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