On the brink

A parting gift

2009-12-02T08:54:00.001+01:00

I have become increasingly unreliable concerning my activities within the Gentoo developer community during the last year. Now I finally arrived at the point where I consider the only reasonable solution to leave the Gentoo team. The final drop has been the fact that I promised Sebastian the next layman release. But week after week I did not find the time to work on the next version thus failing the promise.

With my commercial endeavours within the Kolab and Horde communities thriving I have to be realistic: The workload won't suddenly fade during the next year(s?). I would have liked to include Gentoo into the portfolio I get paid for but I was unable to achieve that. Chances are that I would be even less responsive concerning Gentoo in the future.

This is no easy decision for me as I do like Gentoo and feel strongly for some of the stuff I did for Gentoo. It is not easy to drop these projects. I would have made the choice earlier in order to clarify the situation if I would not care that much about Gentoo. But I left people with an unresponsive maintainer this way and I'm sorry for that.

There is one final thing I'd like to leave as a parting gift to the Gentoo community.

As some of you may know I wrote a german book about Gentoo. When I initially started the project I asked the publisher if there would be any possibility to produce a free version of that book, too. Writing about free software feels strange to me if the things I write are not free. But books are not software and I had to accept the commercial realities of the project at that time.

But I mentioned above that things for my little one-man-company are going well and so I did buy the rights to my book back. It has now been published under a free license and is available for download here. The latex source for the book is here.

Time to say goodbye. Sigh...

layman moves from subversion to git

2009-10-12T15:49:00.000+02:00

In preparation for layman-1.2.4 the repository has been converted from subversion to git. The new repository can be found at git://layman.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/layman/layman

layman-1.2.3 is out

2009-01-01T08:47:00.000+01:00

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

Support setting the terminal screen width (#253016)
layman -S fetches each overlay twice (#253241)

I can't seem to get layman bug free these days. I already wanted to mark the newer version stable months ago. Let's hope there'll be a longer bug free period now ;)

layman-1.2.2 is out

2008-12-28T23:53:00.001+01:00

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

layman -L: better use of screen real estate for source URLs (#251032, submitted by Martin von Gagern)
Execute subprocesses in a shell. (#235165)
layman/overlays/git.py (GitOverlay.sync): app-portage/layman - 'layman -S --quiet' yields "git: 'pull-q' is not a git-command." (#247964)

Thanks to all the contributers!

layman-1.2.1 is out

2008-11-15T11:15:00.000+01:00

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

Fixes for python-2.6 (#237625, submitted by Mike Auty)
Better locale support (#235165, submitted by A. F. T. Arahesis)
Handle git+ssh://, ssh:// correctly (#230702, submitted by Donnie Berkholz)
Do not remove directories if adding an overlay failed (#236945)

In addition there is a feature enhancement:

Pass --quiet flag down to the version control system (#236165, submitted by A. F. T. Arahesis).

Thanks to all the contributers!

Multiply your knowledge

2008-02-27T17:20:00.000+01:00

I've waited since Friday and it finally arrived today. Another German Gentoo book is available now!

It concentrates on the experienced Linux user and tries to achieve two things:

Get you running on Gentoo if you never used it before
Highlight the central Gentoo tools and provide a reference for their usage

For new users it should be possible to grab a laptop, insert the DVD and run through large parts of the book without ever connecting to the net. Thus the first steps with Gentoo are hopefully pleasant.

Even the early chapters feature larger sections that provide in-depth knowledge for the more experienced Gentoo users. All tools, options, variables and concepts are referenced in the thirty index pages of the book. So it should be a good companion while working with Gentoo.

If you need more details you can check the table of contents or even read the chapter on writing ebuilds.

One of the later chapters - "Extending Gentoo" - can be considered the main origin of the whole story. It talks about overlays.gentoo.org and layman.

About two years ago I sat down on a weekend to code the basis for layman in order to make the use of overlays.gentoo.org as easy as possible. I certainly didn't expect this to have any significant effect. After all layman always was - and still is - a rather trivial script.

But since I liked the whole idea about overlays I decided to write a small article about this concept as well as how layman fits into that. This got published in the German Linux magazine and had one unexpected result: I got an email from OpenSourcePress asking whether I'd like to write a whole book about Gentoo. At that time the answer was "yes".

Would it be "no" today? I'm not certain. I have to say that I hated the three weeks of pure text editing in the final phase of the project. It reminded me far too much of my PhD thesis. Yes, I like writing stuff: emails, wiki pages, blog entries, source documentation, ... you name it. Small stuff. Epic texts turn out to be much harder.

What definitely made it bearable in this case were the systems provided by OpenSourcePress: They give you a subversion repository and the whole text is done in Latex. They also work with Emacs on their end which happens to be my favorite editor too.

And one thing about their subversion repository is really great: You commit crudely written techno-babble on your side and a few revisions later it comes back in well readable German. This is what I definitely liked most about the whole project: Getting rewritten to readable language. Big kudos to the team of editors which really does great job.

So would I do it again? Well, I don't have to decide on that anymore. The basis is there so all there will be are further revisions. And that will hopefully be easier than the first version.

But for now I'll keep the book closed and continue coding...