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

[Benda Xu]

Dear Michael,

Michael Haubenwallner <haubi@g.o> writes:

> 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!

I was first introduced to Prefix as an IBM AIX user, and benefitted
immediately from your poineer work on AIX and got educated by you on IRC
and the mailing list.  Thank you, Michael (together with Fabian), for
bring me into this exciting world.

The prefix-stack is a master piece that has not been fully exploited its
potential.  I hope I could officialize the full version and bring it to
the HPC world.

Really said to see you go inactive in Prefix.  Our platform matrix[1] is
going to shrink a lot for that loss.

Best wishes for the future and the Java world.  Take care.

Yours,
Benda

1. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix#Platform_matrix