[gentoo-project] marecki's Council 2021 manifesto

[Marek Szuba]

Dear everyone,

Having been nominated to run for the Council this year, which nomination 
I consider an honour (thank you, everyone who thinks I am appropriate 
for this position!), here are a few words from me regarding what I think 
is important regarding the Gentoo Council and why I consider myself a 
good fit for this role.


A bit about me:

I am an experimental particle physicist (currently employed in the field 
again but having since my Ph.D. studies gone through several other 
fields of science, as well as a brief stint in industry) with strong 
interest in computing infrastructure, with particular emphasis on 
high-performance computing, advanced networking and security.

I have been using Gentoo since I got my first amd64 system in early 
2006, and it has been THE workstation Linux distribution for me ever 
since - not in the least due to the fact that even when I used Slackware 
on x86, I still installed most software from sources. Even as a regular 
user I frequently contributed ebuild patches via Bugzilla, became a 
proxied maintainer shortly having found out about this possibility in 
early 2016, and later this year following the encouragement of several 
people on IRC became a developer. In addition to maintaining (and rather 
well I dare say, if my update or stabilisation turnover rate as well as 
the number of open bugs assigned to me are anything to go by) a somewhat 
eclectic set of packages, I have:
  - introduced to Gentoo OpenCL runtimes for Intel (first Beignet, then 
the whole NEO stack) and AMD (amdgpu-pro-opencl) GPUs;
  - subsequently led the effort to refactor OpenCL support in Gentoo to 
be more modular and easier for users to understand;
  - planned and to a large degree implemented the long-outstanding goal 
of supporting side by side multiple implementations of Lua, making 
Gentoo one of the few Linux distribution capable of this;
  - helped test Python 3.8, 3.9 and now 3.10 support across the main 
Gentoo tree;
  - been involved in the RISC-V Project since early 2021, in which 
capacity I am one of the developers representing Gentoo in the BeagleV 
beta programme and have been keywording packages for ~riscv using such a 
system.


What I think is important for the Council:

1. It has already been mentioned in several other manifestos that the 
Council should be OPEN; mine will be no exception. As the body 
responsible for global Gentoo policies as well as the final court of 
appeal for disciplinary decision, the Council's work should be as 
transparent as possible without violating privacy and data-protection 
regulations.


2. The Council should be DECISIVE. Seeing most if not all materials 
pertaining to issues requiring Council decisions are publicly available 
well ahead of the meetings and that it is entirely possible to discuss 
such issues in advance on Bugzilla, the mailing lists, IRC and so on, 
deferring a decision should be a last-resort option. And yes, all of the 
above does mean Council members should spend time on Council matters 
outside Council meetings.

Here I strongly feel my work experience in particle physics will prove 
very useful - it is a highly collaborative field, with projects 
comprising of members scattered across numerous countries who even 
before the pandemic communicated primarily through videoconferences, so 
I am by no means a stranger to such a mode of work.


3. I feel it would be useful for the Gentoo Council to be a bit more 
PROACTIVE regarding policies. Not that I think we should codify 
everything, far from it! Still, we have got some things in Gentoo which 
are de-facto standards (for instance the fact much of the main tree 
currently implicitly depends on changed-USE functionality to achieve 
seamless updates of e.g. Lua, Ruby or Python, even though as far as I 
can tell this feature is not part of the PMS) yet which often fall 
through the cracks. It is my opinion that Council members should try to 
keep track of such matters being brought up and follow up on them. This 
implies Council members should be INVOLVED in the Gentoo community, 
which for me is obvious but I'm mentioning it here for completeness.

As a scientist, I on the one hand largely supervise my own work (making 
it in my best interest to keep track of what needs to be done, what is 
important or urgent, etc.) and on the other operate in an environment 
where many ideas come from informal discussions (meaning they are easy 
to lose unless you capture an nurture them). I believe this makes me 
quite suited to this task.


-- 
Marecki