Just a Life - Down Under (Observations by Paul de Vrieze)

Seemant has a nice post on gentoo history. While the role of Kurt is sometimes unclear I have to agree with him on the general points. One can not know what another person wanted, but it seemed at the time that Kurt saw himself as the successor of Daniel. It is a truth that he held quite a lock over gentoo’s infrastructure that had me (and others, including Daniel) worried.

In general I think that we should start at improving the culture. I’m not sure how to do it. I do know that it means that at some point uncivilized behavior should be stopped. Since the council seems incapable of actually taking fast, decisive action, perhaps we need a lead. (And no, I will not be running)

Yeah yeah, I know it’s been a while, but I think I should make some remarks. One thing that I notice is that the blog is really getting a lot of spam comments. It’s a good thing I’ve put moderation on so that it doesn’t end up on the web, but it does waste my time. Perhaps I should investigate a better solution.

Some core kernel people posted a position paper on the gpl revision. Besides the points made in this paper, which I agree with, it really showed to me that even version 2 of the GPL is not all appropriate in many cases. This up to the point where it is unclear whether it is relevant.

The point I mean is the linking and derivative work clause of the GPL. To me it is debatable whether pure linking of a library and using compatible headers constitutes creation of a derivative work. If it does (which I think it shouldn’t) that is a serious limitation in the use of any GPL software. The reason is that this means that this works both ways, and not only is it impossible to link GPL software into non-GPL software. It is also impossible to link GPL software with non-gpl software unless it is operating system software. This even means that GPL-3 software may not link to GPL-2 only software as these licenses are incompatible.

I have decided to go on the lookout for a better license for my own software. For gentoo I see no issues as the kinds of works gentoo produces do not touch these specific issues. I am very happy however that Daniel chose to indeed license specifically under version 2 of the GPL, not the 2 or later as encouraged by the FSF.

I’ve got the weirdest “bug”. Basically on my home system, and my office system (which is an x terminal) whenever I move the mouse strange very low volume clicking sounds come out of the housing of the system. I really wonder what it is. Perhaps I’ll unplug the onboard speaker on my homesystem to see whether that has anything to do with it, but in general I find it weird and annoying. Yes I know I have sensitive ears, but it shouldn’t make any noise.

Today I had a nice confrontation with the init system that is used in redhat enterprise linux 4. It is what one would call unsophisticated. I did however forget that it was this unsophisticated. Bascially when a runlevel starts the rc system runs all files in the runlevel dir that start with a K with the stop argument, then runs all files with an S with the start argument and is done with it.

What does this mean? It means a number of things:

• It is essential to keep good bookkeeping as it is easy to forget to kill a deamon if it doesn’t belong in the current runlevel
• Every script must tollerate multiple start attempts as the state of a script is not recorded
• Comment lines are used to determine the order in which scripts are started or stopped, no dependency

This is really a system that does not use the power of the system that exists. I’m really happy gentoo has a sane init system

It seems that many people are upset about the seeds project. To me this illustrates more the reasons behind gentoo inertia, than anything else.

The seeds project is something that I think could add an extra dimension to gentoo. Something that enhances the gentoo project and indeed shows its power as meta distribution. I don’t really get it why people don’t just take the project as the cool project that it is. The gentoo project is build to give freedom, both for users, and for developers. At this point it seems that some members of the project don’t want to see that. I know that some don’t really like Stuart (the instigator of the project), but I see him as someone who is responsible for bringing cool new things to gentoo. It is important to remember that there are only two directions for gentoo. Going forward, enhancing things, or perishing by becomming insignificant.

This monday I’ve started my new job at AT Computing. It was tiring, but also nice. I believe I’ve found myself an interesting job with nice colleagues. It also allows me to use my knowledge of linux and java in a professional manner. I much prefer that to starting from the ground up in some junior position.

From this spot I’d also like to put my grief on the departure of Rob Levin (better known as lilo on freenode). While I never met him personally, I know that his contributions made a difference for open source and gentoo.R.I.P

Chris White asked why we use gentoo. I’ll give my personal answer here.

I’ll answer in two parts. Why I started to use gentoo, and why I continue to use gentoo.

Why did I start to use gentoo. Well, my linux experience started with an old version of redhat. I’ve also administered a slackware box, and even for a short time a debian box. From redhat I experienced that the software you wanted wasn’t there, you had to compile stuff yourself if you wanted it. Some things were so unstandard that replacing them with self-compiled stuff would break things beyond repair. In short I didn’t really like redhat. For my home system I then continued with Linux From Scratch. This had some advantages, but I found soon enough that a package manager was necessary (I used RPM), and that support for packages like kde is also nice. It was a nice learning ground though. At some point I came across a gentoo review from the prerelease time. I took a look, and liked it. I installed gentoo on my system and I’ve been running it since.

So why do I keep using gentoo. There are a number of reasons:

• A nice community
• A distribution that likes to empower the users
• It is very easy to make your own packages
• Except a few cases where the “standard” is really broken (like init scripts) gentoo does not conflict with the standard way to do things
• Awsome documentation. In general if I want to do something I can find good gentoo-specific documentation on how to do things. This very much includes the inofficial documentation on gentoo-wiki and the forums.
• In general gentoo works properly. An ex-colleague of mine used to be sourcemage project lead. I’ve seen some of those systems, but they are unstable. Their system does not allow multiple versions of a package, it is impossible to have multiple packages from the same slot available for installation, but worse they use unwise optimizations. My roommate had such a system and went from one segfault to the other. To me that is unacceptable.
• The ease of installation of even disputable packages or even commercialware. Packages like mplayer, the nvidia drivers etc. are available by default and install very very easilly.
• Many packages available

Then finally one thing that is for me NOT a reason to use gentoo: Optimized CFLAGS (while it helps a little bit I don’t believe it is not the reason to use gentoo, and if you want speed, better buy a faster computer and use an optimized binary distro (prelink works better there too).

Joel is posting a nice series about software developers and jobs. While he’s more windows oriented, it is an interesting read and I’d like to encourage anyone to read it.

For me it is particularly interesting as I’ve been jobhunting until shortly (I start my new job on monday), and have strong recognition in his talks. One thing is worth mentioning, that is the kind of company that in The Netherlands provide a lot of IT jobs. They are all a bit different, Logica-CMG, Cap-Gemini, Ordina, Getronics Pink Roccade, you name it. Their main business is in IT consulting (what they call it). Those companies however are mainly in the business of being glorified temp agencies. They have alarming turnover rates too. They basically hire someone, provide him with a leasecar and a laptop, and drop him at some customer to perform a project. In the meantime the new employee only comes to the office for evening lecturing sessions. After about a year, the employee goes to the next customer. This is indeed something I don’t really like. I have a nice car that would be way too expensive to lease, so I don’t want a leasecar. I also feel I’m above the next marketing buzzword that they really feel you should have on your resume. I like to thing I’m not average at all, and that I do have the experience that I don’t need a couple of years of standing in the mud.