Gentoo Archives: gentoo-science

From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@×××××××.net>
To: gentoo-science@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-science] Re: Scientific herd leadership
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 14:57:43
Message-Id: 4309E79A.7000302@cesmail.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-science] Re: Scientific herd leadership by "Marcus D. Hanwell"
1 Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:
2
3 >On Monday 22 August 2005 08:48, C Y wrote:
4 >
5 >
6 >>Perhaps we could have a "support team" behind someone with official
7 >>Gentoo developer status - people could point out significant ebuilds
8 >>with most logic in place to the developer, help work out quirks in the
9 >>programs/ebuilds, and generally speed things up? Certainly the
10 >>developer would bear final responsibility but this way those of us with
11 >>five hours every month or so could help out too, particularly for
12 >>specialty packages. (BTY, if some genius could figure out brl-cad I
13 >>would be grateful - it's going to take me a year at this point :-/.)
14 >>
15 >>
16 >
17 >I was wondering myself if some people in here might be receptive to the idea
18 >of a support team, much like the arch testers we have for the amd64 porting
19 >team. It often leads on to people becoming devs, but is a great way to help
20 >out when you can.
21 >
22 >
23 Yeah, it's a good idea -- my tastes are widely varying, though,
24 including science and computer music, Ruby on Rails, and just learning
25 in general. For myself, I'm probably closer to knowing what's "under the
26 hood" in R than any other package; I've been using it since 1.1 or
27 thereabouts. In the case of R, I beta test the upstream tarballs
28 whenever I have the spare time. But the R ebuild itself isn't
29 particularly tricky, nor is there a lot of work maintaining portability
30 of it across the Gentoo-supported architectures. Their issues are the
31 same as those of most open-source packages -- x86-64 and GCC 4. :)
32
33 In the end, we're all volunteers anyhow in this game. We do what we can
34 when we can, as long as it's legal and ethical. So I'm going to keep
35 spending at least four hours a week doing exactly what I'm doing now,
36 whether or not I get some kind of "formal" status or "recognition" --
37 just the learning and having the quality software available when I need
38 it is enough!
39
40 >Tony Murray is filling that kind of role unofficially with all the work he
41 >puts into the boinc and setiathome ebuilds, whilst I review, test, improve
42 >and commit them once they are up to standard. I also have good contact with
43 >the quickplot developer who has integrated my patches upstream and helped
44 >significantly with the ebuilds for that package.
45 >
46 >I think these relationships are important, and I personally nurture them as
47 >much as possible. Many scientific packages are very involved and having
48 >people help test and work out problems can significantly increase our
49 >efficiency as a team.
50 >
51 >
52 It's also important to have lines of communication/liasons with the
53 upstream package developers. Since most of Gentoo is built from source,
54 it could take as little as a few hours for an upstream release to make
55 it into Portage unstable/testing and onto a Gentoo user's system. Good
56 news and bad news can travel at the same speed. :) In my case, I've been
57 the "user" in the development chain of TeXmacs and Common Music. There's
58 no way on Earth I could have done that in Fedora or even Debian.
59 (Actually, in the case of TeXmacs, I did try to file a bug in Debian on
60 the TeXmacs/R bug I found, but never did figure out their bug filing
61 system. And those folks at TeXmacs never *have* fixed the bug, either! :( )
62
63 --
64 M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
65
66 http://www.borasky-research.net/
67 http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
68
69 http://pdxneurosemantics.com
70 http://pdx-sales-coach.com
71 http://algocompsynth.com
72
73 --
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