g2boojum's Gentoo weblog http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog gentoo musings en-us Grant Goodyear 2006-04-30T22:03:23-05:00 http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2006/04/index.html#e2006-04-30T22_03_17.txt Foundation thoughts 2006-04-30T22:03:17-05:00 Grant Goodyear Okay, here are my thoughts about the upcoming elections, bylaws, etcetera. <br /><br /> To the best of my knowledge, we've never voted on the bylaws. In principle it would suffice to have the trustees vote on it, but I'd really prefer that we have a general vote on them. We can combine that vote with the vote for trustees, presumably. That said, we may want to consider revising the bylaws some. Last year we decided that all active devs who'd been with Gentoo for one year were eligible to be foundation members, so our list of members is much larger than that of the Python Software Foundation, which served as the source for our current bylaws. For example, it seems unlikely that we're going to be able to attract a quorum of 1/3 of the members and the required annual meeting. Also, the current rule is that new members must be nominated by an existing member, a membership application has to be filed by the person wanting to be a member, and a majority of existing members must vote to approve a new member. Assuming that last year's system was more in line with what we want, then perhaps what we really want is a requirement that foundation membership be tied to Gentoo devship (presumably continuing the must-be-a-dev-for-a-year rule). A much more minor issue: the bylaws require a corporate seal; do we really need one? I suspect there are other things we're going to want to change, too. <br /><br /> As far as elections go, it would be good to have new trustees in place before our fiscal year ends (which is 30 June, I believe). This last year we started with 13 trustees, and we finish the year having lost at least three, and several others have contributed rather little during the last year. I'd really like to see the number of trustees drop dramatically. The major issues for the upcoming trustees are going to be: (a) moving the corporation to a state that doesn't require a member to live there, (b) continuing to assert our intellectual property rights (thanks Swift for all of your work on this area), (c) move banking away from netbank, (d) make some sort of decision on copyright transfer, and (e) get some sort of real budget put together, and (f) other things that escape me right now. Of course, this list is fairly similar to last year's list, which is not so good, although during the last year we saw a complete transfer of all IP from Gentoo Technologies, Inc to the Foundation, seemant, ramereth, klieber, and dmwaters all worked with our legal folks to address copyright transfer issues, but it's such a complicated problem that we still lack a definitive solution (I believe), we have a funding process in place (thanks to spyderous, if I recall correctly), and we even have the Gentoo name registered (in the US) as a registered trademark. Nonetheless, I really think the foundation would benefit from having a much smaller number of trustees, like five, with an expectation that if a trustee becomes inactive a new trustee takes that person's place in a reasonably short period of time. <br /><br /> I'm sure there's more that I should mention, but that's all that I can think of right now. http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2006/04/index.html#e2006-04-29T10_55_49.txt Still around 2006-04-29T10:55:49-05:00 Grant Goodyear Just a note that I'm still around. Indeed, I've clearly decided that I now have too much free time on my hands, since I've volunteered to be a mentor for Summer of Code students. It should be fun! <br /><br /> Foundation elections should be happening sometime "soon", which means a lot needs to be done to make that process be not quite so dead. I'll have an update on that later this weekend. http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005/05/index.html#e2005-05-21T22_19_54.txt Taking a break 2005-05-21T22:19:54-05:00 Grant Goodyear Well, we have signed copyright and trademark transfer agreements now, but I don't know if we've managed to resolve the issue about the copyright assignment forms that some devs signed. Time will tell, I'm sure. <br /><br /> Meanwhile, in my roles as trustee and ombudsman it seems that I'm doing a pretty good job of irritating all sides of a number of disputes while actually accomplishing essentially zip. so I think it's time for a break. <br /><br /> Back in a week or so. http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#e2005-04-13T20_49_46.txt Foundation stuff 2005-04-13T20:49:46-05:00 Grant Goodyear Every now and then I remember that I'm a Gentoo Foundation trustee, and I do some actual work to that effect. We now have an actual bank account with money in it, and I even have a debit card from the bank. Unfortunately, it seems that our bank and PayPal don't play well together. Worse, our bank requires a US social security number for anybody who can access the account, which is not exactly helpful for our non-US trustees. So, if anybody has a favorite bank that can easily be accessed online, allows read-only (or other limited) access, and works well across national borders, please do let us know. <br /><br /> I've also been pushing to get some sort of membership policy for the Foundation. We need to hold elections for a new board of trustees within a month after the Foundation's date of incorporation, and that means by mid-June. To elect a new board we really need to have members. So that begs the question, who should be a member? There's a straw poll being taken now, and we'll see what it has to say. <br /><br /> In my spare time, I've been working on getting a copyright transfer agreement put together so that Gentoo Technologies, Inc can transfer copyrights (and also some trademarks, some equipment, and a smattering of domain names for good measure) to the Gentoo Foundation, Inc (the non-profit). It looks like we're reaching a consensus there between the trustees and Gentoo Technologies. I don't suggest holding one's breath, but I think we're almost there. http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#e2005-04-01T13_27_50.txt 1 April 2005 2005-04-01T13:27:50-05:00 Grant Goodyear Yes, it's 1 April. No, whatever you're reading probably isn't true. http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#e2005-03-15T01_50_49.txt Differences between Sourcemage and Gentoo 2005-03-15T01:50:49-05:00 Grant Goodyear Thanks to ferringb's blog <a href="http://dev.gentoo.org/~ferringb/blog/archives/2005-03.html#e2005-03-14T18_03_31.txt">post</a>, I just finished reading the page on the Sourcemage wiki that describes the <a href="http://wiki.sourcemage.org/index.php?page=FaqDiff_Gentoo">differences between Sourcemage and Gentoo</a>. It certainly makes for interesting reading. I opened a bug <a href="http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1184">1184</a> almost exactly three years ago suggesting that we should implement some of the better ideas from Sorcerer Linux, some of which are still lacking in portage. It's quite clear that Sorcerer and its decendants have some quite good ideas. It seems a shame that the Sourcemage Gentoo diffs page seems to be a bit biased, since I would be very interested in an objective comparison of the distros. http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#e2005-03-11T08_03_34.txt GLEP overreaction 2005-03-11T08:03:34-05:00 Grant Goodyear Yes, I definitely <a href="http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005-03.html#e2005-03-10T22_38_49.txt">overreacted</a> to <a href="http://dev.gentoo.org/~obz/blog/archives/2005-03-11T00_32_59.html">obz's post</a>. Mike, I apologize profusely. <br /><br /> We're due to have a real discussion about GLEPs. I'll get it started on the -dev mailing list shortly. http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#e2005-03-10T22_38_49.txt GLEP thoughts 2005-03-10T22:38:49-05:00 Grant Goodyear In a recent <a href="http://dev.gentoo.org/~obz/blog/archives/2005-03-11T00_32_59.html"> post</a> it was stated that GLEPs are "an arduous task, a pain to write, and relied heavily on the submitter to push the enhancement through". I've been hearing many similar complaints recently. I'm not quite sure I understand why they seem to evoke such vitriol, though. I'll admit that it does take a bit of time to figure out how links work in restructured text, but otherwise restructured text is pretty similar to how one generally does markup in a text document, so I'm not sure what makes them so hard to write. I'd be willing to accept generic text files, though, if restructured text is too complicated. Is it the structure of the document, breaking the GLEP into specific sections, that provokes ire? <br /><br /> The rationale behind the GLEP concept was that writing a GLEP should be an effort. It shouldn't be hard, but it should require thought. The idea was that the process of writing the GLEP would force the author making the proposal to assemble a well-reasoned argument for what should be changed and how it can happen. A well-reasoned GLEP is much easier for people to pick apart, find the holes in it, and improve it, than is a general thought thrown out on a mailing list. <br /><br /> Once written, the process is straightforward. The GLEP is submitted to the GLEP editors, who generally accept it and post it on the web site in reasonably short order. The author is then responsible for soliciting feedback, modifying it, and deciding when it should be sent up for approval. Once sent up for approval, either the related project manager makes a decision on whether to approve it, or, if it crosses projects, it is voted upon by all of the managers at a managers' meeting. That part, in my opinion, is the most arduous, but it's rare that a GLEP is ever rejected outright. Unsurprisingly, it may happen that people "agree with the idea, but not with the specifics". Hopefully a reasonable compromise has been reached before requesting it be approved, but sometimes the compromise has to come afterwards. My suspicion, though, is that in general the compromises made lead to improved proposals. <br /><br /> After a GLEP is approved, it is then up to the GLEP author to implement it. It's not uncommon for GLEPs to linger here, since implementation is often hard. My personal opinion is that a good idea without an implementation is still a useful thing, since at least there's a record of the idea, and somebody else might come along later to implement it. <br /><br /> Is it a bad thing that the GLEP editors do not nag GLEP authors about their GLEPs, to keep the process moving forward? I pushed to have a deadline for GLEPs to become inactive (and I'm about due to run through the list again), but my feeling is that if the GLEP author, somebody who was motivated enough to write the GLEP in the first place, cannot remain motivated, then nagging is unlikely to change much. The odds are good that if the GLEP is stalled, there is a reason. Either we lack the infrastructure to implement it, or not enough people are interested enough to invest their time and effort. That's not a "backlog" of GLEPs, it's just a list of GLEPs whose ideas aren't quite good enough, or at least not needed enough right now. http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#e2005-03-03T13_00_25.txt Upcoming managers' meeting 2005-03-03T13:00:25-05:00 Grant Goodyear We're overdue for a managers' meeting, so I've scheduled one for this coming Monday at 1800 UTC. A managers' meeting is barely newsworthy, but this time around I'm stirring the pot a fair amount, and making the focus of the meeting the current Gentoo management structure. In my opinion the current structure suffers from three significant problems: (1) managers were appointed to indefinite terms, so Gentoo appears to be run by a "cabal" that has no accountability, (2) the current top-level projects (and associated managers) don't really "span" Gentoo very efficiently, and hence large numbers of Gentoo devs cannot easily locate the most relevant manager to him or her, and (3) the top-level project managers are supposed to collectively handle cross-project issues and provide a strategic vision for Gentoo, but it's not clear that the latter is occurring. Don't get me wrong, I actually do prefer the current system to the benevolent dictator model that we had previously, but we did lose something when drobbins stopped providing a single, strongly-held vision for the distribution. <br /><br /> So far my e-mail to -core announcing this meeting and its topic has produced few fireworks, or even much interest at all on the -core mailing list. On the other hand, I've had several folks drop by on irc and mention that my e-mail was "interesting". Most of these folks have been younger devs, so I wonder if the older, more jaded folks are just ignoring it. We'll find out, I suppose, on Monday. It should be interesting! <br /><br /> [Note: It seems that similar issues arose at FOSDEM, which I hadn't known about when I originally sent out my e-mail. I'm rather looking forward to seeing their new proposal.] http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/gblog/archives/2005/02/index.html#e2005-02-20T16_51_12.txt Whither Managers? 2005-02-20T16:51:12-05:00 Grant Goodyear Well, it's been a good number of weeks since the last Managers' meeting, and nobody seems to have noticed their absence. The latest GLEP will require a vote by the mangers before it can be approved, but it's not clear to me at the moment what else requires a gathering of managers. So, what's next? Ditch the managers' meetings altogether? Convert the meetings to general Developer meetings? What about the managers themselves? Do we actually need a representative meritocracy? Do we have one now?