Older blog entries for halcy0n (starting at number 44)

Ankh: Well, I don't mean that I thought all projects would be without fights. A flamewar every now and again will most likely happen, but it shouldn't by any means by the norm of getting things done. I agree, I think the way for a project to work efficiently is to adopt the idea of "scratching someone else's itch". Atleast, it seems like what we should be aiming at doing... :)

lkcl: I completely agree. I always try to take into account what would help other people when I work on something. The only reason I get involved with projects is because I want to give back and help people out. If I wanted to do something for myself, a group environment does not seem the place to do that. When you have 100s of people who are supposed to be working together all doing something just for themselves, you end up with all of those people fighting with each other. It seems to be exactly what happens with Gentoo, since as other people have observed, each team normally interacts with its own members fine...its just when those teams have to deal with each other that the flames start to fly. If each team realized that interacting with others is a basic requirement for being part of a group project, I think things would go a lot more smoothly, but unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

So, I retired from Gentoo the other day. It was great while it lasted, but the developer atmosphere really became something that was "not fun" to be part of. There is too much arguing, too many people that probably shouldn't be devs to begin with, and too many people putting forward silly ideas that they didn't think through at all. Everyone finds something to argue about, and people can not just agree to disagree and try to work towards an acceptable solution. Its really a sad state of affairs to see something I used to love doing become something I found to be a chore.

So, my question for everyone is...is this something common with all open source projects? Do all of them start turning into projects that have flamewar after flamewar on their development mailing lists? Do all of them have developers that forgot they were once users themselves and treat people like crap? If so, I must really have an incredibly idealistic view of what open source projects should be all about. I always thought it was something like minded people did to give back to the community, and to work together. It seems that I may have been mistaken though...but I hope not...because I really do think that there are people like me hoping for the same nice environment to work in.

GCC:

Well, gcc-4.1.1 was unmasked yesterday, and so far it looks like everything went very smooth. It appears that I was wrong about one thing though, mixing gcc-3.4 and 4.1 doesn't seem to be the greatest idea, so you should follow the GCC Upgrading Guide that we have. A few people ran into some strange issues that were resolved by recompiling with gcc-4.1.1, so it is probably best that everyone does that. Now that 4.1.1 is out the door, I'm hoping to stable gcc-3.4.6 on x86 this weekend, and then looking at the remaining GCC bugs we have open. Hopefully the next GCC we will be marking stable will be 4.1.1. :)

x86:

In the past week or so everyone has stepped up and done a lot of work, and because of that, we only have 4 bugs left :) wolf31o2 and tsunam both handled marking KDE stable for x86, which is a huge task, so thanks to them for handling that huge pain in the ass.

Now that we have a pretty streamline process for getting packages marked stable quickly we can start to look at doing some more QA related activities. It would be very cool, in my opinion, if we went around and tried to find all of those random packages that haven't been touched in years and don't even compile or work. I'd also really like for us to continue doing periodic checks on everything we have marked stable to ensure everything is still working and that we didn't miss anything when we were marking it, or something else that may affect it, stable.

QA:

Well, after our GLEP was passed, things have been quietly going on for us now, doing what we can to help out where needed. Recently we got the Gentoo Devmanual converted from RST into XML, so it will be easier for us to maintain. plasmaroo and myself both did the entire conversion, but the original content was mostly written by Ciaran McCreesh, along with other contributors. If you find any errors, have some suggestions, or new content you want in the manual, please email plasmaroo and myself. Also check out the contributing page if you want to send us new content.

15 May 2006 (updated 15 May 2006 at 03:00 UTC) »
GCC:

If you are usin gcc-4.1.0, then you probably saw the revision bump to -r1. That's because we want all of you to have all of the changes we've made before we unmask it, to ensure that nothing is broken and that the upgrade should be relatively smooth. If you notice any major bugs, please let us know so we can fix them. We are hoping to unmask it by next week if nothing huge comes up. Just waiting for the dust to settle :)

QA:

The QA glep was approved finally :) Thanks to the council and everyone else for your support. Hopefully everyone will see now that we are only here to help and people will come to us when they need help. We are still working on the devmanual and hope to have it hosted as soon as I talk to infra about how we should go about that.

x86:

We finally have a few ATs helping us out now that have been awesome (thanks mlangc, djm, and saknopper). If you want to help out as well, stop by #gentoo-x86/irc.freenode.net and let us know :)

I went and fixed a bunch of wxWindows related bugs today. We will hopefully have someone to take care of wxWindows very soon (and we have needed someone for awhile now)...so long as we don't scare him away. :)

We still need help with a lot of other packages (like I talked about last time). xemacs and GNUstep are the two that are completely unmaintained right now, and could really use some love from people that use or are familiar with them. If you would be interested in helping out, please shoot me an email.

Classes will be over soon, and I should have lots of free time to work GCC related bugs, QA stuff, etc for Gentoo. Right now I could still use some help on the gcc-4.x porting bug. There are still quite a few blockers, and I'd like to get the list cut down a lot more before I go ahead and unmask gcc-4.1. Testing patches that are attached to bugs, and writing patches both help, so please try and help on a bug or two. :)

14 Apr 2006 (updated 14 Apr 2006 at 06:32 UTC) »

Just a short update on things:

Toolchain: I now have gcc-4.2 snapshots in the tree. Don't use them unless you feel like actually fixing any problems you run into. They are not supported yet, and are just there as a convienence to those that wish to play around with them. In other news, GCC-4.1 is coming along nicely, but I could definately use some help cleaning up all of the porting bugs that remain. Just check out the blockers for bug #117482.

x86: On the x86 front, we definately need more arch testers. So if you are interested, contact me, tsunam, or hparker and let us know. I think the team has helped improve "x86", and I'd really like to see things improve even more, but we need more people for that.

Also, if you want to help out by maintaining some packages, check out the Staffing Needs page. There are contact addresses on there for whomever is asking for help. Also, you can check the bugs assigned to maintainer-needed@gentoo.org. You can send me an email if you think you can help out by maintaining any of those packages, and either I'll help you out, or try to find someone else that would be more appropriate.

toolchain:

gcc-4.1.0_pre20060223 (aka _rc2) is in the tree. I would appreciate it if people could test it and let me know of any remaining problems with packages they run into. You now have permission to file bugs for all gcc-4.1 related errors and not get yelled at. :) 4.1.0 final should be out in a few days, and I expect to have it in the tree shortly after it is released. I have to go through all of the patches we have applied to 4.0.2 and see what should still be applied, so be patient if it isn't in the tree right after it is released :)

QA:

Well, we are trying to get together an actual QA "team" to search out QA problems and get them resolved. So, if you see a bug assigned to you and with QA CC'd on it, don't worry, we are not out to get you. We are just trying to keep track of all of the QA problems, and educate people so the same problems do not occur again. If you have ideas on what we could do better or problems in the tree that you think we should look for...I'd love to hear them :)

A lot of people are asking me when gcc-4.0 is going to go into ~arch. The answer: soon :) I want to get it in as soon as possible, but I also want to make sure it is not going to break on common packages. If you want to help out, go check out the gcc4 tracker bug. If something doesn't have a patch yet, it would help if you tried to find one or came up with one that we could use.

toolchain:

Okay, so gcc-4.0 isn't in ~arch yet, but we are getting there. If you want to help out, check out the bugs that bug #117481 depends on. There are a few packages that I consider "major", and I would like to see fixed before moving forward. I'll see what I can do about getting those issues fixed as soon as I can.

x86:

The other day fox2mike expressed interest in joining the x86 team as an AT, and he's also a doc dev. What luck for us, since now we have someone to help me write up some documentation for the x86 team :) We should have a draft of the AT documentation done soon (probably this coming week). Hopefully after that I can update the project page and get some new information up on there.

other stuff:

I just added Delta to the tree. Its a really cool application for reducing "interesting" input files. I personally use it for reducing testcases for GCC ICEs, which it has done very well for me. I'm sure there's about 5 other people out there that will find this useful, so, go crazy :)

Toolchain:

Well, I added glibc-2.3.6-r2 to the tree tonight, which I will keyword as ~x86 in the next few days so long as no problems come up. After that, I'll make sure all major apps are compiling fine with gcc-4.0.2-r3 (which they are currently), and then we can finally start getting gcc-4.0 into ~arch. So, if you want to jump the gun and start testing, just unmask the latest glibc and gcc ebuilds. If you find a package that doesn't compile and there isn't a bug open, please create a bug with the error message and the output of `emerge info` (a patch would also be awesome, but not required :) ). Also please set the bug you create to be a blocker of bug #117482.

x86:

Well, I think the x86 team is working out well, but we could still use some more arch testers to help out and improve the testing we are doing. If you want to help out with Gentoo and you aren't sure how to start with doing so, this may be a way for you. Just come talk to us on IRC (we don't bite) in #gentoo-x86 on irc.freenode.net. (Yes, this sounds like a bad advertisement, but hey...whatever works :P )

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