow for them so that others who don’t test anything will have a updated version that works perfectly to upgrade to. I’ve just pushed 10 packages from ~arch to arch potentially because those are the only 10 that I really had any reason to use a ~version of and knew the new features of. Now, packages that were “behind” as some people claim, just became current. It would also put the arch teams out of business in a lot of ways. If you notice, I’m all for putting myself and others out of jobs as odd as that might sound.

So please respond as I actually really want to know. I would think that this is by far the simplest way for someone to get involved with a minimal of effort on the end of the users and you’re still able to use the version of applications updated in a far quicker manner then the developer having to go hmmm this has been in the tree for a year and no bugs have been submitted..maybe it should go stable.

Perception is a funny thing. It causes a lot of misunderstandings as the recent events within Gentoo have shown quite clearly. Many are quite clearly developers failing to get information out there. I have failed in various ways that I’ve stated in past entries and have begun or hope to have begun to fix many of those.

However, I’m seeing an issue that I’d like to discuss as well. There is currently a lot of passion for Gentoo and I want to grab onto it and bring more people into working with the sphere that encompasses the project as a whole. Which is actually an ideal time because people have that little bit of extra motivation. For that I need your help, yes I’m saying you..and you and yes even you in the back hiding under the cat ears, as you need to want to help out directly to affect the changes that you want to see within the project. We’re not just going to know what it is you want without explaining what it is.

An example that came up today. A user was having an issue with one of our bug wranglers and came into User Relations to discuss it. One of the issues brought up, the wrangler in my opinion was correct in closing the bug, but was overly terse and didn’t give a adequate explanation of why it was closed. This obviously perturbed the user and as they explained that they had no clue why it had been closed. In the case of this bug it was in fact a feature of many applications and not a bug. The item in question was about the fact that during configure and consequently during builds the application was using /usr/local/lib for the source of a library instead of /usr/lib. As you might know this is not an unusual occurrence to find configure looking in multiple spots for a library. Had this been explained it’d of not been an issue but was dismissed out of hand.

While the immediate issue was of course explaining the reason why and why the developer would say the same thing as I had attempted to explain. It also became a thought for me of how things could be improved. The immediate first thought contrary to what might of been thought was that we have far more bugs then wranglers and an obvious and simple solution would be to possibly find some more people who’d have the perseverance to help out others in this very direct way. Many of you do it on the forums and would to me make sense to be a perfect transition to continue helping out in another way for the benefit of the entire community. It’d also lighten the load of those staff who deal directly with the bugs day in and day out for any and every package. There is however one catch. You need to be staff as far as I’m aware currently to be a bug wrangler. For that you need to pass the staff quiz, which really is not a horrible quiz if you look it over. I know many of the staff would appreciate the help.

One area that has disappointed me however is that I’ve had one total request for things to write about that involve Gentoo. That being the discussion about the GLEP-55 proposal which I’m happy to say a few people in #gentoo have even linked to as explaining even the basics of what that means. I’d like to absolutely write more as long as people have topics they’d like to know about. I have no problem doing research about it if need be. I just need your help in what you want to know more about. This goes as well for User Relations. I’ve seen one suggestion coming into our mailboxes with suggestions of the ways to improve matters. I know there are a lot of people out there with idea’s and I’m more then willing to read any suggestion that you might have, big or small and discuss it with you as well. If we get the response I would hope we would get, I’d been inundated for at least a week and having a direct interaction with you the end user.

I’ve certainly heard your unified voice, now let me hear you individually.

As per an announcement made on the Gentoo-dev mailing list[1]. The 2.6.24 kernel has been released with the gentoo-sources patched version will hopefully be hitting the tree this afternoon. The tentative plan is to have it ready for stable in about 5 weeks to hopefully be the kernel used in the 2008.0 release. Testing and bug reports have been requested by the development team.

Modules such as ipw3945, ati, nvidia that are in the tree are likely to break as with most new kernel releases. The tracking for regressions can be found as always at bugzilla. Note that this is just a tracker that will serve as a central source for other bugs that act as a blocker to the stabilization/regression bugs of items not directly in the kernel.

As always your reports will help get this stable sooner…not that people who are running it as testing will go woo hoo at that, but it’ll help business users and people such as myself running a stable tree. It also means that you played a part in the 2008 release if it is in fact the kernel used. Your reports are always appreciated.

[1] http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_150497.xml

I will state that I’m far from the most technical person when it comes to the EAPI’s that we deal with. I learn about it as I’m required to so my understanding will be far from perfect. I however was asked by a user to explain in a bit clearer detail what this glep is about and what it means to the users as a whole.

At its core this is a expansion of the EAPI=0 documentation that is defined in the PMS. You can get the full technical document here. EAPI’s are basically as I defined earlier a spec for ebuilds, eclasses, and the package manager. It defines what should be expected and in what form to ensure that no matter where your source is, or the package manager that you use it will all just work happily.

Now you might say that Gentoo has always done this but its never really had any other package manager that wanted to make use of the same ebuilds. This is why the spec was created so that there is a defined standard that everything conforms to and you get a very expected result every time. It also allows people to write paludis, portage, and pkgcore without having to find edge cases.

Glep 55 is a continuation of this EAPI spec. It seeks to add a ending onto the .ebuild suffix to define what part of the spec it is valid in. A .ebuild conforms to a -0 or EAPI=0. .ebuild-1 would conform to EAPI=1 which is glep 55. This doesn’t require any parsing of the actual ebuild itself to figure out what EAPI version you are dealing with.

A function that could be eapi=1 only would not work for a package manager that is only able to do eapi=0 specs. It would obviously fail for a number of reasons.

Now as far as users are concerned, there’s not much change for you. It ensures that you continue to get updates without issue no matter if you switch from portage, to pkgcore, to paludis, then back to portage. What will change is that if you are using a version that is only supporting eapi=0 you will not see packages that are .ebuild-1 as the package manager would not be able to handle them anyways.

Hopefully, this gives you a somewhat better understanding of what the heck the Glep is about.

Daniel has again blogged which will again cause a stir. I will of course naturally respond. Not that anyone did not expect this of me. I would however like to ask, and ask the users who want him back to ask him to participate in the -nfp mailing list discussions.

It appears that there are two interim trustees - Grant Goodyear and Paul de Vrieze.

On this point neither of them are interim, as they were elected to the positions over a year ago now and continue to be the elected bodies for the Foundation in the application for reinstatement state it is currently. The last election did not succeed as we did not have enough people running. Renat (rl03) was the only Trustee to run again, there were 3 others who were nominated to run. That shows that Daniel is correct in the fact that developers don’t really want to deal with the legal side of things. There are a few exceptions to that point but its true for most of the people who’d be members of the Trustees. It was also one of the factors of why there was going to be a separation of the legal from the technical.

I was able to speak to him on the phone today, and he told me that it would be “legally weird” for him to hand over the reigns of Gentoo to me without a vote of the members, which prior trustees have decided are essentially Gentoo developers who have been volunteering for the project for a year or more.

As the president of the foundation the initial bylaws you would of had to approve of the bylaws as well. The cvs entry for the website for those is 2005, however to be incorporated in the first place bylaws had to be in place upon which the current ones have a few modifications, not sweeping changes that you seem to consider done in your comment here. You even mention that Grant just filed the paperwork that was requested to remove you as the President of the Foundation, and you’re requesting to come back as the President. Which is it now, cause quite frankly I’m confused if you want to be removed or reinstated?

However, he did not attempt to organize a vote last week, to my knowledge.

A vote was not cast last week, as the larger community of developers wanted to actually slow down. Renat, and Grant wanted to set one up but people wanted to evaluate the various options available to them. You can’t blame people for wanting to be careful about a decision and giving ~1 week for discussion and a vote on an issue that many people needed to get up to date with is a bit unrealistic. You as a developer know very well how Gentoo works, and that it was unlikely that the deadline would be met.

However, I did place a deadline on my offer for a reason - so my offer couldn’t be used to drag me into an extremely long-term and political Gentoo decision-making process against my will.

As far as I’m aware the offer is still on the table, unless you are pulling it from the table? If its on the table then there might be some questions for clarification but I don’t see why you would be pulled into any kind of long-term discussion/decision making progress, just asked to clarify your points and give better definition to long term goals and steps to take in the shorter term that would make steps towards this larger long term goals. That’s one area that I’ve asked three times for clarification personally, however I’ve heard no response with detailed suggestions.

snip… previous paragraph through this last comment
So I am not willing to change my offer to accommodate the direction the Foundation (Grant, essentially) wants to take.

Grant is far from the only person who wants to go this direction, and is currently working to get the Foundation back into a legally instated form. This again doesn’t exclude going with your plan if that’s how the vote should go. However, from what I read from these two paragraphs that when the Foundation is reinstated due to the proper paperwork being filed, that you would no longer want to be involved at that point?

Also, if what Grant said is correct - that the Foundation is basically stuck with developers and just developers as voting members, then it will be very hard to fix the user/developer disconnect in the Gentoo community via the Foundation as it currently exists.

I’ve personally stated that if someone comes up with something that has technical merit as far as things that can improve gentoo, and steps that can be taken such as the guest post below that I’m more then willing to look and work on idea’s that Users have. I don’t consider “Bring daniel back” as a technically valid reason for his return as president. If you could point out that he has had experience running a few llc’s for example that is a very valid point for leadership of a Not for Profit business.

Again however I see a pushing of items that you were directly related to as being something that you had no part in. Many of the developers who became such were users who submitted patches and people got sick of doing commits for them were given access. This was a model that was implemented during your time as the leader of the project prior to 2004 and grew into pretty much what we see today.

I’m glad to see that we all want to have a tighter integration of the user and developer communities and that everyone has a strong passion for the project. We just need to figure out the technical ways to achieve this integration. That ultimately means this project is not dying because people care about it.

This is a guest post that was posted to the Not for Profit list by Mr. Summers that I felt should be shown on a wider scale and asked to repost it here so that people who read planet but are not subscribed to the nfp list would see it. As well he stated that he would follow this post and respond to questions and comments.

Greetings,

First, I wish to state that I am a long time Gentoo user and over the past several years I have been nothing but happy with Gentoo. It is my opinion that Gentoo is the greatest of all GNU/Linux distributions, and I want to extend my most hearty gratitude to the entire Gentoo community, to the developers, to the users,to everyone involved, both in the past and in the present, for all of the effort over the years. It has been monumental. Many thanks.

I now own a small development company & we use Gentoo (Hardened-amd64) on our development & production servers. What’s more I happen to deal largely in the non-profit, foundation, and grant world. It is with regard to this particular aspect of my expertise that I wish to inform the various governmental bodies of Gentoo that there is a vast ocean of possibilities, and funding, available to non-profits & foundations. This to perhaps inspire new thinking about the role of Gentoo and the Gentoo community in the world at large.

I am of the opinion that Gentoo should not contract the SFC to manage the Foundation for the following reasons.

-With responsible governance there is no real need to be underthe umbrella of another larger organization. -The SFC may or may not have the funding, capacity, or longevity to handle as large an organization as Gentoo.
-The SFC will surely take some Gentoo generated funding away from Gentoo to cover administrative costs, etc, that, given responsible governence, could be used for the greater benefit of Gentoo and the Gentoo community.

There are significant amounts of money available to NPOs, like Gentoo, from Federal grant programs to the more mundane private charitable donations. In general, these funding opportunities require program development and partnerships with other organizations and institutions such as community based non-profits and universities. The real beauty of these opportunities is that it fosters a relationship between our Gentoo community and the larger public, be it on a smaller local level with other community-based non-profits or on a larger scale with multi university research partnerships, etc. One of the many benefits of this type of interaction is that funding can be allocated for many different activities, for example, provisions for administrative costs, new equipment, training programs, salaries, incentives for developers, and a premium experience for users. Therefore, with this kind of funding, Gentoo can help its own community members while also assisting others. Which, in my opinion, is one of the strongest characteristics of the Gentoo community, helping others. This is demonstrated on IRC, in the forums, and in the email lists every day. Why would we need to belong to a larger organization to do these things? Why do we need an organization, like the SFC, to “manage” Gentoo. Perhaps we ought simply solicit them for /pro bono/ legal assistance in emergency situations.

I am of the opinion that Gentoo should welcome the return of Daniel Robbins, but in a somewhat more limited sense than his recent offer.

Mr. Robbins is obviously an extremely intelligent and dedicated individual that seems to really care about the health of Gentoo. In addition, Mr. Robbins has a large amount of experience in the larger world of business and software development. Thus it seems reasonable to posit that he may indeed have some very good ideas regarding the direction of Gentoo. I, for one, welcome a transparent roadmap that I would have the opportunity to review and comment on. Prior to starting a business I was rather happy to simply remain on the fringe of the Gentoo community. My main interest was in using the meta-distro to accomplish some very specific research related work as well as use on my personal machines. However, now that I rely on Gentoo from a business perspective I find myself much more interested in and concerned about the general direction of Gentoo. Thus, a more transparent governance would put my mind at ease and provide a means for greater communication with Gentoo’s developers.

What follows are some suggestions.

Consider the use of university internship programs for projects like documentation (technical writing students) & The GMN (journalism students). These programs are a requirement to graduate for many university students. With that, many companies and other organizations offer resume-building experience in their field in the form of these unpaid interships. I’m sure many of you have had the pleasure of an unpaid internship. The Gentoo
Foundation can leverage its status as a well known GNU/Linux distribution and a legitimate global organization to attract the leading universities around the world. What I mean to say is that people pay attention to Gentoo and there exists a certain level of expectation of quality from the larger tech world. To really floor the critics, solicit a few English departments at some highly respected university to collaborate with a team of developers and users to create and maintain documentation and write a regular news letter. I know a few good writers and if you give them the right information to start with then answer any questions they have along the way you get really nice work. What writer wouldn’t like to have their name on really well written, and heavily viewed pages? Talk about an attention grabber.

Further, consider using internship programs to assist with the management and governance of the Gentoo Foundation itself. There are many university programs that focus on non-profit and foundation management. Create programs that give opportunities to these students to participate in the day to day business of the Gentoo Foundation. They can act in supporting roles for the trustees and counsel members and other various committees. Hey,
its worth university credit to the student and its free to Gentoo.

Consider the implementation of a Gentoo Patron program, such that companies and other organizations have an opportunity to support the Foundation, be it financially or with volunteers. In return, offer some Patron Profile Page to give the donors some visibility. Further, as a small business owner I have to say, its sometimes very tough to locally procure for employment a good developer, administrator, or otherwise one that knows their way around Gentoo or GNU/Linux for that matter. I imagine that other companies have similar issues. Thus some way for companies and organization to be exposed to the larger Gentoo community would be a significant return on any investment.

Consider a partnership with a larger organization, like Google, to extend the users experience in novel ways. One example would be the use of some social networking tools to aid the Gentoo community in collaborations on code, documentation, etc.

In closing, I want to offer thanks for a job well done. It has taken the dedication of many individuals to get Gentoo to where it is today. This spirit is not gone. Thus, we look toward a bright future. If anyone wishes to contact me for any reason please do so, I would be pleased to answer any questions. If I can provide any futher information or assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Best Regards, Matthew Summers

There’s been a lot of talk about the community knows better then the developers. That we are in fact the cause of the downfall of Gentoo from the Top of the Top Distros for GNU/Linux. I have to wonder why that is. Why is it that you as a user want it to be the best of the best? As far as I’m concerned now, we are the best of the source based distros. However, people seem to want us to be above ubuntu. I personally don’t see this happening nor do I really want to be the tool of a person who will just leave once something is the new hotness.

Really its a matter of dedication for the developers because its not related to pay at all. Its a matter of wanting to do something for that which we really enjoy having used/worked on. Those are the people who push the distribution forward and the people who ultimately the developers relate too, as they are in essence the same as they were or are. Its the spirit of the open source movement as well, to want to get involved for your own personal reasons but ultimately you’re giving back to what you enjoy.

People can do that different ways and some of which don’t require anyone but yourself: Such as organizing a booth at a local college during rush week and handing out cds to people. Its a local effort to spread information about something you care about. You could as well give a demonstration of some of the features unique to Gentoo at a local LUG. Having used Gentoo, I’m sure you have unique tips and tricks to get information out of the system that others would surely benefit from. I know personally that Gentoo has pushed me harder on learning scripting to make my life easier in respects that have positively affected my abilities at my workplace.

I don’t know about everyone else but Gentoo has made me a more productive person because I’ve had to learn how to do things and its taught me via that. So really, I think I’ve gotten far more from Gentoo then I’ll ever be able to give back.

Perhaps if you think about it, you might see the same thing I do and what really makes this to be what I really do consider the best distribution out there and consider what you can on a personal level do to help it improve, either by your own actions or by constructive criticism that I’m more then willing to consider as I would say the entire Userrel team would be.

You’d not have an international user and developer base who have very diverse ideas about what Gentoo is to them without doing something right…Nor would you have as much passion coming from people as there has been recently without that as well. So while there is a lot of hurt feelings and that coming out in comments that don’t help matters it gives me hope and pride in the fact that people care that much.

Joshua “tsunam” “tool box” Jackson

First things first, I’d like to thank my fellow developers for the support they’ve shown me for what I was trying to do and the support voiced even if its contrary to what others want.

I’ll continue on another issue that I’m directly involved with…thus the failing of Gentoo as a whole *wink*. Its also by far where I’m the biggest tool box. Not many users would know this but I’m one of the leaders of the User Relations team. Which is actually quite ironic in a few ways since as I’m so fond of saying things are a two way street. In this case I mention it because the last actually email I have seen to the User Relations team from an actual user was in September of 2007. This was directly involving a user/developer conflict and was hopefully satisfied, but I did of course do a nice boo boo and call a very nice young man a woman. Needless to say that left me feeling chagrined. Since then no users have emailed user relations at all. Now I will say that user relations hasn’t been great about the information and working with users, and there’s been failed attempts at things such as the User Representatives. However, you can’t lay everything on the developers themselves, which seems to be what everyone is doing right now. At some point as a user you have to take responsibility for your own actions or inaction as the case might be.

Obviously, there is a lot of passion for Gentoo as a whole and each and every one of you have wishs for it to go a different direction. Some want to see it become the distro of distro’s for embedded building, or in general. Some want to see a whole lot more releases. Others want things to just compile without issue, even across api changes. If the community is in this state…then you look at the developers themselves and its the same ordeal. We’re simply a reflection of the community as well. So when you say we’re in chaos..you are as well.

What I’m about to say will have many of you wanting to call for my head on a platter…that is fine, its my opinion. Many people want Daniel Robbins back, thats great, but ask him what his true goals are in concrete form. All I’ve seen so far from him is lofty long term goals without anything that is possible to be realized now. Long term goals are certainly something you need in any project, but you need steps to attain them. I’ve not seen any of those yet. This is one of the reasons that I’m not for Daniel coming back. Many of the leaders that have “failed” as people like to point out is that they have the long term vision for something, but have no follow up or ability to implement features of it in the short term. As you can not just go from A to Z but have to go through B as well.

So really….what is it that would improve communication for User Relations? Website does and doesn’t fall under us, and for those who mentioned we had a contest for the design of the website and worked towards a new design, however the developer who created the new design (that I really liked personally) left in part because of a conflict with other members that he was working with. After that at least one person tried to finish it but he faded away as well. Honestly, at this point I’d like to take some of the money that has been donated to us and hire someone to professionally design the website for us that meets the criteria that we need.

Ultimately and personally, I think the biggest contribution that Gentoo can make to linux is in our documentation. Members have discussed the fact that users of debian and ubuntu and $x distro actually link to Gentoo’s documentation for setting this or that up. I’d like to see that increased and expanded personally to cover a larger array of things that people do. For that we need you to write the guides for how to do this or that..Many do reside in the forums but I’d like to see them join the family of documentation that we have. I’m sure that on this last point Joshua (nightmorph) will have plenty to say. As well how to get involved with something like that.

As always we can be reached at user@gentoo.org and the various group alias’s such as userrel.

If there’s something you want to know about gentoo, post a comment here. I will answer to the best of my ability as to my understanding of what is the cause etc of whatever it is you want.

But with the last two posts being told I’m a tool box (this made me laugh actually), that I’m everything wrong with Gentoo, and basically just being hammered on by the people who I can not identify with in the least anymore because as a user I had respect for developers. Remember everything is a two way street….

So ask and I’ll follow up with the questions with the best answers I have..in the meantime I’ll go back to killing Gentoo single handedly by unknown means to myself.

P.S. This is a standing offer….at which point email would probably be best..@gentoo or @tsunam.org will get me. Just maybe the spam filters will get you

I’m going to do a bit of clarification as there’s a lot of people who I’ve seen replied that don’t get truly what we are talking about here. Surprisingly so actually. As it stands there are two separate divisions in Gentoo Linux, have been for 2-3 years when daniel stepped down/forced down depending on who you talk to. I’ve created a handy little graphic for you

As you can see in the above graph. Gentoo is divided into two distinct sides. Technical which everyone is worried about has almost nothing to do with this. Its only affected by the fact that Daniel could tell us today that we no longer can use Gentoo (new name time) or the G logo (new logo time). He has not done this in the 2-3 years that he’s still held onto these copyrights when we should of been properly incorporated as a foundation and had the transfer that he wanted to happen actually happen.

If you notice…ebuilds will still be here..developers will still be doing portage updates, things will continue on. This is not a death of gentoo technical..nor in anyway relates to them other then a possible name. Now assuming you got that can we please avoid the “we need to give gentoo back to daniel because the trustee’s failed and that means gentoo as a whole failed and its dying. Its simply not…we just have someone who’s very kindly allowing us silently to use his copyrights but at any time he’s able to tell us that we can’t use it anymore and would be changing all the materials that he holds copyright over. Everything that you as a user or a developer would use would be the same…just instead of Gentoo, you’d be using (We_lost_our_name_distro).

Now as far as daniels post, please excuse the bit of sarcasm involved but here is another graph that shows his plan.

As you see this plan brings the Foundation and the Council under the same umbrella. With Daniel as the head of the organization electing the other trustee’s who will oversee both the technical direction as well as the financial/legal aspects…which as I mentioned previously is very hard to find in anyone who would be able to be elected. If you talk to Mike(vapier) for instance. He has no desire to deal with the “foundation” aspects but has done very well as a member of the Council. Diego (flameeyes) I have no doubt would say the same thing. He’d much rather be coding and working to improve Gentoo then having to deal with the potential…oh this person wants to be reimbursed for printing up a banner for the Germany linux symposium that we were represented at.

Now please note that it is a lot of sarcasm in that picture with the “yes men/women” but I’m fairly certain that while Daniel has good intentions at heart, he’d elect/select people who generally agree with his point’s but not be the best for the role. While I don’t follow the Councils actions much, I see them actually making progress. Which you can actually see here in the logs and summary of the meetings. If you want to talk about transparency, there you go meetings are actually posted with what was discussed in both raw and summary format.