Striving for greatness

I wrote an article discussing Gentoo’s new release and new council for this week’s LWN.net. If you’ve read my earlier blog posts and other posts on Planet Gentoo regarding 2008.0, there won’t be a whole lot of new information. It’s designed as analysis of recent Gentoo events for people who don’t already follow Gentoo development.

If you aren’t already subscribed to LWN.net, get on it. It’s my #1 source for Linux- and open-source-related news, and it saves me huge amounts of time that I would otherwise spend in cesspools like Slashdot. =)

P.S. Anyone going to OSCON, let me know via a comment here or my contact info.

Here’s links to a few places that posted announcements for 2008.0. Go there and get involved by voting and commenting!

• Slashdot
• Digg

Gentoo 2008.0 makes the Digg frontpage

• Reddit
• DistroWatch (original announcement)
  
• LWN.net
• TuxMachines
• Phoronix
• OSNews
• OStatic
• Heise
• Linux Format
• Clubic (Warning: French. English translation)
• FOSSWire
• DesktopLinux.com
• Linux Magazine (UK)
• InternetNews.com — The only one to do any real reporting & interviewing
  
• Open Source Pixels
• Techgage
• LinuxNews.pl (English translation)
• Programas Livres (Warning: Portuguese. English translation)
• Linux Journal
• Linux1.no (English translation)
• PettiNix (Warning: Italian. English translation)
• Linux.org.ru (English translation)
• ZDNet.co.uk
• DistroWatch Weekly

There’s also a ton of talk about Gentoo 2008.0 happening on Twitter, which I’m following through the Summize search engine with a search for gentoo. I’m also following blogs talking about Gentoo, and I have a news search for Gentoo that I expect to pick up more later once more journalists pick up the news.

Update 1: Added Phoronix, thanks to Denis Dupeyron (Calchan).

Update 2: Added OSNews

Update 3: Added OStatic, Heise, Linux Format, Clubic, FOSSWire, DesktopLinux.com, Linux Magazine (UK)

Update 4: Added InternetNews.com

Update 5: Added Open Source Pixels, Techgage

Update 6: Added LinuxNews.pl, Programas Livres

Update 7: Added Linux Journal, Linux1.no, PettiNix, Linux.org.ru

Update 8: Added ZDNet.co.uk, DistroWatch Weekly

I said this briefly on the gentoo-dev list, and I want to expand on it here. The council is Gentoo’s leadership, and it’s composed of 7 people elected by all Gentoo developers using a Condorcet-style ranking vote. Of the 7 people on the old council, 5 of them decided to run again and every single council member who ran was re-elected.

This is significant because the re-election was forced over miscommunication about a meeting, and this created some serious conflicts with a sentence in the Gentoo Linux Enhancement Proposal that created the current structure, including the council. I consider this a mandate, showing that Gentoo developers have confidence in the existing leadership doing what’s best for Gentoo.

This was your chance to say yes or no, and you gave us a resounding yes. Since it isn’t often we hear much from the vast majority of developers, this really means a lot to me in saying which directions we should go, based on who you voted for (graphs here). My interpretation is that you like what’s going on now and where we’re talking about going. I’d really love to hear more input from those of you who don’t normally speak up, though. What can we do for you?

P.S. The 2008.0 release is out.

Devs, listen up–voting closes for the Gentoo council at 23:59 UTC today (Friday). Here I’m going to tell you my surprise underdog picks. By underdog, I mean people who I didn’t realize I was going to rank fairly highly for before doing research. I dig through all my mailing-list archives of -dev, -project and -core, looking at all the recent posts by each candidate. Then I decided whether they expressed enough opinion on global directions, whether they were active enough on-list, and whether I agreed with their ideas about where Gentoo should go. Based on that, here’s my underdogs:

• jer (HPPA arch team)
• leio (wxWidgets, GNOME maintainer)
• ulm (emacs maintainer)
• dev-zero (cpp, postgresql, samba, python maintainer)

Other than them, I strongly endorse our QA lead, Halcy0n (also on GCC porting, toolchain, and C++ teams). I’m not listing anyone who’s been on the council before, because that isn’t as interesting. There are other candidates who I think have the technical qualifications–I’m not voting for some of them because I think having a strong community that follows and enforces its own Code of Conduct is not just important but vital for Gentoo to move down the path of greatness.

Last night, Dave Airlie released libdrm 2.3.1, which set the stage for all the pieces of the X.Org 7.4 prereleases to actually work (with a couple mesa patches). If you’d like to test 7.4, here’s how. This assumes you’re already running an ~arch (testing) system–if you aren’t, you might want to hold off on testing hard-masked packages. This may not work with binary drivers–particularly ati-drivers. It looks like nvidia-drivers has preliminary support for xorg-server 1.5.

echo "
# xorg-server-1.5 prerelease
=x11-base/xorg-server-1.4.99*
=media-libs/mesa-7.1*
x11-proto/dri2proto
=x11-libs/libdrm-2.3.1*
" >> /etc/portage/package.unmask
emerge -va xorg-server
emerge -va1 $(qlist -I x11-drivers)

I’ve still got 16 more packages to bump before everything’s up to date, but the main parts are in place.