Whats happened to the Free/Open Source Movement?

metalshark · Last edited by metalshark on Mon Feb 27, 2006 9:21 am; edited 2 times in total

Original comment: Anyone feel the same about this?

New comment: The answer is it has matured - those of us expecting the rapid dispatches of the good old days are falling short of the bigger picture. Projects do need more visibility within Gentoo and other projects to stop duplicated efforts and to help testers/those wanting to try new methods of fixing problems to find the required resources.

BlackEdder · Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 4:38 pm Post subject:

You can read about what happened to the open source movement here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_movement

metalshark · Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 4:50 pm Post subject: Funny

POST LEFT FOR CONTINUITY BUT I WAS WRONG!!!

It links to OSC (Open Source Culture) which is a direct irony to the link in my post. I've read many papers by Eric Raymond - helped with Slackware for many years - moved to Gentoo and am met with a regression to some (only some) proprietary development practices.

How does Gentoo expect to have a future if this is the attitude they promote? I love Gentoo to bits - think it's the best distribution to date - but it appears (only appears - have no actual proof beyond what I've been presented with thus far) a close minded upstream dev community.

Maedhros · Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 7:39 pm Post subject:

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Gentoo Chat.

I can't see your concerns here - it's seems perfectly reasonable to me that the Gnome devs want to save themselves large numbers of useless bug reports caused by people using unstable software. Also, how is this a 'proprietary' development practise? The overlay is freely available - see the latest comment in the bug-report...

The developer in question wasn't closed minded to my mind. He was patient, and explained his reasoning, which seemed sound to me.
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metalshark · Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 8:56 pm Post subject: Difference of opinion then

It must vary alot from open source project to open source project. I am obviously used to a more rapid and more accessible open source projects. Please can a moderator remove this whole thread - or tell me how to then - so I don't upset any devs on my lack of understanding.

My reason for mentioning OSC and Eric Raymond in particular was "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" - I am used to more bazaar like open source projects where everyone can join in straight away - you can see all the different efforts at once in one place - I would not of found the gnome-experimental area if it was not for that bug report.

Hence my concerns - but if two moderators tell me I am wrong or am misunderstanding - I will take it as gospel.

brims · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 492 Location: Arizona

I completely agree with Maedhros' comment. Until the Gentoo Gnome team has a chance to test and work out some bugs, they don't want others using it, because they won't have had any experience using it. So if they are working on bugs they already know of in other versions, they don't have time to work on software they have yet to even look at.
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metalshark · Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 9:18 pm Post subject: I just didn't know

I assumed too much and retract anything detremental.

wjb · Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 9:21 pm Post subject:

Sorry, you've lost me, what is the problem?

Earthwings · Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 9:38 pm Post subject: Re: Difference of opinion then

metalshark · Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 9:38 pm Post subject: Loosing people

Well for some time now I have been grappling with getting newer versions of software into portage through bug reports - to fix problems people (primarily myself) have been getting. I use IM programs to help a few noobs with the Gentoo issues I have knowledge of - and putting overlays on my personal webserver is a pain - if they aren't in portage.

Gnome devs don't seem to respond to patches I issue them either (normally GIMP or GTK related). If I issue a bug report to KDE or Slackware though - they respond positively and normally include other peoples work as soon as possible.

Through the course of this thread I have discovered alot of the work I've been doing has already been done - it's just not been well advertised and I think that letting people know somewhere pretty obvious on www.gentoo.org would be a good idea. For instance gnome-experimental - admitedly you have to mask a fair few versions - but all the versions I need of software are there.

I just didn't know and the perceived attitude from this lack of knowledge caused me to falsely assume - I have since retracted any deframatory comments and will continue to find out more about these "hidden overlays".

firephoto · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 2:06 am Post subject:

You'll hit a brick wall with getting newer stuff in portages stable branch. It has to "sit" for a while before it's even considered because apparently the people release the source in an unstable state all the time that "settles down" after sitting for a month.

Also with the kde-gnome thing, kde seems to be more actively moving or more acceptable to dep changes where gnome kind of hits stable points and the makes a big jump which also causes a big jump in dependencies just to satisfy the gnome bumpage. This at times causes gnome to need (or gentoo-gnome to prefer) older versions of certain pacakges where kde might need a later version (or vice versa) which causes a conflict in the portage tree (and within the devs at times

).

I say submit the bugs, the patches, the whatever and even if they get closed they are there for others to use. Most likely you aren't hurting anything except for a few egos.

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metalshark · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 6:50 am Post subject: Explanations

All of this makes sense - and thank you for taking the time to explain - it would be nice if this kind of thing was explained more clearly on the official pages or the actual Gentoo homepage. Just one exception though - anyone else using GCC-4.1.0 - and find it ironic we are using overlays for GLIBC and BINUTILS?

@firephoto - you really think I should carry on as is - does it stop at the wranglers - or do I annoy the devs?

firephoto · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 7:30 am Post subject: Re: Explanations

metalshark · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 7:40 am Post subject: Aha ok

It's just the irony with GCC-4.1.0 being in portage - yet the versions of programs that compile with it - or the patches required being excluded.

Also the latest prelink is in portage - yet the versions of libraries that work on ALL platforms with it aren't.

Fair enough we don't want to make Gentoo unstable - but I refer to ~x86 with all except the WACOM patches - as the stable really doesn't work with certain setups.

firephoto · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 7:46 am Post subject: Re: Aha ok

metalshark · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 8:50 am Post subject: Positive outcome?

Ok trying to get a positive outcome for upsetting people. I am a web developer (mainly AJAX) and would love to resolve this lack of communication. I love the fact people on the forums (such as that halcy0n diary link by firephoto) seem to know the answers. I cannot find anything on the development overlays on www.gentoo.org and will now try contacting the relevant people to see if I can maintain a section on their site. Maybe another one for testing groups - like GCC-4.1.0 where we can centralise information in an easy to read manner instead of long forum threads wouldn't go a miss.

The forums work well - but the information doesn't archive well for people joining in testing later on and many pieces of vital information are omitted from scanning through too quickly (seems to be the thing most people have done when I come to help them).

All in favour - and any ideas? Will post some designs and obviously konq/links/lynx/firefox support will be as standard - expect a design later this week - if www.gentoo.org doesn't want it - I'll still stick it on my site for those I talk to.

metalshark · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 9:18 am Post subject: Feedback

Well before I start work (what I do for a roof over head) - I got some feedback on the section. A "ricers" section is apparently needed

An additional sub-section would be a readahead list for packages sorted by versions so that everyone doesn't have to continually strace. Something like tick the boxes for the versions of programs you use and it'll make the readahead (+ seperate early) list for you to download dynamically. Maybe with a wiki style storage system so we can all help each other. Hows that sound?

brims · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 492 Location: Arizona

[rant]What is with the use of the term AJAX, Microsoft seems to have started everyone using it (if I'm not mistaken, they coined, or at least highjacked the term). On /. all I see is AJAX this AJAX that.[/rant]

metalshark, you talk about we don't want Gentoo to be unstable yet we have the "unstable" pacakages (~x86, ~ppc, etc). I think of the ~ as just slightly less tested. Most of the time I feel the ~arch packages work better. I have 3 machines running, one is a gateway so it runs x86 because I just don't need bleeding edge. The other 2 are desktops, 1 has a strange problem with stability, definately hardware, still trying to figure out what exactly, it to runs x86, the other desktop runs ~x86, well everything except for XFCE, a feature doesn't work for me, filled a bug and they can't recreate it, even though I don't do anything special to create it. The point I'm trying to make is that I believe ~arch isn't unstable.

(I'm really tired, so this post may not make sense, oh well)
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metalshark · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 9:38 am Post subject: A great laugh

@brims - Thank you someone else who hates the term - especially as it's ironic - most good JavaScript/XMLRPC (the term I MUCH prefer - yet most people don't understand) rely on some sync (not async) components (don't believe me just look at Backbase or Google maps source code). I migrate projects that use Access with ASP to use Tomcat Servlets with Derby and a nice DOM compliant links/konq accessible interface. The clients usually don't give $0.02 about the tools, etc until they try to resell months later and discover what they paid for is under a Free Software license (I love my principles sometimes :p)!

For all the servers/desktops I maintain I love the non ~ branches - just add a cron job to auto update and never get breakage. It's brilliant. For my home box's and dev machines of course I run bleeding edge so that means ~ and some -*. If I really want something I go -*, if I receive issues I do my own overlays. As there are many people I talk to daily about software and we all like to share amungst each other - I thought I'd continue in the same way as I did in Slackware - post bug reports.

As Slackware really isn't maintained that well anymore - everyone (who is annoyed by this factor that I've met/talked to) is just moving to Gentoo as it's a really good system. When I run aground on something - I post a bug report with the fix - without knowing all of this about whats happening behind the scenes I'm sure you can understand why I got sooo miffed to the responses.

metalshark · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 10:01 am Post subject: Also brims

Hey brims - also if you're ever around online - I do alot of overclocking/bleeding edge multimedia so am used to fixing hardware stability - the more obscure the better - can spare some time to try and help if you'd like. PM back if it's a yes. Guess being in Arizona really doesn't help with cooling.

metalshark · Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2006 1:50 pm Post subject: Ideas

Had some ideas - and will start a new thread tomorrow once I've done some more work on this.

For me getting rid of the cruft in Gentoo (here and here) is a good thing. Also I love KDirStat as a way of drilling down the file usage on a mount point. Readahead is also a major time saving - and Windows XP Prefetch seems to be a good thing too (they have spent ages on it).

The /var/db/pkg folder has some nice things on packages that have installed - such as CONTENTS for each package that can drive scripts. So using an interface ripped out of KDirStat - having a drill down of files that don't belong to emerged packages would be nice. Would open the opportunity for an ebuild generator to help people put their custom configs or diffs to confs in an ebuild so that etc-update, etc can do their job yet allow people to better distribute their custom settings even accross their own systems.

So for instance these new easy installers for Gentoo can have their hardware/task specific alterations in ebuilds (obviously these wouldn't reach portage) but allow for better administration. You could keep track of old files and maybe cron a remove of everything outside of /home or send a daily admin report or even add a fam/gamin type system for immediate notification if used on a public network of desktops/remote server. So if a file that doesn't appear in an ebuild suddenly appears in it can remove/notify (a more proactive IDS, security in depth).

Kuroo performs poorly for me but I'd like the client side of the readahead list generator to use the emerge tools non the less so that changes to portage storage are negligable (I believe this is the reason Kuroo goes so slowly too). So an emerge -pv something will tell you your use flags - your LANG/LINGUAS will inform of NLS files and can then send a request for the package with the version number to the server, with a listing of your /etc/runlevels and send back a readahead list for boot and default. I won't touch initng as parallel sysvinit continually outperforms it on my systems (if this sounds wrong it's probably just because I don't know how to use initng properly). If the info isn't on the server then it can use the CONTENTS file in /var/db/pkg.

I am learning perl xmlrpc quickly so I can make it a quick cron job - and people can vet my code won't do anything nasty straight away (like only writing to the readahead lists not deleting your runlevels or setting fire to your face). Then anyone who straces their program with their use flags can upload the results for the rest. Some programs straces change on confs but not gonna be able to get that kind of level of sophistication any time soon. Think I'm capable of the rest.

So to recap - a KDirStat style interface for viewing parentless files on the system - with gamin support for detecting new files on the fly - an automated readahead list generator based on the info of stracing programs based on their use flags and version number only (emerge -pv) that is built from the info in your LANG/LINGUAS variables, the runlevels folder and the program version - which feeds into a perl script to talk to my server database of entries - on a not found query it'll just use the details in your CONTENTS folder.

Please yell if more explanation is needed - but think this is the only way I can actually contribute to Gentoo and a system like this is a long time coming.

metalshark · Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2006 2:41 pm Post subject: KGentooAdmin

Here is the new post.

metalshark · Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2006 3:11 pm Post subject: Ok

I think I understand the whole contribution system now and will not be so hasty in future - anything still upsetting people will be acknowledged if they post here - hope some good will come out of all of this.

Peace

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metalshark · Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2006 9:32 pm Post subject: Well

After this https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124991 I am just too pissed to contribute anymore.
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bbe · Apprentice Joined: 10 Jan 2005 Posts: 158 Location: UK

metalshark I feel for you man. I just wish I knew enough to be able to contribute stuff like you seem to be doing all the time. I can't believe devs don't want fixes for problems (that, yes, my not exist now.. but are imminent). Just seems to come down to a matter of trust. Though I understand the devs are under a lot of pressure to make sure things don't break so can't go applying patches "willy nilly".