Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Council 2012/2013 election

[Tony \\\"Chainsaw\\\" Vroon]

On Thu, 2012-06-07 at 22:05 +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> chainsaw

Thank you Ulrich. I accept.

My manifest for this election follows:

I am a firm believer in the UNIX philosophy of multiple interlocking
small components. Each only performs a very specific, small task and
does that job very well. This is well suited to an open source
environment, where a maintainer has "scratched an itch", found his/her
niche and takes pride in the smooth running of their individual gear[1]
in the bigger machine.
In my day job, I depend on these UNIX machines and have trained people
in carefully replacing these gears as the machines run. It has become
apparent that this way of life is under threat, and I would like to
protect it.

There is a push to pull all of the gears out of my UNIX machine and
replace it with a harmonic drive[2]. I am told that it has less play and
higher torque, and with only one component it is much easier to maintain
if I only forget all I know about UNIX machines, throw all our custom
gear sets away and retrain my staff in strain wave gearing instead.
I am sorry to have to point out that we have invested significant effort
in getting our gear shufflers to the level they are today, and that we
depend on our lovingly hand-crafted gear ratios to get us the
performance that we require. Reducing us down to exactly three gears[3]
may make a harmonic drive conversion a lot easier, but our ideal speed
happens to be reached on four right now!

[1] program
[2] systemd
[3] /usr merge

Regards,
Tony "Chainsaw" Vroon

P.S. You are most welcome to join me on IRC or e-mail me privately about
my strong yet controversial opinions. However, I hope that you recognise
yourself in the story above. Whether you make gears, (re)place them or
simply depend on the output of a UNIX machine...