Patrick's playground

I officially announe the Summer of Fun!

Are you getting tired of flamewars? Feeling down because noone said anything nice to you today? Does Gentoo seem to lack that certain je ne sais quoi?
Fear no more! During the next weeks it is the Summer of fun, so if we have enough participants the stupid things that annoy us won't take over our Gentoo time.
First of all, be nice to others. If someone asks you a question don't be like "wtf n00b go away", just say either that that question is inapropritate or that it is answered in the documentation (and, obviously, you add an URL to guide the n00b).
If you're replying on a mailinglist don't take it personal. Hey, we all disagree on some topics. That is normal and no reason to insult me - just say that you don't agree. Also think about what you write. Often you'll just be stating the obvious, and that's redundant. Nobody likes to read through 300 emails.
Now if you're a user and want to help there are many ways. If you don't know who else to ask just drop userrel@gentoo.org an email, we'll see how you can help. There are many open bugs on bugs.gentoo.org - maybe you can help fixing them. You could write or improve the documentation. Maybe you can provide hardware or software to help a dev - there are so many ways to help.

Did I just write three paraghraps of obvious stuff? I think it has to be said every now and then. Gentoo used to be fun, so I'll do my best to keep it that way. Just say no to flamewars! Tell someone that you appreciate his/her work.
It's the summer of fun, and fun we'll have.

So today I was unmotivated and spent some time cleaning up things that were left hanging for some time. With thanks to karltk who set up his homebrew trac admin tool it was easy for me to add new repositories.

First one is HURD, the OS around the GNU HURD kernel. The debian port and other projects seem to be a bit stale, so I hope that Gentoo/HURD will reanimate it a bit. While I'm personally a bit indifferent to HURD I still think it's good to have people working on it.

Candidate number two is Cygwin - yes, the evil Redhat compatibility layer for the Redmond GameOS. (The only thing that doesn't run well in Linux are games ... so ... hehe). While I did some work on it quite some time ago I never really finished it - the low performance was a killer for me. Almost 3 minutes for "emerge --info" on a 1,6Ghz machine and fun like that :-)

If you are interested in working on those two or need hosting for a similar project poke me, I'm quite liberal in that respect :-)
On a sidenote I have offers for roughly 30% of the new server I mentioned in the last two blog posts. That is good, but not yet enough. I'm happy to see any reaction at all and thank all those that wish to help, but at the same time I think my goals are too ambitious.

And while I'm at it - Gentoo got 14 slots in the Summer of Code. Sso we'll have 14 dedicated students working on projects for the next three months, and we met a few very motivated helpers in #gentoo-soc that wish to do work even without Google's sponsorship. So forward it goes, one step at a time ...

6400 applications. Almost 90 projects.
Google's Summer of Code has grown a lot. And Gentoo is part of it! Yay!
On Monday the final applications will be selected, we'll have dedicated codemonkeys working on good features until September then. I don't mean codemonkey in a derogatory sense, it's just that these people will be paid to implement things that are cool and something we all want, but which noone found important enough to do yet. It looks like we get funding for 13 projects (more than debian! Hah!), I'm really excited that we get the chance to do this all. And some people will do the project they proposed even without Google funding, so that's really really ... nice :-)

After my last blog entry I got some quite positive responses. Some people have offered a one-time donation, at least one person has offered a monthly contribution. Cool. This motivates me to try a small fundraiser:
Goal: 100 Euro per month to pay for a server
What you can do: Donate a small monthly amount!
As i said in my last post this will server will be available to all devs (and within limits to contributors that work on Gentoo-related stuff) as a playground and fileserver.
If 20 people donate 5Eur/month each it will be enough. One-time donations are also appreciated, but I will need to be able to sustain that server for at least 12 months (default contract runtime).
For now I will only collect pledges and trust people not to withdraw. I will post updates. If this works out we'd be a community distro with a real community server ...
A big thanks to those that responded, and a big thanks to all that will respond now. Viva la comunidad!

Hello people,
I had a very strange idea yesterday, and now I wish to see if it is practical. If you have any input on this feel free to mail me or hunt me down on IRC or whatever is practical for you.
So ... the idea was, in short, to get a server with, say, 150G harddisk space and unmetered connection and make that available as an extension to the gentooexperimental.org server. Among the ideas that prompted me to consider this are daily livecd snapshots and storing patches, distfiles and other Gentoo-related things that don't really find a place in the official Gentoo infrastructure. Also this box could be used as a bittorrent seeder for some of the larger files that devs may wish to distribute.
What is missing now is financial support - a server will cost around 100Eur/month. If there is enough interest from users (and maybe devs) I could make this ressource available - but only if I can guarantee that it won't eat more of my money. So please, if you are interested and wish to help tell me, I'd appreciate it if we could get a server for experimenting and making files available.

Note: while Gentoo Infra does provide a great mirroring service this is limited and in some cases slow (it can take hours until files are available etc.) I don't intend to replace that, but add a ressource where for example daily snapshots or testfiles can be made available.

I've started collecting information on the whole checksum and signing problem area. The first discussions I found were from late 2003, and now we still have the same "critical" security problems. I'll try to get it all summarized and then push it at the -dev mailinglist so that I get an idea if my proposal makes sense. No really new ideas, but I try to get it wrapped up in a bundle that can be GLEPped if needed.
It's frustrating to see that noone managed to gather enough momentum in the last 3 years to get this done, so I'll have to do the hairpulling and kicking needed to get this done ;-)
If anyone wants to discuss this with me and help me improve my proposal feel free to hunt me down on IRC or by email ...

As you might have noticed last year's "Summer of Code" project where Google sponsored many OpenSource Projects has been revived for this year. Gentoo has been chosen as one of the organizations that will profit from this project.
So if you are a student and you think you can implement something really cool (see our list for ideas) contact us - either by mail, on IRC in #gentoo-soc or by any other means. Google will reward you for your work with a quite substantial fee!
We are open for all kinds of ideas as long as they profit Gentoo (or Linux in general) and fit a three-month timeframe. If in doubt just ask ... but better do it fast, Student registration closes on the 8th (Monday)!
Summer of Code Homepage