Gentoo Archives: gentoo-alt

From: Sam Pfeiffer <sammypfeiffer@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-alt@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-alt] Time has come, or: a story of success
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2020 00:54:20
Message-Id: CABVqfw9HqW0y4G76yyj7fNKU+0d1uJtg7hsM2cf2MFPe20HVhA@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-alt] Time has come, or: a story of success by Michael Haubenwallner
1 Good luck on your next adventures! You'll surely be missed.
2 I'm personally thankful for your kind replies when I was getting introduced
3 to Gentoo Prefix and when I reported issues, thanks a lot for being such a
4 good community member.
5
6 On Thu, 10 Dec 2020 at 06:02, Michael Haubenwallner <haubi@g.o>
7 wrote:
8
9 > Dear Gentoo Prefix folks!
10 >
11 > TL;DR
12 > It was a great pleasure to grow up Gentoo Prefix with you, yet for me
13 > the time has come to leave. Thank you so much for a great experience!
14 >
15 > A story of success:
16 > Back in 2004, at work, for a number of 3 packages I have been requested to
17 > realize some mechanism to compile+install them together into some custom
18 > filesystem location as normal (non-root) user on the proprietary Unix
19 > platforms AIX (ppc), HP-UX (hppa, ia64) and Solaris (sparc, x86).
20 > So I invented some package installer, using GNU make to resolve
21 > dependencies
22 > and parallelize the build, with Bourne Shell files to define the package
23 > metadata, dependencies and compilation commands.
24 >
25 > By the time, the list of packages I had to define in my installer grew up
26 > and started to include things like GCC and some FOSS libraries.
27 >
28 > Around the same time, a colleague told me about Gentoo Linux to be a really
29 > cool distro, and I migrated away from Debian as a Linux user.
30 >
31 > But it took me another ~2 years to realize that my invented package format
32 > really is based on the very same ideas as the Gentoo ebuild format...
33 >
34 >
35 > Here, multiple great Thanks! to Fabian (grobian) Groffen, fortunately a
36 > Gentoo
37 > developer by that time already, for:
38 > * Understanding the goal behind my initial Portage patch I submitted to
39 > install
40 > packages into some custom filesystem location as a normal user,
41 > * Recognizing at all that a Portage patch has been submitted,
42 > * Creating the Prefix project within the Gentoo ecosystem as sub-project of
43 > the already existing gentoo-alt (Gentoo on Alternative Platforms) project,
44 > * Providing non-Gentoo resources to run the Prefix project,
45 > * Leading the Prefix project for a really long time,
46 > * Mentoring myself to become a Gentoo developer as well,
47 > * Drinking some beer together at FOSDEM a few times,
48 > * a lot more
49 >
50 > Also, great Thanks! to all the (current and former) Prefix developers,
51 > namely
52 > Benda (heroxbd) XU for leading Prefix these days, as well as Gentoo
53 > developers
54 > for supporting or at least accepting Prefix in general.
55 >
56 >
57 > Within the company, I have released forks of Gentoo Prefix in 2010 and
58 > 2015,
59 > with some help of Markus (mduft) Duft to build packages necessary for our
60 > application as native Windows binaries using the MSVC compiler, with the
61 > driving Portage instance running in a Prefix instance on Cygwin.
62 >
63 > Using one Prefix instance (having build deps) to manage another one
64 > (without
65 > build deps) is known as Prefix-Stack these days, and supported to a great
66 > degree by EAPI 7.
67 >
68 > In 2019, I did hand over to a team of 3 colleagues, and they succeeded in
69 > releasing our fork of Prefix in 2020 on their own already. They actually
70 > intend to show up with some patches in the Prefix community, but as it's
71 > not their main task, this may eventually be delayed until some 2025
72 > release.
73 >
74 > For myself, a month after FOSDEM'20 I have switched my work focus onto the
75 > Java world, but still I'm really proud to see the Prefix baby live on it's
76 > own, exploring the world in a way I never could imagine!
77 >
78 > While I have to see whether I can remain active enough to keep my status
79 > as Gentoo developer, I'm definitively inactive as Prefix developer now.
80 >
81 > So long, thank you for a great experience, it was a really good time!
82 >
83 > All the best,
84 > /haubi/
85 >
86 >
87
88 --
89
90 *Sammy Pfeiffer*
91 PhD Candidate at The Magic Lab within UTS (thesis under examination).
92 Senior Robotics Software Architect.