[gentoo-project] dilfridge's Council 2021 manifesto

[Andreas K. Huettel]

I freely admit that this is an incremental update from last year. (I haven't 
swapped out my brain in the meantime either). Text also available here:
https://dev.gentoo.org/~dilfridge/Manifest-2021.txt

===================

So it's election time again... 

I'm from Regensburg, Germany and by profession an experimental physicist 
leading a university research group. Outside physics and Gentoo I'm interested 
in a wide range of topics all the way from art and cultural history to scifi, 
traveling, and cocktail mixing. (Doesn't necessarily mean that I have time for 
all that though.)

I'm a Gentoo developer since 2010; I decided at some point that if I'm 
tinkering with the computer in my free time anyway I might as well do it 
productively. Today I mostly work on keeping toolchain stuff like glibc and 
binutils and also Perl running. In addition, I recently founded the RISC-V
team and joined Release Engineering, where I take care of building the
RISC-V and 32bit ARM stages via QEMU.

Council business and QA are other things I'm busy with. At some point I got 
interested in Gentoo history, and started assembling the council decisions 
index [1] and updating the Gentoo ecosystem poster [2]. Both badly need an 
update again.

Gentoo runs on our university PCs and is controlling our measurements. So, I 
see a solid stable set and clean upgrade paths as very important. Conversely, 
~arch gives us the unique opportunity to provide our users with the bleeding 
edge of code, and that's something we should use, value and advertise too! 
Gentoo is about providing choice, not locking anyone into a single solution
- so a wide range of projects is great - but on the other hand projects should 
ideally be structured in a way that they don't block each others' progress.

What Gentoo needs is *one* democratically elected steering body, the 
Gentoo Council, that listens to the developer community, is familiar with 
daily affairs, and makes policy decisions based on that. Electing people means 
you trust them to represent your interests for a year, not just by reacting to 
crises, but also by taking proactive decisions. An election is the most 
reliable way that we have so far to find out what the developer community 
actually wants. From this background I stand for a proactive council that 
takes responsibility for all aspects of Gentoo.

We need to build on the strengths of Gentoo and emphasize its coolness. 
Infinite adaptibility, combination of cutting edge testing and solid stable, 
wide arch support, ideal for software developers. This means generic public 
relations work (see e.g. FOSDEM, which hopefully will return to its 
well-proven in-person format next year), but also initiatives of developers 
to "do something cool", supporting and publicising that. 

We need to at least try to go with the times. Yes I see the ideological and 
practical disadvantages of, e.g., Github, but if we want to attract a large
base of contributors, we need to seriously think about having modern, 
comparable ways to contribute! And not get stuck in eternal yesterday... just
because things were done successfully in one way when you joined Gentoo 
10 years ago, that doesnt mean they have to be done that way for all 
eternity; this attitude does not help!

We need to stand for the free software community, and cooperate with other
open source / free software projects in a mutually beneficial way. Let us
not forget that free software is to a large extent driven by volunteers and 
enthusiasts. It's great if big enterprise is contributing and also
profiting from our efforts - but let us remember, this is our playing field!

That's it for now. Cheers!

[1] https://dev.gentoo.org/~dilfridge/decisions.pdf
[2] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo-ecosystem


-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@g.o
Gentoo Linux developer
(council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)