Striving for greatness

Get paid to write open-source software this summer

Donnie Berkholz — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:20:56 +0000

If you’re a university student, time is running out! You could get paid to hack on Gentoo or other open-source software this summer, but you’ve gotta act now. The deadline to apply for the Google Summer of Code is this Friday.

If this sounds like your dream come true, you can find some Gentoo project ideas here and Gentoo’s GSoC homepage here. For non-Gentoo projects, you can scan through the GSoC website to find the details.

Tagged: gentoo, gsoc

Opportunities for Gentoo

Donnie Berkholz — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:38:54 +0000

When I’ve wanted to play in some new areas lately, it’s been a real frustration because Gentoo hasn’t had a complete set of packages ready in any of them. I feel like these are some opportunities for Gentoo to be awesome and gain access to new sets of users (or at least avoid chasing away existing users who want better tools):

Data science. Package Hadoop. Package streaming options like Storm. How about related tools like Flume? RabbitMQ is in Gentoo, though. I’ve heard anecdotally that a well-optimized Hadoop-on-Gentoo installation showed double-digit performance increases over the usual Hadoop distributions (i.e., not Linux distributions, but companies specializing in providing Hadoop solutions). Just heard from Tim Harder (radhermit) than he’s got some packages in progress for a lot of this, which is great news.
DevOps. This is an area where Gentoo historically did pretty well, in part because our own infrastructure team and the group at the Open Source Lab have run tools like CFEngine and Puppet. But we’re lagging behind the times. We don’t have Jenkins or Travis. Seriously? Although we’ve got Vagrant packaged, for example, we don’t have Veewee. We could be integrating the creation of Vagrant boxes into our release-engineering process.
Relatedly: Monitoring. Look for some of the increasingly popular open-source tools today, things like Graphite, StatsD, Logstash, Lumberjack, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Sensu, Tasseo, Descartes, Riemann. None of those are there.
Cloud. Public cloud and on-premise IaaS/PaaS. How about IaaS: OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, or OpenNebula? Not there, although some work is happening for OpenStack according to Matthew Thode (prometheanfire). How about a PaaS like Cloud Foundry or OpenShift? Nope. None of the Netflix open-source tools are there. On the public side, things are a bit better — we’ve got lots of AWS tools packaged, even stretching to things like Boto. We could be integrating the creation of AWS images into our release engineering to ensure AWS users always have a recent, official Gentoo image.
NoSQL. We’ve got a pretty decent set here with some holes. We’ve got Redis, Mongo, and CouchDB not to mention Memcached, but how about graph databases like Neo4j, or other key-value stores like Riak, Cassandra, or Voldemort?
Android development. Gentoo is perfect as a development environment. We should be pushing it hard for mobile development, especially Android given its Linux base. There’s a couple of halfhearted wiki pages but that does not an effort make. If the SDKs and related packages are there, the docs need to be there too.

Where does Gentoo shine? As a platform for developers, as a platform for flexibility, as a platform to eke every last drop of performance out of a system. All of the above use cases are relevant to at least one of those areas.

I’m writing this post because I would love it if anyone else who wants to help Gentoo be more awesome would chip in with packaging in these specific areas. Let me know!

Update: Michael Stahnke suggested I point to some resources on Gentoo packaging, for anyone interested, so take a look at the Gentoo Development Guide. The Developer Handbook contains some further details on policy as well as info on how to get commit access by becoming a Gentoo developer.

Tagged: development, gentoo, greatness

Video: Package management and creation in Gentoo Linux

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:23:55 +0000

As one of my four talks at FOSDEM, I gave one on Gentoo titled “Package management and creation in Gentoo Linux.” The basic idea was, what could packagers and developers of other, non-Gentoo distros learn from Gentoo’s packaging format and how it’s iterated on that format multiple times over the years. It’s got some slides but the interesting part is where we run through actual ebuilds to see how they’ve changed as we’ve advanced through EAPIs (Ebuild APIs), starting at 16:39.

If you click through to YouTube, the larger (but not fullscreen) version seems to be the easiest to read.

It was scaled from 720×576 to a 480p video, so if you find it too hard to read the code, you can view the original WebM here.

Tagged: development, gentoo

On package management: Negating the downsides of bundling

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:29:59 +0000

App developers and end users both like bundled software, because it’s easy to support and easy for users to get up and running while minimizing breakage. How could we come up with an approach that also allows distributions and package-management frameworks to integrate well and deal with issues like security? I muse upon this over at my RedMonk blog.

Tagged: development, gentoo

How to recruit open-source contributors

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:49:19 +0000

I just posted a video and write-up on how to recruit open-source contributors over on my RedMonk blog. It’s based on my years of experience as admin for Gentoo’s involvement in the Google Summer of Code, where I’ve greatly increased our ability to recruit students as long-term developers. Check it out.

Tagged: communication, culture, gentoo, gsoc

Gentoo Linux, or Why in the World You Should Compile Everything [Video]

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:06:00 +0000

I gave an introductory talk on Gentoo at a local BarCamp called MinneBar a couple of months back, and the videos were just posted online. The sound isn’t perfect but it’s perfectly understandable. Oddly, this is the first time I’ve ever given a formal talk on Gentoo in nearly 10 years of working on it.

The slides are pretty tough to read from the video, so I also uploaded them to Slideshare. I updated and heavily customized the same “Intro to Gentoo” slide deck that’s been floating around for years. It still could stand to lose a whole lot more text, and hopefully I can optimize it further if I give it again.

Gentoo Linux, or Why in the World You Should Compile Everything

View more presentations from Donnie Berkholz

Tagged: communication, gentoo, pr

3 days left to apply for the Google Summer of Code

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:26:31 +0000

Students, this Friday at 1900 UTC is the deadline to apply for this year’s GSoC. It’s an awesome program that pays you to work on open-source projects for a summer (where you == a university/college student).

It’s by no means too late, but start your application today. You can find more information on Gentoo’s projects here (click on the Ideas page to get started; also see our application guidelines) and on the broader GSoC program here.

Good luck!

Tagged: community, development, gentoo, gsoc

Wolfram|Alpha Pro: data science made easy

Donnie Berkholz — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:59:35 +0000

Over at my RedMonk blog, I wrote about how a new tool called Wolfram|Alpha Pro makes it easy for anyone to do basic data science. If you have any interest in data analysis, doing data science, or anything along those lines, check it out.

If you’re in Europe, go to Monki Gras

Donnie Berkholz — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:02:23 +0000

To my European readers: if you care about the impact of social technologies like Git (and GitHub) & how they’re transforming software development, or the impact of social technology on communities, and you enjoy good beer, you need to be at Monki Gras. I just posted over at my RedMonk blog about how the previous conference in the series, Monktoberfest, was the best conference of my life. And I’ve been to many.

Monki Gras is Feb. 1–2 in London. The timing’s perfect to stop by just before FOSDEM (and that’s exactly what I’m doing). Registration is dirt-cheap, speakers are universally top-notch, and you’ll also get some world-class beers in the package.

Tagged: community, development, gentoo

The state of Gentoo

Donnie Berkholz — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 14:21:38 +0000

I just published an article over at LWN called “The state of Gentoo.” In it, I talk about Gentoo’s progress over the past few years as well as its current problems, how they’re affecting Gentoo’s user and developer communities, and how to begin fixing them.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from our developers on the article so I’m confident that it’s generally a fair representation of where things stand today. However, Alex Legler (a3li) kindly told me our security team does much more behind the scenes to report vulnerabilities and get updated packages stabilized, even if we don’t see the results in the form of GLSAs.

Tagged: community, development, gentoo, pr