Sam Bishop <sam <at> cygnus.email> writes:
> In my mind. Gentoo has the kind of hook you speak of. We just havent > refined it or done a good job showing it off to the world. > The ebuild format is one of the most powerful packaging standards. > An automatic test battery for Gentoo could possibly catapult Prefix > and similar sub projects forward to much greater adoption, and help > Gentoo reap secondary benefits as a result. > Now all the replying is done, here's the big question, where to organise > the bigger picture things? This mailing list? IRC? A new mailing list? > I want to get involved in this because I'm going to be building some > parts of this already. Why wouldn't I want to give back and help make > Gentoo better. Organization is great, but, practical tools are the first step,imho. In order to make this not only useful for Gentoo, but other coders, We need a liveUSB, where folks can download "Gentoo Fever" onto a usb stick and stick into their current hardware and boot up a killer code development system. That way they can work on these aforementioned codes right on a gentoo system and submit code snippets (patches) easily to the appropriate github. They can use epatch_user to test their codes on a given ebuild, very simply or use github tools. They'll need tools so their project of interest can be "ebuildified" with a set of ebuilds, and then tested with codes like "etest". What we need is a dev or a stong_user who is very knowledgeable of code development tools, to use build upon the livedUSB work of LikeWahoa and put together a set of tools, realizing that non-gentoo developers are the target. Surely the accomplished user/coders and gentoo devs all have their customizations set; so there would be no reason why we cannot have different killer versions (kde, lxqt, gnome etc) centric on what given dev likes. And so these liveusb images can be use to bootstrap gentoo users into a pahtway of becoming gentoo devs too. So just put the tools you like and know about and projects on a lived-USB and post back to this list where to download and test it. I for one will download and boot up hardware with your usb stick (usb-3 with a high read/write bandwidth is nice) and look at Gentoo from your eyes. Surely you are capable/willing to do this Sam ? Then another and a another and we will have a family of "gentoo-fever" live media. Then the discussion on a wider basis and targeting the GSoC kids to join us next spring can get moving. From there, Gentoo-Fever spreads back to the universities and eventually to those Mac/Winblows professors that are tenured...... and so on and so forth. If gentoo "celebrates" the systemd vs openrc divide, surely we'll gain from those disgruntled ranks. As an old Deb & Ian fan, I'd be very, very proud of Gentoo saving those openrc_centric deb fans...... "Carpe Diem!" (where's that liveUSB?) The saddest thing is this. Surely we all know individual devs at Gentoo that can individually build a "Gentoo Fever" liveusb image, in just a few hours. The fact that there is little interest among those folks with that skill level, I personally find to be a devastating statement about Gentoo Apathy. They can do (and do) amazing things with gentoo, but so little efforts is expended in a helping hand upward. If I'm wrong about this, then show me a gentoo-fever liveusb from several different groups at gentoo, please? hth, James