That season is upon us again, students getting excited about writing code for the summer. Gentoo is planning to apply once again to be a mentoring organization and this is where we need your help.

Developers, we need you to figure out if you have the time to guide a student on a project. Needless to say you need to be a fairly decent programmer and take a valid interest in helping.

Users and developers, we need idea’s for projects. Toss them my way cause I want them.

Good luck to all organizations and students applying for the Summer of Code.

Gentoo has once again fallen into a rip van winkle state. For a period everyone was motivated and driven about Gentoo both in the developer and user communities. A few people tried to harness that and improve things. Donnie has probably had some of the most success with the revivial of the Public Relations group and keeping the front page updated. This has most certainly calmed one of the major issues that users had brought up about Gentoo as an Organization.

As Daniel so kindly pointed out that in a lot of ways that Gentoo is very likely a Dystopian society. Much like in 1984 you have your inner party that would be made up of your Developers, who could be split in a few ways such as by length of service, amount of work done, ebuild/non ebuild developers. Depending on how you split the above you can have Developers in the Outer party and users who make contributions as well. Finally you have the proles who are the users who use the product for their own reasons but also unlike the novel have the freedom to leave and go to another distribution that is the same as Gentoo in this respect. Ultimately, in any shared project that is Open source I tend to see the same global phenonomen that I described above with Gentoo. When you get down to individuals however is when you see a change.

Oceania(Gentoo), as we’re all aware is entirely driven by the vollunteers that join and contribute to make it better for what they need. Notice that its not typically for the betterment of the party but for their own individual needs. I’m not for example going to suddenly take an interest in clustering because I’m told that I need to. I’ll stick to what I’m doing which is a mixture of areas that I try to affectionately term as the Human Relations.

As part of the Relations aspect, I’ve been trying to get more information out to the proles and trying to request information as well. I know that the developers/inner and outer party are far outweighed by this large group and in ways I’m trying to organize at least some people who have a hint of motivation to give me ideas of things that they see. I’ve unfortunately not been successful with this task. Both here and on the forums which I’ve started posting to again after a year plus absense. I would hope that it would be agreed that I’m trying to reach out but someone has to take my hand and give me something as well. A few have done this and while I might not agree with the idea I will at least discuss it and give insight into the party because of that discussion.

I continue to ask for topics to talk about both from my fellow members of User Relations, who also seem to be busy with other things and do not simply have a few minutes to answer some questions I’ve posed to them. If I can’t even get an answer from people I should be working with, I’m not sure how effective I can be with anyone else. I’ve had a few minor successes with the request to discuss and explain what Glep-55 was about and would like to cover other things like it but I don’t know what people would like to know about.

So once again I’m here asking for people to talk to me and give me their ideas. Its not a trick to get you to commit thoughtcrime. Its simply a request from someone who wants to improve Gentoo for everyone. To have people who want to see it improve step forward with me and see if we can’t come up with ways that would help people. I still need to work on a few things naturally like a quick guide about submitting stable requests.

I’ve posted the meeting notes provided by Matthew Summers to the forums here. I’ve also asked that people start coming up with ideas for GSOC. It doesn’t mean that we’re an accepted project. I’d just like to have some proposals that are well thought out and have very solid target goals along the path to the end that will allow for implementation at those points.

Minutes are also posted below:

tsunam started the meeting by introducing a short agenda, as follows.

1) Google SOC
2) Ways to revive user relations as we’ve been sorta meh for a while
3) ways to get users more involved
4) ways to get information out better

Antarus, then, spilled his burrito, which brought us to the following discussion.

The user-relations project’s activities and responsibilities include:
-Resolve conflicts where possible, and find creative solutions to them. Help to work through ongoing conflicts, miscommunication, and other such issues that affect our relationship with the user community.
-Help to turn ‘more communication’ into ‘better communication’.
-Understand and appreciate different project types and management styles.
-Collaborate with, and where possible learn from, the user community.
-User-relations acts as a form of umbrella project, providing resources and input to the projects in its area of responsibility. Some of the things we can do for projects include:
-Arrange cross-project meetings for discussion of issues that affect more than one participating project.
-Develop and carry out user surveys, and other methods for gathering input from the user community.
-Provide a central source of information and resources to make user-focused projects’ jobs easier and more productive.
-Encourage and facilitate sharing of experience and expertise amongst participating projects.

It was agreeed by tsunam, antarus, fmccor to discuss some of the finer points at a later date.

An Action Item:
fmccor: One thing we might do is (1) update the project pages to reflect current membership; (2) note who is available to help resolve conflicts (I know I am, and I believe dmwaters is).

1) Google Summer of Code
It was agreed that Gentoo should apply.
-jmbsvicetto: tsunam: As I recall the 2 largest problems have been: lack of mentors and lack of progress reports
-antarus: I need to write a mentoring guide
-nichoj: having a list of possible projects is good and bad. good because it gives students an idea, but bad because you end up with lots of similar proposals, usually without much further research from student
-tsunam: so we need
–1) idea’s and ones that are fleshed out ahead of time
–2) mentors who have the ability to be some
-irasnyd: nichoj: maybe require a “why I want to do this project” or “why I chose this project” with the application?
-quantumsummers: we could provide a team of subject matter experts , acting as liasons to the larger developer pool, to answer questions in a rapid manner (i.e. return answers within a day or less) to address any lack of knowledge on any particular Gentoo project (ex. portage).
- jmbsvicetto: I think it could help if mentors tried to work in team. If a student has a problem and isn’t able to reach his mentor, it would help if another mentor could help.

Also, it was agreed that a higher level of peer review of the project proposals was necessary. Essentially a team is needed for this purpose. g2boojum and christel lead that team for the last years. Some sort of page for a proposal with a place to put comments and feedback.

The following people stated that they would run the GSoC for Gentoo this year.
-antarus (since I can just walk to leslie’s desk ;P)
-tsunam (one of the coordinators yes and would be willing to poke people for updates)
-jmbsvicetto (help organize things and to server as a contact for students/mentors)

2) Ways to revive user relations as we’ve been sorta meh for a while
3) ways to get users more involved
4) ways to get information out better
-Get involved with PR and Events coordination.
-Consider regional Gentoo Conferences.
-Increase Gentoo exposure at other conferences by holding “Birds of a Feather” or other meetings.
nichoj: I’m wanting to start announcing events gentoo will be at on the frontpage.
-Consider the implementation of a web based survey system to gather user feedback. QuantumSummers offered to assist with this, having designed & implemented a dynamic survey & analysis engine using the Django (python) web framework. Antarus offered to assist with this as well by talking to Infra (robbat2).
-Gentoo is holding a Birds of a Feather meeting at PyCon 2008, on Saturday, March 15, from 6PM to 9PM (or later).
-Considered creating a Gentoo User Interview Feature and a “Company Using Gentoo” Feature section for the GMN.
-We also discussed ways of providing development updates to the user community by means of interviews for GMN
-( antarus: 25% of projects requested a month, you only get bugged every four months)
-(mark_alec:monthly ‘what project are you working on’ threads on -dev)

Well, I’ve about had it with mysql. Figure I’ll move to postgresql and hope for better luck. Which also means that I need to move from wordpress. What do people recommend as the alternatives?

Just means I get to spend some time converting about 5 db’s to postgres and the apps to use postgres instead of mysql…fun fun.

Figured since I actually got some interesting replies as of late that I’d highlight some of them and add some more thoughts about them.

I think one thing that would help the bugwranglers in this case would be a Frequently Submitted Bugs.

This is an example of an idea that I’m looking for. Something that I most certainly would not of thought of but has a very valid way to help out. One little minor issue is that we don’t have enough bug wranglers. The one person who actively does it, doesn’t really have the time to actually write up such a document. An area that we could use help obviously so this kind of documentation can actually be updated or simply created.

Do I always need the latest and greatest, well no. Except may be for a few select apps for which I will go as far as having my own personal overlay. Really I experiment with stuff.

This is a perfect example of a person who has the perfect way to help out. They have only a few packages that they run unstable and as they actively use them…know if they work with the rest of their stable tree setup. With a minimal of effort they can do a search for open bugs with a simple ALL package name. If there’s nothing critical for their version they can then go and file a bug for marking it stable. Currently the maintainer needs to push that to the arch teams to mark stable but it will mean that other people will get a new stable version. That’s always useful.

Some of the Portage documentation gives a bit of a mixed message about this. ( http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=3&chap=3 : “If you want to use more recent software, you can consider using the testing branch instead.” ). It says “we recommend you only use the stable branch” but maybe not strongly enough?

Something that we can look into changing as it does say that either work, and they certainly do. I’d like to see more stable users personally but that’s my goal and not the projects as a whole.

I tend to run ~x86 versions of desktop apps which I know are updated regularly with new features (Pidgin, Amarok, Firefox, many others), even if I can’t name all of those features off the top of my head; but I use the stable versions of mostly everything else. Does this seem like a sane policy?

This is the kind of thing I actually sort of expect to see happen with Gentoo. These are also applications that really should be stable far sooner then others as they are so commonly used in arch and ~arch mixed environments. I consider this a very sane policy and in a lot of ways its also the way I do my own system.

I’d submit bugs to mark new versions of some of those packages stable, but I don’t really know what the process is.

This is something that once I’m able to sit down and work on it…that I’ll hopefully put out a document that will be somehow associated with our bugzilla system so that its prominent there. I’m sure others would like it mentioned on the front page as a prominent link but there has to be some motivation to want to help out.

I’ve always been running ~ arches, both because I like bleeding edge stuff and because I don’t mind investigating broken builds and post bugs about it. Even unstable has been very “stable” to me, so keep up the good work!

This is great and shows another side of our community. A person who helps out in his own way. More power to you and those like you.

The second big reason (after I hit the problem first, so I can help, I have less problems then they have), I am a version junkie. I like to have the latest KDE, xine, glibc, kernel, gcc as soon as it is unmasked. Even more true for games, where the difference between two releases can be huge.

I think quite a few of our users would fall into this category. This is of course is diametrically opposed to those who run stable.

Also, when I’m trying a new unstable package, I’m never quite sure what version to unmask. I don’t *really* want to run unstable - it’s just that there’s no stable version.

This is another perfect example of what we could use help with. Honestly, I don’t know what packages you run. I doubt you know what I run. So if its entirely unstable…lets work on getting at least one version stable if it can go without some major blockers. It could be that the maintainer just never thought about it for stable. A lot of maintainers do actually maintain 20+ packages so some do get forgotten when you have that many.

I generally try to keep my system as close to arch as possible (i use x86, amd64 and ppc(64) ).
But some of the packages I depend on are hopelessy outdated.. dev-db/postgresql .. the stable release is 8.0, 8.3 is in release candidate state… there is usually around 15-25% more performance for each major release (8.1 -> 8.2 -> 8.3) and lots of major features (new features for 8.3 is for example full text search, which is vital for my kind of work) …

Postgresql is a fairly important package, one that I’d vote for lots of testing before going stable. Still requires someone filing a bug to go stable as well. If the maintainer doesn’t do it. Recommend it. If the maintainer says it shouldn’t then there should be a good number of reasons but I’d like to see a 40+% increase in performance in my stable machine, I’m not sure of a user who would not.

That’s just a few of the comments that I found interesting lately and wanted to highlight the ways that these users can help out a lot as you can see is by simply working with the ticketing/bug system we have and helping us with the testing you are already doing….