Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo vmware/virtualbox/qemu images
Chris, Chris Gianelloni wrote: Currently, Release Engineering is quite understaffed. We have lost a few release coordinators between the last release and now. The arch teams are picking up the slack and getting people to fill the roles, but they have to be trained, which means more time spent training and less time spent working, which delays a release fairly significantly. Are you still looking for staff ? What roles/positions/work needs doing most ? Are you aware that http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/staffing-needs/ lists no staffing needs for release engineering ? Where do I volunteer and what amount of time-investment can I expect ? Ramon -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo vmware/virtualbox/qemu images
On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 13:54 +0200, Ramon van Alteren wrote: Currently, Release Engineering is quite understaffed. We have lost a few release coordinators between the last release and now. The arch teams are picking up the slack and getting people to fill the roles, but they have to be trained, which means more time spent training and less time spent working, which delays a release fairly significantly. Are you still looking for staff ? What roles/positions/work needs doing most ? Release Engineering is almost always looking for staff. The primary need is architecture release coordinators for the architectures which have lost them. Anyone considering joining Release Engineering should be capable of being an ebuild developer, if they're not already, as most issues are in ebuild code. Familiarity with catalyst and genkernel is a requirement. Strong python and bash skills are preferred. Are you aware that http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/staffing-needs/ lists no staffing needs for release engineering ? I am well aware. I have no intentions on asking our user pool for help with this due to my own constraints. It has nothing to do with the users themselves and everything to do with what we actually need. We don't need people that we have to train, as that only takes time that we already do not have to train the new person, compounding the problem more than it helps. We don't really need people that are not on architecture teams, because their work is representative of the team and they need to work with the team in question. Unfortunately, this pretty much leaves us pulling from our current developer pool. Where do I volunteer and what amount of time-investment can I expect ? Well, first you would need to become a developer. I don't have time to mentor someone myself, so you'd need to find a mentor and get yourself into the developer pool. Aside that, you'd need to be able to use catalyst and troubleshoot your own issues with it. I know that this sounds really bad, but I don't mean it to be. It doesn't help me, at all, if I have to teach someone. My familiarity with catalyst is such that it is generally faster to do something myself than to teach someone else to do it. Basically, we require people who are completely self-motivated learners capable of reading code, understanding it, and putting that new knowledge into practice without help. The amount of time required can vary wildly, depending on the quality of the tree for your architecture, just how crazy the architecture boot sequence is, the speed of your hardware, etc. On average, I spend anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a *week* during release times. I've spent as little as 3 or 4 hours and as much as 60 hours. Also, Release Engineering is one of the few places where deadlines are very important, meaning you have to be able to actually commit to time lines and follow through, on time. Of course, this makes Release Engineering one of the more stressful jobs around Gentoo. Just ask anyone who has been hanging around #gentoo-releng during a release... ;] -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering Strategic Lead Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams Games Developer/Foundation Trustee Gentoo Foundation signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo vmware/virtualbox/qemu images
Mike Doty wrote: I don't get this obsession with a live image when someone can boot the LiveCD/LiveDVD on real hardware *or* in VMware. They can even boot the ISO directly and not even have to burn to disk, so people without a DVD burner can still use the LiveDVD. So exactly what problem are we trying to solve with creating an image that cannot be solved with our current media? Where do you plan on storing such a large image? What other media are you planning on us removing to support it? (By the way, I am planning on adding support for creating VMware images to catalyst, so this will eventually be something much easier for us in Release Engineering...) The only advantage I see is less than technical people(read windows/osx users) who don't know/are afraid of ISOs and such, yet know how to operate vmware-player. Were we to consider Enterprise Gentoo we'd certainly want to offer it to people interested in gentoo. Think of it more as a marketing tool. As for what to put on it, liveDVD is the only sane choice. That said; It would be awsome if when catalyst can build vmware images, to make a minimal one as well, so groups(maybe xfce4, kde, ) can make their own demos based on that. This guy: http://gentoovm.blogspot.com/ works for vmware according to his first post here: http://www.vmwhere.net/category/gentoo/ (where he makes clear he has nothing to do with releng, and that his work is in no way to be seen as official.) He might be a good guy to rope in? He seems to be having trouble with hosting and hasn't released since 2006.0 so he'd most likely welcome the approach, imo. Wrt to second use case (custom ones for groups) there's nothing stopping someone doing that from a minimal iso right now afaict. (It's a lot easier if you work in a partition, and make the image at the end for deployment.) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo vmware/virtualbox/qemu images
On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 07:19 +0100, Steve Long wrote: This guy: http://gentoovm.blogspot.com/ works for vmware according to his first post here: http://www.vmwhere.net/category/gentoo/ (where he makes clear he has nothing to do with releng, and that his work is in no way to be seen as official.) He might be a good guy to rope in? He seems to be having trouble with hosting and hasn't released since 2006.0 so he'd most likely welcome the approach, imo. He was on the bug. Also, people seem to forget that we would also very likely have an issue with hosting, too. We do not have unlimited space on our community-donated mirrors. It has always been a constant struggle within Release Engineering to keep our sizes down. This is one of the reasons that we've not undertaken such a task. To be honest, once I get support in catalyst, it'll be much more likely that I'll end up creating these, since I'll be able to share the catalyst caches and such between LiveDVD and VM image builds, so it'll take almost no time to produce the builds. Currently, Release Engineering is quite understaffed. We have lost a few release coordinators between the last release and now. The arch teams are picking up the slack and getting people to fill the roles, but they have to be trained, which means more time spent training and less time spent working, which delays a release fairly significantly. I have no intentions on pulling in more media for us to support when we're having difficulty supporting what we have now. That's just an unfortunate fact of life. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering Strategic Lead Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams Games Developer/Foundation Trustee Gentoo Foundation signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
