On 12/07/2016 02:44 AM, Duncan wrote:
james posted on Tue, 06 Dec 2016 22:10:16 -0500 as excerpted:
Really, for someone like me, it is just best to avoid irc.
FWIW, some 12 years ago now, in 2004, I started using gentoo, with the
intent of contributing and potentially eventually becoming a dev.
Somewhere along the line but rather early in the process, I read that IRC
was absolutely required at least for the final interview, and given that
I too strongly prefer email (or for group communications better yet
newsgroups, with gmane being that bridge for most mailing lists), I
decided my contributions, such as they are, can be better made either
elsewhere, or to gentoo, but without becoming a dev.
Put it this way. There's a lot of FLOSS projects out there hurting for
devs, and if some of them throw up entirely artificial barriers that some
have problems with to the direct repo contribution level when there are
so many other options that don't, fine, it's their prerogative, but they
obviously aren't hurting for devs as much as they might claim, if they
have the luxury of throwing up such artificial barriers to filter some
potential contributors out.
Much later, likely after some recruiters project changes, someone from
recruiters clarified that IRC on the final interview isn't actually
/required/, there might be ways around it in individual cases.
Apparently it does need to be real-time synchronous for some reason, but
he suggested that a (VoIP?) phone call or the like could be arranged as
an alternative. In theory I could do that.
But by then, while I continued then and continue now to use gentoo as it
really does seem the best and most flexible scripted build-it-yourself
distro out there, my enthusiasm for becoming a dev had burned off due to
finding it simply wasn't an option for so long, and given all the work
involved, I decided I could simply remain as I was and as I have for now
over a decade, a gentoo user and contributor on various lists, bugzilla,
etc, as well as a generally non-coder contributor to a few selected
upstreams.
Now it seems to be IRC hard-required again. <shrug>
I do find it a bit ironic, tho, since literally generations of devs have
come and gone since I started, always with the intent to contribute to
the best of my ability, back in 2004. From my perspective, that's a lot
of additional contributions missed in the decade-plus since then.
Furthermore, I see little reason I'll not still be gentooing in another
decade, even three, by which time I'd be turning 80 (I'm turning 50 in
January), if both gentoo and I are still around by then. That's a
lifetime of additional contributions from my perspective needlessly
missed, but I guess they must not be so desperately needed after all,
apparently because the quality of contributions from people that don't
IRC are of significantly enough lower quality that it's simply not worth
bothering to recruit those folks. <shrug>
I want to get the quizes done to the current version, mostly to prove I
have the knowledge and work on my ebuild and bring them up to EAPI 6
or possible EAPI-7 (is it reasonably formulated yet?). Maybe I could
just ask Duncan to grade those quizes; I certainly trust his judgment.
I do not need to be a formalized as a gentoo dev. But with over a decade
of gentoo experience, a bachelor in EE, a professional engineering
registration and a Masters in CS (yes from an ABETT university), decades
of coding, and I've had significant issue with the process, you'd think
that this effort to become qualified as a gentoo dev, is maybe a bit too
socially subjective and more of a cruel social filter to folks that they
(then existing gentoo devs) just do not want in the clubhouse. Thanks
Duncan for stating my case too. (Actually more eloquently that I ever
could). If I've been rude or abusive, I apologize, but it's a very
small fraction, at most,
compared to the angst folks experience, as they look, covetously at the
gentoo tree. Are there any shareable apples ?
I also really like the Anna W. idea of using a GLEP to formalize
methods to fork Gentoo, very straightforward and very easy. From an 'old
fart's' gentoo distro, folks could even work on core codes (think
bootstrap, profiles, compilers and such) and test their ideas before
submitting ideas/ebuild to gentoo_irc_proper. Someone might just
experiment for a replacement/enhancement to Bugzilla or such? I know
that 'fork' scenario will work for me. In fact with a repo that is
visible and usable via layman, folks could just try ebuilds or groups of
ebuilds from a repo. Seems like we had this discussion, with another
young coder on gentoo-dev less than a year ago?
However, when I start pushing a 'bare-metal' provisioning systems, not
dissimilar to CoreOS's 'ignition' then a separate gentoo-hack-distro
would be very useful. My research (on bench-marking thousands of
different clusters/codes) on identical hardware configurations, the
installation has to be automated and unattended in the most robust of
fashions. There is no other distro to perform this work on, from my
tests and experiences. Like Duncan, I too am mostly discouraged from
'walking the hot coals' to dev status.
Being able to use stage-4 or stage-5 (G. forums) installs to rapidly
provision a collection of bare-metal systems [BGO-593218] into a wide
variety of hardened clusters is my passion. Unikernels as stage 4
packages can then very easily be targeted for very specific needs: VM or
container or bare-metal. Gentoo-proper is has too much political
baggage to encourage folks to innovate, imho. So, I really hope the
gentoo dev community gets behind the Anna Wilcox idea of streamlining
Gentoo into the most fork-able distro on the planet. WE could all be one
happy family and yet be very competitive with our ideas, trials and
published results? Surely a few eggheads (academcis/pedantics) see the
wisdom of competing micro_distros? Not unlike competing micro_breweries,
it make the entire craft much stronger and better for all.
Then there can be peace and harmony as everybody can do exactly as they
please with their little cluster of gentoo and their very own
portage-tree. And then folks running gentoo-proper now can pick and
choose which innovations they want to include in the master tree. Isn't
that pretty much what Google and CoreOS do now, as well as the gentoo
derivative OS? Why not accelerate what has worked, for the few, to
emancipate those of us still chained into user-land servitude.
hth,
James
