my idea of open source governance

This week has worn me out. I’m taking actual effort to get some things done. The extras steering committee is trying to, slowly, make some progress. A bunch of things happened this week.

The fedora-maintainers list started up. It’s a list that is populated only by those people who maintain a package in fedora core, fedora extras or who otherwise contribute helpfully to fedora’s growth and prosperity. It’s available read-only to anyone who wants to read it. A lot of folks think this is about elitism and about control. It’s really not. It is about organization and some semblance of sanity. Right now the problem is that hearing from anyone who uses fedora is not a way to get anywhere. It means a lot of noise a lot of fury and nothing signified or done.

That’s what maintainers is all about. You do some work, you get a voice. You don’t do work, you can still speak, but you won’t be able to speak on maintainers list. This isn’t new. The Linux Kernel Summit at ols each year is invite only. The gnome foundation conference calls are invite-only. This isn’t new. The people who do the work get to make decisions.

This is the ultimate in free and ultimate in open. Because it means anyone, ANYONE, who is willing to help out can move through the hierarchy of decision making. You can do almost anything b/c you do the work and people trust and rely on you.

This is what open source governance has always been. No one really speaks of it much b/c we like to think open == democratic. It doesn’t. Open means unlimted social mobility. No glass ceilings.

So if anyone wants to get to start making decisions, take a look at the fedora extras todo/schedule. See if you can help, email or contact the person who is listed there and see how you can help them or what they need done. If you really can’t figure stuff out, email me.

There’s no grand conspiracy, no secret, just people doing the work, trying to keep it working.

Week in review

Monday was spent in lovely shopping-on mode with the girl. Much trying on of clothing and acquiring of misc items. I even bought a pair of pants. Later I made it to linuxworld and successfully navigated the gauntlet known as the registration desk. It was quite possibly the least well-designed registration desk organization I’ve ever seen.

Tuesday: I made it to linuxworld at a reasonable hour and made my way around the various booths. Settled for a bit at the fedora booth and tried to figure out what else needed to get done for fudcon. Journeyed to Paul’s house for Karaoke revolution which was shockingly fun to play

Wednesday: more of the above – linuxworld, answering a lot questions, talking to folks that I wanted to speak to about various items, taking some abuse, the usual. Ended up grabbing vietnamese with Jeremy and Kara at Pho Pasteur that night. Good stuff. Thought about going to the google party then relented and decided to crash in for the evening. From what I was told that was a wise decision the google party was sub-par.

Thursday: All day in meetings on fedora, it was mildly excruciating. Got a lot of things accomplished and a whole fistful of things decided to be done. We’ll see how many of those things happen in the coming week and what repercussions they will have if they don’t get done. Out to dinner with a huge chunk of the fedora people. Went to an israeli place, pretty good. It was fun watching Warren be confused about the food. Apparently mediterreanean food is fairly uncommon in hawaii.

Friday: Up bright and early, really early considering how late I stayed up finishing my slides. Met folks at the right place, was reasonably clean and mostly conscious of the world. Got to BU in time, set things up, got some of the stuff together. All in all fudcon ended up being a good turn out and while everything did not go smoothly it could have been a whole lote more horrible than it was. We finished cleaning up everything around 6:30ish and I trekked back in the artic cold to the hotel. Met with the girl, had a fantastic meal at henrietta’s table in the charles hotel. I slept nicely w/nothing to worry about.

Saturday: Got up on time the next morning and was off to the airport then to richmond. Pleasantly surprised that offline mode in evolution worked almost entirely as I expected it to. So I got a bunch of emails answered on the plane then sent when I got into richmond. This was nice. Drove home on saturday my dad was already here and my brother was playing golf over at unc and doing fairly well (2 over par).

Sunday: up at a fairly silly late hour and slept wonderfully. Nice brunch/lunch at elmos followed by some work. Built all the packages that had accrued in the previous week in Extras’ wiki. Planning on doing a little more yum work tonight. Would love to get a chance to fix up a few more bugs and put out a devel release.

This week bodes interesting. New boss, a bunch of meetings about linux@duke and the potential for a lot of things to get weird. Here’s looking forward to a significantly screwed up set of weeks to come.

Heathrow^HRIC Shuffle

I’ll give many points to anyone who understands that title.

anyway – sitting at the airport, hour delay waiting for the flight to boston. No weird weather anywhere so I’m not sure why the flight is delayed other than stupid-airline-shit.

eunice finished my scarf and is now working on a hat to protect my melon. I coulda used that earlier though when my mom, while closing the hatch on her car smacked me in the head with it.

Trying an older kernel out right now to see if it de-screws my laptop.

la la la

FUDCon shuffle

Getting ready to shuffle out of durham for richmond then from richmond to boston. Packing sucks, as always, but it’s going to be nice to be somewhere else for a week. Watched Garden State with the girl last night – a fantastic movie. I can see why it did so well at sundance. Looking forward to some of the FUDCon discussions this week in much the same way I look forward to going to the dentist: I know it’s good for me but god I kinda dread it.

Need to work on my slides and yum on the plane, though it’s a short flight. Hopefully my laptop will be less flaky. 🙂 I upgraded to rawhide about 3 days ago and things have been a bit, umm, odd at times.

It will also be nice to possibly be on a little less ridiculous sleep schedule. I went to bed at 4:30am on thursday night/friday morning and woke up at 8:00am friday morning to go to the vet with cori and then to work. I’ve been doing a fair bit of that recently and it wears you out.

In home news the girl made a positively DIVINE banana almond bread. It was so soft and so moist, it was almost pudding but w/o that disconcerting texture of pudding. Very nice. Kinda looking forward to valentine’s day roaming around boston with her in search of bridesmaids dresses for a friend of her’s wedding she’s in. I’m odd in that I enjoy shopping with women for their clothes. I can’t stand to shop with others for clothes for me but I’m actually quite skilled at picking out clothes for others. Feel free to ask current and past girlfriends as well as female friends, I’m l33t in clothes selection and style, when it comes to others.

For myself, however, I tend toward the jeans, comfortable, simple tshirt style. Oh well.

okay, away for a while, maybe more yum information soon.

FC4 test1 and repoclosure.py

Elliot announced that fc4test1 would be freezing soon. And he gave us some very warm
thoughts:

“I would fall in love with you all over again if you did your part to make sure the tree was installable and free of broken dependencies & conflicts by Valentine’s Day (Monday, February
14th).”

Now, I always want Elliot to be in enthralled with me so it occurred to me that we could check for dependencies from the metadata.

So I put together a script to do that. It’s called repoclosure.py. It just goes through all the packages in a set of repositories you tell it and makes sure that something else in that repository can provide for the requirements of the packages. If it can’t find a provide for a require it tells you which package it is and what it needs. So we can check repositories, or a set of repositories, for dependency closure.

It uses the yum modules and your yum caches to do all the work.

If you just run it w/o any arguments it looks in all of the repos you have enabled in your yum.conf:

if you’d like you can also pass it a list of repositories you’d like to check:

repoclosure.py development extras

repoclosure.py base updates-released updates-testing

That’s really about it. So now for rawhide and the test series you can harass your favorite packager about broken deps in his/her packages.

Notes about Extras

So now that we can officially talk about Extras. Let’s highlight a few items people will be interested in.

• General Info about Fedora Extras
• Contributors – people doing stuff in Extras, many of them with CVS access – these are the folks who will sponsor other people into the system
• How to go about obtaining CVS Access
• Fedora Core 3 Package Status
• Poor little Orphaned Packages

See, wasn’t that thrilling? There is a bunch more information (some of it badly outdated) available on the Extras Wiki Pages.

It’s a good start, with extras rolling out to mirrors all we need is for the cvs server to finish its long trek across the country to the new coloc so we can start building again.

Progress!

Yes, I can now say this is not pseudo-progess it is actual, honest-to-$deity

1. Extras is open, f’real, completely, sactioned, ratified, blessed, what-have-you. Click on ‘EXTRAS’ – that’s got the stuff you crave. We’ve got all sorts of packages and stuff in there now and it’s actually kinda useful

2. CVS account creation for !red hat people are being made again. wooo hooo!

3. FUDCon is all ready to go. We have a place, we have things to talk about. All we need now is people to show up and talk to each other. And maybe pick up a fine tshirt or two provided, graciously, by the nice folks at Red Hat (thanks to Greg D. on that)

See, bonafide progress of sorts.

sigh: conned by the girl

I took this silly test.

and I got a silly result.

and I’m being compelled to list the silly result.

this is not my fault. I swear.

AHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

You’re a villain!

…though you prefer to think of yourself as misunderstood. You know the world would be a better place if they’d only let you be in charge of it, and if they don’t appreciate your genius by themselves you’re willing to make them. You’ve got good hair, a secret base and an ambivalent relationship with the bishounen hero. You’ve got the money, the women, the best mecha and your own private army, but you still lose in the end to some jumped-up kid with spiky hair. There is no justice. Which generic anime character are you?

*sigh*