It turns out that it's fairly easy to use a linux box to take pictures using my Nikon D50 and display the results to the screen:

$ gphoto2  --capture-image --interval 10 -F 2 --hook-script showpic.sh

The above takes two frames ten seconds apart (making a D50 into a very expensive webcam). Alternatively, I could use the following to use the camera normally but have the pictures show up on the computer screen:

$ gphoto2 --capture-tethered --hook-script showpic.sh

The "hook script" is what does the actual display after each shot:

$ cat showpic.sh
#! /bin/bash

self=`basename $0`

case "$ACTION" in
    init)
    echo "$self: INIT"
    # exit 1 # non-null exit to make gphoto2 call fail
    ;;
    start)
    echo "$self: START"
    ;;
    download)
    echo "$self: DOWNLOAD to $ARGUMENT"
    eog ${ARGUMENT} &
    ;;
    stop)
    echo "$self: STOP"
    ;;
    *)
    echo "$self: Unknown action: $ACTION"
    ;;
esac

exit 0

Pretty darn cool!

In drobbins' post today, http://blog.funtoo.org/2008/02/refocus.html, he offers the following advice:

If a project doesn't meet your needs, I encourage you to create your own project. If you do, I recommend keeping the development team small, tight-knit and independent. I think this will maximize your productivity as well as your overall enjoyment of collaborative and open development.

Is that the future for Gentoo? It's already happening to some extent. The next generation of the (in)famous Gentoo init system is now an independent project (http://roy.marples.name/openrc). Paludis (http://paludis.pioto.org/) and pkgcore (http://www.pkgcore.org/trac/pkgcore) are independent package managers designed to work with Gentoo's portage tree. Drobbins independently releases x86 and amd64 stage tarballs (http://www.funtoo.org/linux/). Anybody who wants to can create their own overlay repository such as those at http://overlays.gentoo.org/.

Internally, though, Gentoo works pretty much the same way. Take a look at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/index.xml?showlevel=3 sometime. Most Gentoo developers spend their time toiling on a handful of specific projects. Yet that specialization inside Gentoo seems to contribute to the feeling that Gentoo lacks any sort of coherent direction. Would things really be that different if those projects were independent, external projects?

I've no idea. Thoughts / comments welcome.

The nikon D50 viewfinder is only about 95% accurate. Specifically, it misses about 50px total on the left and right, and 75px total at the top and bottom. Here's a fix:

$ convert foo.jpg -shave 25x38 +repage foo_shaved.jpg

This way the final result is what was actually seen.

Gads, I've been swamped recently. Ah, well, who wants a boring life?!

It turns out that in my 38 years I've been to much of the US:

Edit: Red states are the states I've visited. Thanks to rbu for the catch.

I'm learning how to use my Nikon D50 with off-camera flash.

Here's a shot of our mixer:

and here's a shot of the set-up:

Learn to light (better than I have so far) at http://strobist.blogspot.com.

Well, it's official. I'm an assistant coach for the Woodlands Fit "red group" (the 10-or-more minutes/mile pace group), and I'm 25 weeks (or so) away from running my second marathon. It's been quite a year.

I started running in 2004, when I decided that I really needed to get some exercise, I couldn't find three people to play volleyball with me, and I needed a sport that was inexpensive. Running seemed to fit the bill. I ran a couple of 5K races in early 2005, neglected to buy new shoes, and developed a nasty case of plantar fasciitis that took me out of running for over a year.

By this time last year, though, I had just started running again when I saw an ad for Woodlands Fit at Luke's Locker (during the Wine Walk, of all things). I'd already run some 5K races, and I was planning to train for a 10K, but I thought training for a half-marathon might not be too far out of my reach. Well, actually I was pretty sure that it would be out of my reach, but it would at least be fun to train with other people. Shrug

So, I went to the first meeting last year, shyly talked to a few people there, and somehow got talked into running the 3-mile time trial, despite the fact (a) I hadn't run anything farther than 1.5 miles at a stretch in over a year, (b) I wasn't planning on training for the marathon, but the half marathon, and (c) it was darn hot. After the second mile, I felt like I was going to die, but I finished. (This would become a theme.) I then made the fateful decision that I would train for the full marathon, even though I was still planning to do the half. (I'm not sure how I was talked into that, but I suspect that Beth Whitehead was involved in the process somewhere.)

My wife, upon being informed that I had done something so foolish, ordered me to go see our physician and get checked out. Smart girl.

Thus began my foray into endurance running. Running minutes at home, often with Ophelia (my dog), wasn't too bad. Hills were harder. Beth would fib to me that the hills were almost done (those other hills we still had to climb weren't real hills, she'd say) to get me past them. For the first several months I couldn't see how the 3.2 mile Thursday social run could possibly be considered "an easy 3 miles", as I frequently had to walk during some portion of the run.

Then there were the Saturday runs. Almost every Saturday my run was farther than I'd ever run before. Almost every Saturday I felt like I was going to die trying to run that distance. Almost every Saturday I had to walk at least some portion of the run. Nonetheless, with the help and encouragement of many Woodlands Fit runners, I survived every single run. It's possible that I'm a tad stubborn. Also, the fact that my wife was incredibly proud of me didn't hurt.

(As an aside, you know you're a runner when you're running a long run, and you actually forget that it's raining!)

On 14 January 2007 I completed my first (and, so far, only) marathon in roughly five hours and thirty minutes. I'd have liked to have finished faster, but I'm not really complaining.

After finishing the marathon, some sense returned, and I thought, you know, I don't really need to run another of these. Famous last words, of course. Three Saturdays later, I was out with the group at 6am again, running in the rain. Since then my 11+-minute/mile pace has somehow been replaced by a Wednesday speed run at 9:20 over nearly 5 miles. Of course, since I'm running faster, I still feel like I'm going to die during some of these runs. On the other hand, 3.2 miles actually does feel like "an easy distance" now, at least most of the time.

A little over a month ago, Gentoo was formally invited to join the Software Freedom Conservancy. In their own words:

The Software Freedom Conservancy is an organization composed of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. As a fiscal sponsor for FOSS projects, the Conservancy provides member projects with free financial and administrative services, but does not involve itself with technological and artistic decisions.

By joining the Conservancy, member FOSS projects obtain the benefits of a formal legal structure while keeping themselves focused on software development. These benefits include, most notably, protection from personal liability for project developers. Another benefit of joining the Conservancy is that projects can use it to hold assets, which are managed by the Conservancy on behalf of and at the direction of the project. The Conservancy is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, so member projects can receive tax-deductible donations to the extent allowed by law.

Since that time, the Trustees have been discussing what this would mean for Gentoo, whether or not it's a good idea, and collecting additional information about what would actually happen if we were to take them up on their offer. No decisions or commitments have been made yet, of course, since this sort of decision isn't one that could be made without community acceptance. I think we have enough information, though, that we can put out the information we have and start a real discussion with the Gentoo community.

So, what would it mean for Gentoo to join the Conservancy? First, the Gentoo Foundation, Inc, Gentoo's not-for-profit corporation, would cease to exist, with the Foundation's assets being transferred to the Conservancy.

Deep breath

Yeah, at least on the surface that seems like a terrible idea. What makes it not terrible at all, at least in my opinion, is the fact that at any time Gentoo may walk away from the Conservancy, taking all of our assets with us. Moreover, if Gentoo were a member project of the Conservancy it would be the conservancy who handled all of the financial management, tax filings, and legal protections (for no fee), which are all things that the current, previous, and original Trustees have all been really bad at doing.

So, here are the details. Gentoo would have to sign some variation of the agreement that is at http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/GentooSponsorshipAgreement.pdf. To put that agreement in context, the Conservancy folks provided us with a legal-to-normal-human-being translation:

Subject: Gentoo: invitation to join the Conservancy
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:44:40 -0400
From: Karen Sandler <conservancy_softwarefreedom.org>
To: Michael Cummings <mcummings_gentoo.org>

Hi Michael,

We're really excited that you are considering joining the Conservancy and
are pleased to extend an invitation to Gentoo. Attached is a draft of the
fiscal sponsorship agreement that representatives of Gentoo will need to
sign in order to join the Conservancy.  Please read this agreement and
share and discuss it with all of the key people involved in Gentoo.  Some
of the denser provisions of the agreement reflect the special
considerations necessary to support the Conservancy's tax exempt status.
However, on the whole, we believe that this agreement fairly and clearly
sets out an advantageous relationship for the Conservancy's member
projects.

As some of the paragraphs specifically indicate, the agreement can be
tailored to reflect Gentoo's particular needs.  To help you in your review,
below is a section-by-section walk through, giving an explanation of the
significance of each provision.  If there are any sections that seem
confusing or that you feel should be changed to reflect Gentoo's needs,
please don't hesitate to discuss them with us.


Introductory Paragraph

This paragraph identifies the parties to the contract.  It's more
thoroughly explained in paragraph 6, but the point of this paragraph is to
name the people who sign the agreement.

Recitals (the "WHEREAS" section)

These paragraphs set forth the basic understandings of the parties.
Similar to the "preamble" found in the GPL and other Free Software
licenses, these are not operative provisions of the document.  Instead,
they give the context of the agreement.

In this specific case, the key points of understanding are that the purpose
of Gentoo is to forward FOSS and that both the Conservancy and Gentoo want
Gentoo to join the Conservancy.  The Conservancy's mission (and charitable
purpose) is to advance only FOSS development, so it is important that this
context be stated clearly.

Paragraph 1 - Term of Agreement

This paragraph says that Gentoo is part of the Conservancy as of the
signing date of the agreement.  It cross references the terminations
provisions in paragraph 7 (which is explained in greater detail below).
Note, though, that Gentoo  can choose to leave the Conservancy at any time.

Paragraph 2 - Project Management and Activities

a) Both parties agree that Gentoo will be FOSS.  As noted above, this is
   the fundamental goal and charitable purpose of the Conservancy.  The
   Conservancy will not sponsor proprietary projects.

b) This clearly sets out the limits of the Conservancy's management over
   Gentoo.  Due to requirements connected to the tax exempt status that the
   Conservancy is seeking to achieve, the ultimate legal control of the
   projects must be in the hands of the Conservancy.  From the IRS's
   perspective, the projects compose the Conservancy, and the purpose of
   its tax exemption is to forward the FOSS mission of those projects.

   However, the Conservancy does not want to interfere with the successful
   software development work already underway in member projects; such
   activity should continue after the agreement without interruption or
   interference.  This paragraph delegates part of the Conservancy's legal
   authority back to the developers, so that Gentoo can run itself in
   day-to-day matters.

   The only limitations that we must place are to prevent Gentoo from
   producing non-free software (as per the Conservancy's charitable
   purpose) and from spending money or conducting activities that would
   jeopardize the Conservancy's tax exempt status.  All the ordinary
   activities of FOSS projects come well within these limitations.  Some
   specific activities that are restricted include lobbying activities and
   spending money in ways other than consistent with the charitable
   purposes of the Conservancy (i.e., forwarding FOSS).

   Note that developers of Gentoo, in their capacity as individuals (when
   not representing Gentoo), still may engage in for-profit service
   businesses related to their Free Software work.  The work of Gentoo
   itself must fit the guidelines, but individuals are free to act in their
   own capacity in other endeavors.

   If you are ever concerned that a particular activity -- be it one
   carried out for Gentoo or one that an individual developer engaged in
   independently -- might be a problem, you can always ask the
   Conservancy's lawyers for clarification.

c) As discussed above in (b), this section describes the corporate
   relationship of the project and the Conservancy.  For clarity, it refers
   to section (b), which delegates the actual management of Gentoo to the
   relevant developers.  The Conservancy, when acting as a fiscal sponsor,
   must have the legal authority to manage Gentoo, even though section (b)
   delegates the day-to-day operations to the developers.

d) This section clarifies that Gentoo can't represent the Conservancy
   without getting written authorization first.  If you'd like to represent
   the Conservancy at a conference or other such event, you can always talk
   to us about it.

Paragraph 3 - No Fees

It's just as it sounds.  The Conservancy provides services to projects to
benefit the Free Software community and does not ask member projects to
bear the overhead costs. Of course, projects are welcome to make donations
to the Conservancy if they desire.

Paragraph 4 - Project Fund/Variance Power

This sets out the financial structure in connection with the relationship
described above in paragraph 2. The Conservancy will maintain a separate
bank account for Gentoo and, for tax purposes, the Conservancy will report
all of the income to Gentoo in its IRS filings.  Gentoo therefore will not
need to file any separate tax returns with the IRS.  The Conservancy will
keep the financial books for Gentoo.  The developers will direct the
Conservancy to spend the money on behalf of Gentoo, within the limitations
imposed by the tax laws.  The Conservancy will receive any checks on behalf
of Gentoo, and it will also write checks on behalf of Gentoo.

Paragraph 5 - Project Fund Management/Performance of Charitable Purposes

This paragraph clarifies that all assets will be devoted to the project's
purposes, as those purposes are a subset of the Conservancy's purposes.
Assets cannot be used in connection with activities that would jeopardize
the Conservancy's tax exempt status.  As discussed above, in practice, most
typical expenses of FOSS projects will come well within these limitations.
Activities that are restricted include lobbying activities and spending
money in ways other than consistent with the charitable purposes of the
conservancy (i.e., forwarding FOSS).

Paragraph 6 - Representation of the Project in the Conservancy

As the note in this section indicates, we understand that each project will
have its own management structure that it has developed to reflect its size
and community.  This paragraph requires that certain representatives be
named as the individuals that can officially communicate decisions on
behalf of Gentoo.  This can be a single maintainer, a committee of
developers or a few specified representatives.  To the extent that it makes
sense for Gentoo to have a committee of representatives, we should indicate
how decisions can be made by that committee.  For example, should all
decisions be communicated to the conservancy by all members of the
committee or would a simple majority suffice?  Can any one representative
communicate official decisions on behalf of all?  Gentoo should also
consider adding a mechanism here for adding and removing representatives
over time.  We're happy to discuss methods that have worked for other
projects with you to help you select the solution that is right for you.

Paragraph 7 - Outstanding Liabilities

In this section, Gentoo confirms that it has told the Conservancy about any
liabilities that might be outstanding prior to joining the Conservancy.
This gives the Conservancy some assurance that its due diligence process
has been complete and that the Conservancy's board received all of the
information it needed to properly evaluate the project.  Liabilities
include, for example, financial obligations, such as any debts or
outstanding bills, or any legal claims that could be outstanding against
Gentoo.

Paragraph 8 - Termination

Projects can leave the Conservancy at will.  This section sets out the
mechanisms for termination to make sure that when a project leaves the
Conservancy it does so without jeopardizing the tax exempt status of the
Conservancy (and, consequently, the status of all of the other projects in
the Conservancy).

There is a 60 day notice requirement so that a new tax exempt non-profit
can be found for Gentoo to join.  If there isn't another fiscal sponsor or
other tax exempt non-profit to take over Gentoo, Gentoo can incorporate as
a separate entity and apply for tax exemption recognition.  If there is no
separate entity -- for example if a project loses momentum and has been
abandoned by its developers -- the Conservancy must be left with the assets
for use by the Conservancy for other FOSS-related charitable work.

These restrictions would also apply to any separate tax exempt entity, so
if Gentoo were to incorporate and achieve tax exemption outside of the
Conservancy, it would have to deal with the same considerations upon any
wind-up or distribution of assets.  Members of the Conservancy's board are
familiar with non-profit wind-down situations, and can assist in the
unlikely event that this unfortunate outcome occurs.

Paragraph 9 - Miscellaneous

These provisions are standard agreement boilerplate - they clarify the
enforceability of separate provisions, specify that the contract be
governed by New York Law and state that any amendments to this agreement
need to be agreed to in writing by all of the parties.

Paragraph 10 - Counterparts/Facsimile

Although it's good to have original signatures in the corporate records,
this allows you to simply sign the signature page and fax or scan a copy
for the contract to take effect.


We hope this break down has made it clear why the agreement is structured
in the way that it is.  If any provisions seem problematic to you, let us
know and we'll work with you to try to build an agreement that works for
both of us.  We look forward to Gentoo joining the Conservancy!

Karen Sandler
Software Freedom Conservancy

An obvious question is what would happen with our current paypal account, bank account, store, etcetera. Here's what we have so far:

Michael,

Since I currently handle most of the financial details for the Conservancy,
I answered some your questions below (the conservancy@ address goes to both
me and Karen).  I've left one of the questions to Karen.

Michael Cummings <mcummings_gentoo.org> writes:

>   a. What happens to our existing bank account, paypal account, and
>   cafepress account?

Speaking non-legally (IANAL), they become assets of the Conservancy,
earmarked for the Gentoo project.  They could be spun out of the
Conservancy if Gentoo decides to leave the Conservancy and sets up another
501(c)(3) non-profit.

We'd suggest closing the bank account so that we can open one for Gentoo at
our bank.  We keep all the project earmarked accounts in one place, and
this makes it easier for us to manage the finances for you.

For the Paypal account, it would be set up to transfer the money into the
Gentoo bank account at the Conservancy.  Although, we'd actually prefer
that the Paypal account be shutdown if possible and set up an address at
the Conservancy's Paypal account.  However, this means that the email
address used for people to send money to the Paypal account would have to
change.  This has been a problem for some projects.

I am not sure how we'd handle the Cafepress account, as we've never handled
one of those before, but it could probably be configured in a similar way.
We'll work with you find a reasonable solution.

>   b. How involved is the process of spending money?  In this kind of dire
>   circumstance, currently this process is rushed so that within a day of
>   discovery the part has been ordered and paid for. How does this work
>   with the fiscal workings falling under the Conservancy?

We'd recommend in this situation that someone from the project use their
personal credit card or other financial instrument, and then submit a
reimbursement request with a receipt to the Conservancy.  We can't turn
around payments in 24 hours, but we typically process reimbursement
requests within two weeks.  (We do processing once per week, so the most
you'd usually have to wait is two weeks.)

> Can you walk us through the normal procedure for handling these more
> doldrum scenarios as well?

Currently, you just send an email to <conservancy_softwarefreedom.org> with
a receipt and/or invoice attached and a brief note describing what the
expense is for.  If we have any questions pursuant to our due diligence for
making sure the expense fits the 501(c)(3) status of the Conservancy, we
send them to you.  Once the questions are answered (or if there are no
questions), we send a check either directly to the vendor, or, in the case
of a reimbursement request, to the project contributor who made the
original expense.  We can also wire money to vendors/individuals, but this
incurs fees for the project so we try to avoid it.


> 2. Outstanding liabilities. In reference to paragraph 7, we don't have a
> current filing. Our income used to be below the cutoff that required a
> non-profit to file, though we're not sure if that's still true or not.

I'll leave this one for Karen.

--
Bradley M. Kuhn
President, Software Freedom Conservancy

I'm currently working with Ms. Sandler to get our various "liabilities" worked out. We may need to pay some taxes on the store profits, although that would be minimal since it's a pretty small part of Gentoo's income. We've never filed the official IRS paperwork, although it's not generally required for a non-profit our size.

For the most part, the Trustees think that this is either a good idea, or at least a better idea than what we've had so far. Comments? Although comments are enabled on my blog, it might be better to comment on -dev instead.

Sarah and Ronan did quite well last weekend:

I'm having fun with my Nikon D50. Using the DIY macro studio and two external flashes:

Learn to light (better than I have so far) at http://strobist.blogspot.com.

I recently needed to take a raw mpeg-2 file that I obtained from my pvr-250 capture card (pulling from a VHS-C camcorder), and convert it to something that would fit on youtube. Here's the magic mencoder incantations that I used:

$ mencoder 20051204.mpg -edl poker.edl -ovc frameno -oac mp3lame \
> -lameopts vbr=3 -o frameno.avi
$ mencoder 20051204.mpg -edl poker.edl -oac copy -ovc lavc  -lavcopts \
> vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:vbitrate=863:vhq -o output.avi -vf scale=320:240
$ mencoder 20051204.mpg -edl poker.edl -oac copy -ovc lavc  -lavcopts \
> vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2:vbitrate=863:vhq -o output.avi -vf scale=320:240

Using "edl" to cut out the stuff I didn't want was really nice. No need to get avidemux to compile!

Ever wonder what portion of the portage tree is free software, and what portion is proprietary? Here's an estimate.

Total number of packages:

feynman grant> paludis --list-packages --repository gentoo | \
> sed -n -e 's/^\* \(.*\)/\1/p' | wc -l

11540

Total number of packages w/ LICENSE containing [gpl|as-is|bsd]:

feynman grant> paludis --list-packages --repository gentoo | \
> sed -n -e 's/^\* \(.*\)/\1/p' | while read a ; \
> do paludis -qM ${a}::gentoo | grep LICENSE: | \
> cut -d: -f2 | grep -i --quiet '[gpl|as-is|bsd]' \
> &&  echo ${a} ; done | wc -l

11164

So, if I did things right, we're looking at roughly 96.7% of the tree. Thanks to ciaranm for the lengthy one-liner, although any mistakes are definitely my own.

(If you saw an empty post on planet/universe, my apologies. I need to work on my pyblosxom workflow, it seems.)

The real power base of Gentoo is not infra, the Council, the trustees, or devrel. It's the developers. We have the credit and the blame for what Gentoo is, has been, and will become.

Before that, though, a quick comment about Seemant's recent posts about poisonous individuals (http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/seemant.php). I think Seemant makes a number of good points, but I have a different interpretation of many of those events than Seemant has. I'll cover some of them below, but let me address his comments about Kurt Lieber here. I think Seemant is wrong in his assessment of Kurt. Oh, the facts are essentially correct: Kurt was in charge of infra, he was one of the primary people pushing to extract the reins from drobbins hands, and he strongly pushed for the establishment of the Gentoo Foundation. He's also bright, and frequently sure of himself even when he's wrong, and when he eventually does lose his temper he can be just as inflammatory as some of the more infamous of our community. I also have little doubt that Kurt believed that if he were in charge of Gentoo, then things would be better. Nonetheless, I don't believe that Kurt was subtly trying to become Gentoo's Svengali. What I did see was that Kurt had a different mindset from many of the devs (myself included). Kurt viewed things from an infra perspective and with big-business sensibilities: security should be paramount, devs are a potential threat as well as an asset, enterprise Gentoo should be a goal, etcetera. (Of course infra has a culture of mistrust; that's their job. It's also why infra is lower on the organizational chart than the Council.) It was hardly surprising that Kurt would clash with Seemant and others (again, including myself) from time to time, given those differences of opinion.

Okay, back to the real point of this post.

Once upon a time, Gentoo was drobbins' baby. It was his project, his guiding philosophy, and his say as to who was a dev, and who wasn't. Becoming a dev was mainly a matter of submitting ebuilds and patches until somebody got tired of committing them to CVS on your behalf, and decided that it would just be easier if you were a dev so that you could do it yourself. In those days I knew the name of everybody in #gentoo (or was it #gentoo-dev, I don't remember). Whether due to drobbins' ideology or sheer pragmatism, during that period Gentoo established a defining tradition of our community: we provide our devs with nearly unfettered access to make changes, and we trust them not to do anything too stupid (or at least to fix things if they do). The idea is that our talented devs with time and ability _should_ be able to make sweeping changes when need be. As such, Gentoo is very much a distribution founded on trust, and that tradition of trusting our devs survives to this day.

It may have been a golden age, but it was hardly perfect. Drobbins had vision, but he could also be capricious and dismissive when somebody disagreed with him. He had to learn management skills on the job, and although he got much, much better, he occasionally made mind-blowing mistakes. Early devrel would often do a great job, but sometimes turn around and collectively blow up at somebody, shattering any good will they had built up. Read through the various bugs and mailing lists, and you'll see that the current mistrust that Gentoo devs have for powerful groups is perfectly rational, even though it is remarkably unhelpful. Learning to govern ourselves properly has been _hard_.

It's important to note, though, that we're not done yet. Right now Gentoo is a barely-herded collection of projects. The elected Council has some power, but neither they nor the devs who elected them have really come to terms with how much they have. I would say that the current Council is trusted not to do anything too awful, but not really trusted to actually do much that is useful. They are working to change that, though, however slowly they may be moving. Meanwhile, Gentoo is still growing (yes, we are still gaining new devs far faster than we lose old ones), and we're still putting out new releases and maintaining the tree, so there's time to work on figuring things out.

So, what does the future hold for Gentoo? I've no idea, but I expect good things. I predict that we won't return to the days of a single strong leader, despite the number of folks who seem to think that doing so would solve all of our problems. Those folks might be correct, except for the niggling fact that leading Gentoo is a full-time job, with no pay, and so we haven't seen a lot of people stepping up to the plate to do that job. Sorry, Seemant, but we're going to have to learn to live with an elected governance committee, I suspect. Will we turn into Debian? Yes, and no. Gentoo is a rare beast--a community distribution. Almost all of the work is done by volunteers, and those volunteers will only work on what they want to work on. Not everybody will agree, so lengthy discussions on -dev aren't going away. In those respects, we're very much like Debian. Similarly, we do most of our work out in the open, so all of our disagreements and spats are available for all to see. Ideologically, though, we're still quite different. We're less rules-bound, we tend to favor pragmatism over ideological purity, and we favor flexibility and power over stability.

I do hope that we can overcome this current lack of courtesy on the mailing lists, irc, etcetera. I have no good suggestions on how to accomplish this goal, I'm afraid, but I can offer one bit of history. Back in the day, I helped to write the infamous Gentoo etiquette guide. My assumption was that it was a gentle guide-to-the-clueless on how to behave without causing too much friction. I never expected that anybody would actually try to enforce it, especially not without running it by the rest of the community first. Any solution in Gentoo has to have the support of the majority of devs, or it's worse than useless.

If you've made it this far, I'm quite impressed!

A few minor thoughts:

• Ciaranm suggested that the heated discussion between he and drobbins was an attempt by drobbins to grab power. I doubt it. He just believed that he understood the problem and knew precisely how to fix it. Impressive hubris, and he got smacked down pretty hard, but that's different from malice.
• Most devs are working hard on their own areas, and ignoring all of this stuff. Thank goodness.
• Darn, I miss danarmak. Feel free to return anytime, Dan!

Occasionally people reference mailing list messages by Message-ID (i.e., a header such as 'Message-ID: <20061214084820.GA29311@suse.de>'. For lists to which I subscribe, finding a message is as simple as a search in mutt for:

~i 20061214084820.GA29311@suse.de

but what about lists to which I don't subscribe? As usual, agriffis had an answer for searching both marc and gmane. The gmane search requires less processing; it's just:

http://mid.gmane.org/20061214084820.GA29311@suse.de

For the trustee elections, it's important to have a record of who voted because it is by voting that one becomes a member of the Gentoo Foundation. Any election official, after countify --collect has been run, can determine that list using the following one-liner:

while read num user; do grep -q "confirmation $num"
master-trustees2005 || continue; echo $user >> voted;
done < confs-trustees200

That's what we used to determine the existing Foundation members from the 2005 trustee election.

In mcummings recent entry (http://www.datanode.net/?p=297), Mike mentioned meeting Spider on -user long ago, and that he thought that -user and -core were the only lists at that time. I didn't think that was quite right, so I went digging through my own Gentoo e-mail archives. The oldest -dev mail I have dates from April 2001. (Back then I tossed most of my Gentoo mail, so I don't know when I actually subscribed to -dev.) According to the wayback machine, Gentoo at the time looked something like this:

(http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020443/http://www.gentoo.org/)

Back when "every user was a hacker", the only lists were -dev and -announce. With a bit of additional digging I discovered that -user appears to have been created in Oct. 2001, while -core didn't exist until Feb. 2002. I faithfully read -user until sometime in 2003, when the amount of traffic on -dev, -core, and -user became truly overwhelming. Nonetheless, I'm embarrassed that these days my only contact w/ -user is though the threads posted in the GWN.

(By the way, check out http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020443/http://www.gentoo.org/dev.html to see what administering a Gentoo system used to be like!)

I'm Grant Goodyear (g2boojum), and if you're an eligible voter in the current Trustees election then I'd like your vote.

Okay, that gets the boiler plate out of the way. Seemant did a classy job of lauding the skills of the current candidates (http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/seemant/2006/10/07/trustee_elections_2006_have_commenced), but he seems to have missed someone:

Seemant is the long-time developer who was once (in)famous not only for breaking a vast portion of the tree with libpng, but also for the speed and skill applied in fixing the breakage (along with spider's assistance, if I remember correctly). Since then he has repeatedly proven to be responsible, thoughtful, and willing to take on jobs that are necessary, but not necessarily fun. For the last several months Seemant has been our lead contact with Gentoo's legal team, and he has been doing an exceptional job of it.

As for what I think the priorities for the next year should be:

• New (and approved!) bylaws. Several times during the last year or two I've raised problems with the current proposed bylaws (problems which are my fault since I drafted them, borrowing heavily from the Python Software Foundation's bylaws), but I've yet to achieve any sort of consensus on new wording that would work better for us. (Actually, I've yet to obtain any comments at all.) We really need to get something sane in place, though.
• Move the corporation to a more non-resident-friendly state.
• Dealing with money between the US and Europe is a real pain. Right now we're using paypal, but that's imperfect. Google's "checkout" system may be an improvement, but it seems to me that it would be better to have regional organizations that can raise and handle funds there, with the US organization responsible for US funds and handling and licensing all of the Gentoo IP.
• Set a yearly budget for infra.

All that said, I'd also like to mention that if we can get the really important items out of the way, then the Foundation, at least in my opinion, should be a maintenance organization. It shouldn't be charting the direction of Gentoo, because that's what the Council (and the devs, first and foremost) are for. The Foundation's job is to collect and disburse funds, provide a legal entity, and maintain and protect Gentoo's intellectual property. That's pretty much it, and as such it should be the least sexy part of Gentoo.

We're a bit late running the next Council election. The problem is that our vote counting software, countify, has a bug somewhere that produces incorrect results under obscure conditions. Shrug. On the other hand, the voting (and vote collection) software does work, so we may as well hold the election, and deal with counting the votes when the time comes.

It seems that getent passwd is having issues with the number of users that we have, so a new trick is needed for producing the file of eligible voters:

$ perl_ldap -S gentooStatus | grep \
> -i active | awk ' { print $1 } ' > voters-council2006

It's been a good month for recipe tryouts from Cooks Illustrated. Last night I made their incredibly simple recipe for roasted cauliflower. Even Sarah liked it, and she doesn't like cooked cauliflower. The only drawback is that it required a 475 F oven, which is not such a good thing in Houston during the Summer.

A while back Sarah and I signed up as recipe tasters for Cook's Illustrated. So far we've tested recipes for pound cake and tonight's herb-crusted port roast. I usually claim that I don't do "big meat", but pork roasts are reasonably inexpensive, and Sarah loves pork, so I was willing to give it a try. I started working on it about 4:45pm or so, and we had dinner about 8pm, and I think the time was well worth it. We'll almost certainly make this recipe again.

It's a new, pyblosxom-powered blog, and it was a fair effort to get here.

What happened is that my wife asked me about having a blog. Naturally, I thought: "Hey, Gentoo surely has lots of blog software, I can put together something for my wife". That's true enough, and I took a look at what people are using on http://planet.gentoo.org. I winnowed a good chunk of the field by making an executive decision that I really didn't want to deal with mysql, although sqlite would be fine. I eventually decided upon typo (http://www.typosphere.org/trac/), and I spent some time configuring lighttpd to properly render a typo blog. Typo's a really nice piece of software, and it was fun to play with. I did run into some weird glitches using typo with ecto (on Windows), which is what I was considering for my wife to use, but otherwise I would happily recommend typo to people who want elegant blogging software.

Ultimately, we decided to go with blogger for Sarah's blog. Blogger's web gui for editing posts is really nice, and that bit of usability made Blogger a clear winner for Sarah.

Meanwhile, for me typo seemed just a bit much. It's beautiful, but I'm rather more fond of simple, and besides I'd really prefer to use ReStructured Text (http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html) for markup rather than html. Unfortunately, pyblosxom looks awful out-of-the-box, but Will Guaraldi was nice enough to e-mail his "flavour" and css stylesheet, which helped enormously, and things look much better now. Best of all, I can hack on pyblosxom without too much trouble. (Indeed, I've already fixed the rst plugin, which hadn't kept up with docutils, and submitted a patch to the pyblosxom folks.)

Last Thursday we attended the second annual Woodlands wine walk. It was a tad less well organized than last year, but still lots of fun. We were able to sample over 50 wines, so I'm listing some of the wines that we liked best:

• Dog House chardonnay & cabernet -- Cheap and good
• Rosemount Estate shiraz grenache
• Little Penguin shiraz and white shiraz (for Mom)
• Palmeri syrah
• Messina Hof papa paulo port (private reserve)
• Toasted Head viognier
• Texas Hills orange moscato (like a port)
• Banfi chianti classico docg
• Franciscan Oakville Estate chardonnay
• Chateau Souverain chardonnay & cabernet
• Beaulieu Vineyard cabernet
• Georges Dabceuf beaujolais reserve
• Hogue cabernet
• Kumala shiraz
• Robert Mondavi pinot noir private selection
• Genesis syrah & cabernet
• Xplorador chardonnay (cheap)

We should have others that were recorded in the wine walk "personal wine celler", but we haven't figured out how to extract them yet.

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.

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.

I'm sure there's more that I should mention, but that's all that I can think of right now.

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!

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.

I just submitted my ballot for the inaugural Gentoo council. Of course, I have the option to change my ballot until the end of the month, but I probably won't, so I'm essentially done with it.

Thanks once again to Aron Griffis for our nicely functional voting software.

As the polls are about to open for the election of the first Gentoo council, I thought I'd take the opportunity to share my thoughts about the council. Since I'm one of the election officials, I need to remain impartial, but at the same time I'm the person who created the blasted thing, so I feel like I should also state my opinions about what I think the council should be.

My hope is that the soon-to-be-elected council will represent the best of Gentoo. These people should be wise in the ways of Gentoo, first and foremost. It is the council who will set gentoo-wide policy, and thus hard-earned knowledge of what works, what doesn't, and why things do or don't work seems essential.

The new council members should be trusted and respected by a large swath of the community. The council sets policy, but policy is useless if devs refuse to follow it, which is likely if the council members are not trusted by the devs to know what they're doing. A trusted and respected council, on the other hand, will have the "moral authority" of having been elected by their peers to enact sane and essential policies. Presumably such trust and respect comes from having a track record of significant accomplishments within Gentoo.

Besides being accomplished, the new council members also need to be dedicated. Although I don't expect serving on the council to be an immense amount of work, it does require that the council members hold at least one open meeting per month, and all council members are expected to attend (or provide a proxy). That's really the minimum requirement, though. The real measure of a council is going to be the council's ability to keep Gentoo moving on track. Right now a number of projects are stalled because they require cross-project decisions to be made, and that desperately needs to end.

The new council members need to have vision. As members of the first Gentoo council, these members will set the tone for councils to come. To a significant extent, the success or failure of this new metastrucure depends on the accomplishments (or lack thereof) of this new council.

Best of luck to all of the nominees.

Here's a quick write-up on what needs to be done (from a technical standpoint) to run one of the Gentoo Condorcet elections. Since these elections are ones that only involve Gentoo devs, we handle authentication by the simple process of running the election on dev.gentoo.org, collecting and counting the ballots that eligible devs create and store in their home directories on that machine.

We use agriffis's code to handle ballot distribution and vote collection and counting, and that code lives in ~agriffis on d.g.o. The necessary code is ~agriffis/votify (which uses ~agriffis/elections/Votify.pm) and ~agriffis/countify. An election needs three files to run: ballot-$name (where $name is the name of the election--"council2005" in the most recent case), a randomized version of which will be distributed to voters, officials-$name which lists the voting officials (specifically the Gentoo usernames of the officials, one per line), and voters-$name which lists eligible voters (again listing the usernames of the voters, one per line). This last list is generally obtained from devrel, although for a gentoo-wide vote getent passwd | cut -d: -f1 > voters-$name suffices. One also needs to touch the files start-$name and stop-$name with the start and stop dates (and times) for the election. Currently all of these files must reside in ~agriffis/elections, but that will hopefully change when somebody has a bit of time to put into doing some recoding. All of this is done before the polls open, and infra copies or links /usr/local/bin/votify from ~agriffis/votify (if the link doesn't already exist), but nothing needs to be done to officially "open" or "close" the polls, since that's what the start-$name and stop-$name files are for.

After the polls close, somebody from infra runs (as root on d.g.o) perl ~agriffis/countify --collect $name to collect all of the ballots. Then each official runs perl ~agriffis/countify --rank $name to count the ballots. Not only are the results reported (of course), but the master ballot (which resides in the officials' results-$name directory as master-$name) is mailed out. Also, voting confirmation e-mails are mailed out, which agriffis has done using the following one-liner from the results-$name directory:

while read num user; do grep -q "confirmation $num" master-$name
|| continue; (echo "To: $user@gentoo.org"; sed
"s/^INSERT.*/Your confirmation number is $num./" email; )
| /usr/lib/sendmail -oi $user@gentoo.org; done < confs-$name

So far I've spent about five minutes getting this upcoming election ready to go. Thanks, agriffis!

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.

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.

Back in a week or so.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, it's 1 April. No, whatever you're reading probably isn't true.

Thanks to ferringb's blog post (http://dev.gentoo.org/~ferringb/blog/archives/2005-03.html#e2005-03-14T18_03_31.txt"), I just finished reading the page on the Sourcemage wiki that describes the differences between Sourcemage and Gentoo. It certainly makes for interesting reading. I opened a bug ("http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1184") 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.

Yes, I definitely overreacted to obz's (http://dev.gentoo.org/~obz/blog/archives/2005-03-11T00_32_59.html) post. Mike, I apologize profusely.

We're due to have a real discussion about GLEPs. I'll get it started on the -dev mailing list shortly.

In a recent post 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

[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.]

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?

The nascent Gentoo Foundation, Inc needs a set of bylaws. I put together a very tentative set that I borrowed from the Python folks:

http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/bylaws.html

The initial post to -dev that provided the link and asked for feedback about who should actually be a member of the foundation has produced some feedback, but not very much. Let's face it, bylaws are exceptionally boring!

Last night I posted a bit of a missive to -dev asserting that the GWN should be as independent as possible, despite the fact that the GWN is hosted on Gentoo servers, has a Gentoo copyright, and is mentioned on the front page of www.g.o. Early responses seem to suggest that my views on this issue are almost right: There is almost universal support that the GWN should be free from any sort of censorship, but it should still be "official" as a part of PR. Shrug Shows what I know!

Okay, I'm joining the blog party. Now if I just had something to say....