[gentoo-osx] Some Introduction

[Grobian]

Hi all,

I think most of you have already noticed me in some way, either via some 
announcements on -dev, by reading a blog, or just by paying attention in 
IRC.  Anywayz, for those that don't know, I'm a new developer on the OSX 
team.

In the small week that I've been officially on the staff now, I was 
confronted with many small things that made me ponder.  Before going 
into a long mail, I'll apologise upfront for my English, it's horrible.

When Lina send me an email after I submitted some bug on bugzilla, I 
felt like hey, wow, etc.  Basically I still feel like that.  It's an 
honour to be part of the Gentoo team somehow.  That it can't be fun 
everytime proves that recent resignation message on -dev I think. 
However, let's stick to the main point: I like to contribute some useful 
things here, and I hope I can find a corner where I can be that useful 
as I hope to be.  At the moment I have the terrible feeling of being 
useless, doing nothing struggling with everything that gets on my path.

I'm not really an IRC guy.  I know what it is, but in general it's great 
in distracting you and stopping you from doing what you have to do.  Due 
to my time zone, I usually miss the important discussions too.  Hence, 
I'm thinking of a drastical reduction of my IRC online time.  I have the 
feeling most of the OSX staff is in the #-osx channel, but it simply 
doesn't work out so well for me.  I prefer the asynchronous way of 
email, it also allows me to take some more time to type a response.  As 
a non-native English typer, I need more time to come up with responses. 
  And usually, it's time zone free! ;)

I got a fuzzy image of what the OSX team currently consists of.  It's 
far from a unity, more a group of people somewhere related because of a 
shared OS, most of the time.  Personally I'm a bit lost in what the 
general consensus would be among the team members.  Maybe there isn't 
even one.  There is progressive, darwin, osx, etc. the arch ppc-macos 
seems to be a multi-headed dragon.

My vision on Portage for OSX is exactly what the name says; portage on 
OSX, thus a portage instance next to the original OS, so I can enjoy the 
flexibility and package availability of portage and the sweetness of my 
OS.  I am willing to accept that I can't install autofs on a Mac OS X 
machine.  Maybe it sucks, but then you better install Linux on it 
afterall.  A Mac is different, thinks different, and yet, well... maybe 
I just like that.  In portage terms this is called "collission-protect". 
  Great!

Now it seems to me, after paying careful attention to some of the 
comments made in the #-osx channel that this vision of mine, which 
equals the current 'distribution' I think, can be considered the 
unwanted child in the Gentoo family.  Ok, it will be always a bastard 
child, like Portaris would be, but someone started with this idea, and 
got it into portage somehow.  How did this whole thing emerge within the 
Gentoo community, and what happened afterwards to get into the stage it 
is in now?

Ok, this probably all sounds a bit depressing, or put differently, quite 
unpromissing.  However, all I need for now is some guide into the 
wilderness I guess.  What are the (common) targets of the team?  What is 
it 'we' want to achieve?  Who thinks what?

Last, but not least, to get a small impression of the people in this 
team, I would like a (very) short intro of those people that I haven't 
met yet (if there are any ;) )

I hope somehow to become a valuable/active member of the team, but so 
far I think I haven't had the opportunity to do so.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
eBuild && Porting
Gentoo for Mac OS X
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