Re: [gentoo-alt] Time has come, or: a story of success

[Guilherme Amadio]

Hi haubi,

It's a pity to see you leave. Thank you very much for all your work
on prefix! I hope that you'll come back in the future.

Best regards,
-Guilherme

On Wed, Dec 09, 2020 at 08:01:58PM +0100, Michael Haubenwallner wrote:
> Dear Gentoo Prefix folks!
>
> TL;DR
> It was a great pleasure to grow up Gentoo Prefix with you, yet for me
> the time has come to leave. Thank you so much for a great experience!
>
> A story of success:
> Back in 2004, at work, for a number of 3 packages I have been requested to
> realize some mechanism to compile+install them together into some custom
> filesystem location as normal (non-root) user on the proprietary Unix
> platforms AIX (ppc), HP-UX (hppa, ia64) and Solaris (sparc, x86).
> So I invented some package installer, using GNU make to resolve dependencies
> and parallelize the build, with Bourne Shell files to define the package
> metadata, dependencies and compilation commands.
>
> By the time, the list of packages I had to define in my installer grew up
> and started to include things like GCC and some FOSS libraries.
>
> Around the same time, a colleague told me about Gentoo Linux to be a really
> cool distro, and I migrated away from Debian as a Linux user.
>
> But it took me another ~2 years to realize that my invented package format
> really is based on the very same ideas as the Gentoo ebuild format...
>
>
> Here, multiple great Thanks! to Fabian (grobian) Groffen, fortunately a Gentoo
> developer by that time already, for:
> * Understanding the goal behind my initial Portage patch I submitted to install
> packages into some custom filesystem location as a normal user,
> * Recognizing at all that a Portage patch has been submitted,
> * Creating the Prefix project within the Gentoo ecosystem as sub-project of
> the already existing gentoo-alt (Gentoo on Alternative Platforms) project,
> * Providing non-Gentoo resources to run the Prefix project,
> * Leading the Prefix project for a really long time,
> * Mentoring myself to become a Gentoo developer as well,
> * Drinking some beer together at FOSDEM a few times,
> * a lot more
>
> Also, great Thanks! to all the (current and former) Prefix developers, namely
> Benda (heroxbd) XU for leading Prefix these days, as well as Gentoo developers
> for supporting or at least accepting Prefix in general.
>
>
> Within the company, I have released forks of Gentoo Prefix in 2010 and 2015,
> with some help of Markus (mduft) Duft to build packages necessary for our
> application as native Windows binaries using the MSVC compiler, with the
> driving Portage instance running in a Prefix instance on Cygwin.
>
> Using one Prefix instance (having build deps) to manage another one (without
> build deps) is known as Prefix-Stack these days, and supported to a great
> degree by EAPI 7.
>
> In 2019, I did hand over to a team of 3 colleagues, and they succeeded in
> releasing our fork of Prefix in 2020 on their own already. They actually
> intend to show up with some patches in the Prefix community, but as it's
> not their main task, this may eventually be delayed until some 2025 release.
>
> For myself, a month after FOSDEM'20 I have switched my work focus onto the
> Java world, but still I'm really proud to see the Prefix baby live on it's
> own, exploring the world in a way I never could imagine!
>
> While I have to see whether I can remain active enough to keep my status
> as Gentoo developer, I'm definitively inactive as Prefix developer now.
>
> So long, thank you for a great experience, it was a really good time!
>
> All the best,
> /haubi/
>