Title. Can't think of a title...


I am so thankful to Google for awarding us an entire 14 (yes, fourteen) projects for Summer of Code, it's pretty wicked that they decided to put $70,000 towards Gentoo. And even more nice was the following words from Greg Stein: "While I don't use Gentoo, I specifically put you guys into the program (you were on a hold list cuz of all the other Linux distros already present). I like how Gentoo has built a community around the distro in such a short time. To me, that is emblematic of a good community, and is what SoC needs for mentoring great OSS developers." and another quote by him, this time at the Summer Admin mailing list: "As one example, Gentoo got included into the program because I've liked how they came from pretty much nowhere into one of the stronger Linux distributions. Out of the thousand distros out there, they rose to one of the primaries in pretty short order. I believe that is due to a strong community focus, which is exactly something that I believe is good for an SoC organization. A good community can definitely produce good mentors. As a result, I approved their request to join, and tweaked their project count up one (over other choices) when we freed up some projects during duplicate resolution." I hope us Gentoo mentors live up to that view and do a good job at mentoring our students and their excellent projects, and of course I hope that we continue to make Gentoo proud, I hope that in the future I will hear many similar comments, it certainly feels great and makes me proud to be part of something as awesome as Gentoo.

I said we ended up with fourteen projects in the end, the projects are as follows (in no particular order):

It's quite exciting. I think we ended up with a excellent group of students, most new to Gentoo (as contributors) and a few already existing developers working on something different to their normal stuff.

Ironically, two of the four students accepted to work on Irssi are Gentoo developers too, what a tiny world.

Grant (g2bjoom) has been a complete star btw, as I've been semi busy over the past weeks, having had handsome portage developers visiting, celebrating my birthday, trying to catch up on studies, house hunting as I am moving shortly and generally finding that everything happens at once; He's been a total gem and has picked up so much slack and done so much SoC stuff for me at his own initiative, I must remember to buy him a bottle of his favourite beverage. Thank you Grant. Lance (Ramereth) has also been a gem ensuring that he tries to provide us with Infra resources for some/most of what we need to provide to students, what Infra can't deliver in time due to various reasons we luckily manage to pick up at gentooexperimental.org/gentoo-soc.com (so, thank you to Patrick (bonsaikitten) too).

I started the task of building up a Press Contact file for PR (and Releng PR) this week as we're due a release shortly and I'd like to make sure we send a press release to as many people as possible, I also want to ensure that I sweet-talk enough people to get us an editorial or three. This is going pretty well too.

It's been discussed and decided that userrel has found enough footing to move house, it's time to test our wings and leave the safety(!) of devrel behind and become our own TLP. I know this will no doubt please many developers who has had some issues with us being a devrel subproject. It also is rather exciting that we have the backing to do so now, originally it was agreed that we'd stay under devrel until confident that we wouldn't be "yet another userrel fad." I think we're getting somewhere this time. We've got quite a lot of stuff going on with various projects atm, I guess the most noteworthy stuff is working with the bugdays guys, overlays and I believe we will try help Sven (swift) and his Knowledge Base project as much as we can as that's totally in our street. So yes, I am pretty excited, and hopefully so are my boys! Speaking of which, we had a new addition recently; Daniel (dsd) has been out recruiting us a brand spanking new Planet administrator, the name is Steve Dibbs and he goes under the nickname beandog, he seems to fit right in with the rest of the team and I am sure he'll be a great addition to both userrel and Gentoo.

On a entirely different note... am I the only person to get terribly cheered up by pinkish colours? It's amazing how something as silly and small as the following will make me all ecstatic...

So yes, I think I conclude that Gentoo primarily consists of awesome people, even those in Infra.. ;-) Having had more of a chance to speak with, work with and also to hear their side of the story I must admit that some of my statements may have been made rather prematurely, and although I at the time felt the way I wrote I am gaining a lot of respect for these guys and think they are a pretty important part of Gentoo.

Anyhow, i have buckets of stuff to do so I should probably head off and get some work done. I'm sure you'll "hear" from me again soon.

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Posted by:
christel at 25.05.2006 / 22:47
Last updated 27.05.2009
Category:
Geek, Gentoo, Happiness, SoC, Userrel