[gentoo-science] Re: Scientific herd leadership

[George Shapovalov]

Hi guys.

Sorry that I did not reply yesterday, I had a presentation to prepare for 
today :).

I actually moved to a new place already. I am in Switzerland at the moment 
(Geneva/Lausanne, anybody around?), starting a new postdoc position (somebody 
might remember my email to -core or -dev some time ago). I am getting back up 
to speed, however I am still in much flux and everything official takes soo 
long in Swiss :(. Pluss the stress of starting new work (and getting all the 
equipment together :))...

There are a few points to address, so I'll structure my reply:

1. 
Anyway, as far as the leadership goes, I have been a lead of the sci herd ever 
since I created it (few eyars already, was that really that long ago? :)). 
Unfortunately things were rather quiet lately and, as I am not completely 
"on" yet, I am willing to give the leadership off to somebody who will have 
enough time on his hands. That, or at least I think we should have an active 
co-lead or may be even some more involved structure. Well, lets start with a 
co-lead first, so that we get at least somehting done :).

2. 
It would be good to have more devs involved in Scientific Gentoo. I can 
honestly say, that it surpassed my original expectations (it started out as a 
single category with a herd attached) and seems to have attained a status of 
an important project at the intersection of science and Linux. Looks like we 
have people recommending others to run Gentoo because of science apps we 
carry. Well, at least I saw few reports to that effect some time ago :).

I used to put out calls for new/interested devs to help Scientific Gentoo, 
when I was more active, and the responce was rather positive. However 
recently I did not have enough time to devote to training of new devs, so 
that slipped by. I think it would be usefull to reinstate that initiative, 
but first we need to get a head-count of who feels like doing the training. 
Should we have a 1 year as a dev  requirement for the trainers? (not the 
trainees of course! They are even better picked up from science than from 
Linux althogether :)) I would think so, given complexity of Gentoo nowadays 
and that last thing we want to do is to screw our comprehension by scientific 
community :).

3. Blas/lapack move.
Large part of it has been performed, new ebuild are in portage like for ages 
now. In fact so long, that I no longer feel we can just pick up from the 
point it was left at, but rather do another round of retesting (or even 
rethinking the concept) first. The part it staled at was to move all the 
dependant packages to a new blas/lapack system. I started adjusting some of 
the ebuilds a year or so ago, but I did not have that much time back then and 
did not want to step on the toyes of maintainers of these packages.
I'll try to check the situation with blas/lapack ebuilds soon and then issue 
another call for adjustments (for dependant packages). Can we please get 
those adjustment done this time? Pretty please ;).
Then (and only after that) the old versionf of blas/lapack will be masked and, 
eventually, removed. The bug tracing the status of blas/lapack move is 
#30453. Should we may be start a new, clean tracker bug? The mentioned one is 
pretty long, but it has a lot of essential info.

4.
I am for the regular meetings. It is probably good to try to settle on some 
time (may be easier if we go through with the "more involved unfrastructure", 
but the real need for it will only be there if we get 2x more devs than we 
have now (I mean in Scientific Gentoo)). However I agree, that reviving 
gentoo-science@l.g.o mailing list is a more realistic (and less 
stressful) option. In fact, everything is setup, lets just use it!
(To give an example, I am CC'ng this message to that list. Sorry for dups, if 
you receive it twice).

5. 
Anything else?

George
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