Hi all,
I think most of you have already noticed me in some way, either via some
announcements on -dev, by reading a blog, or just by paying attention in
IRC. Anywayz, for those that don't know, I'm a new developer on the OSX
team.
In the small week that I've been officially on the staff now, I was
confronted with many small things that made me ponder. Before going
into a long mail, I'll apologise upfront for my English, it's horrible.
When Lina send me an email after I submitted some bug on bugzilla, I
felt like hey, wow, etc. Basically I still feel like that. It's an
honour to be part of the Gentoo team somehow. That it can't be fun
everytime proves that recent resignation message on -dev I think.
However, let's stick to the main point: I like to contribute some useful
things here, and I hope I can find a corner where I can be that useful
as I hope to be. At the moment I have the terrible feeling of being
useless, doing nothing struggling with everything that gets on my path.
I'm not really an IRC guy. I know what it is, but in general it's great
in distracting you and stopping you from doing what you have to do. Due
to my time zone, I usually miss the important discussions too. Hence,
I'm thinking of a drastical reduction of my IRC online time. I have the
feeling most of the OSX staff is in the #-osx channel, but it simply
doesn't work out so well for me. I prefer the asynchronous way of
email, it also allows me to take some more time to type a response. As
a non-native English typer, I need more time to come up with responses.
And usually, it's time zone free! ;)
I got a fuzzy image of what the OSX team currently consists of. It's
far from a unity, more a group of people somewhere related because of a
shared OS, most of the time. Personally I'm a bit lost in what the
general consensus would be among the team members. Maybe there isn't
even one. There is progressive, darwin, osx, etc. the arch ppc-macos
seems to be a multi-headed dragon.
My vision on Portage for OSX is exactly what the name says; portage on
OSX, thus a portage instance next to the original OS, so I can enjoy the
flexibility and package availability of portage and the sweetness of my
OS. I am willing to accept that I can't install autofs on a Mac OS X
machine. Maybe it sucks, but then you better install Linux on it
afterall. A Mac is different, thinks different, and yet, well... maybe
I just like that. In portage terms this is called "collission-protect".
Great!
Now it seems to me, after paying careful attention to some of the
comments made in the #-osx channel that this vision of mine, which
equals the current 'distribution' I think, can be considered the
unwanted child in the Gentoo family. Ok, it will be always a bastard
child, like Portaris would be, but someone started with this idea, and
got it into portage somehow. How did this whole thing emerge within the
Gentoo community, and what happened afterwards to get into the stage it
is in now?
Ok, this probably all sounds a bit depressing, or put differently, quite
unpromissing. However, all I need for now is some guide into the
wilderness I guess. What are the (common) targets of the team? What is
it 'we' want to achieve? Who thinks what?
Last, but not least, to get a small impression of the people in this
team, I would like a (very) short intro of those people that I haven't
met yet (if there are any ;) )
I hope somehow to become a valuable/active member of the team, but so
far I think I haven't had the opportunity to do so.
--
Fabian Groffen
eBuild && Porting
Gentoo for Mac OS X
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