If my CIA stats are any indication, and they are, it would appear that I haven't really worked on Gentoo stuff in a while. My participation with Gentoo pretty much reflects real life for me: one minute I'm very visible and active and the next minute you'd think I dropped off the face of the earth. Well I'm trying to work on that (both real-life and Gentoo sides and I thought of some ways I'd like to do that (for Gentoo at least):

Try to think of myself as a real Gentoo developer.

Ever since I've worked on packages.gentoo.org I've never really considered myself to be a true hard-core Gentoo developer. The site is pretty much the only thing that ties me in with the devoper community. I rarely participate in the -dev irc discussions mailing lists, etc. etc. I've always thought of myself as a web site maintainer where the web site just happens to have a gentoo.org domain . I would like to get more involved though. One area that I'm definately interested in getting inolved in is fund raising, as I am of the belief that the true success of a not-for-profit is measured by its ability to raise dough. And I'm not speaking in the culinary sense.

Weekly bug checks

Bug reports for packages.g.o have been piling up in the past few monthsand I don't look at my bugsat scheduled interviews. But I plan to change that, sheduling Saturdays to at least look at bugs. I also have a tendency to fix bugs without closing them in bugzilla and I need to stop doing that.

Determine next generation of packages.gentoo.org

One of the things that rush from back of my mind when I see enhancement requests for packages.gentoo.org is it's next incarnation. I've realy been putting off "enhancing" the present code as 1) it's difficult to do so and 2) The next generation is coming out Real Soon Now (TM). What a fellow developer enlightened me on is that I've been saying "RealSoon Now" for over a year. An unfortunate reality is that Real Soon Now is becoming less and less soon. I started writing P2 over a year ago. At the time I was convinced that Quixote would be an ideal platform in which to develop the next-generation packages.g.o. Well since then there have been a couple of opposing viewpoints. The first of which is it appears that the infra group is reluctant to have to "support" yet another platform. The second is that the future of Quixote is in question. The developers of Quixote have release another web site development tool which they seem to favor over Quixote. So I have been considering jumping off of Quixote and onto something else. The most obvious choice from a migration standpoint would be Cherrypy is a framework very similar to Quixote, yet it is more modern, under active development and relatively well supported. Plus it should be pretty easy to convert a Quixote app to Cherrypy. However for the infra group this is still yet another platform to support. So I am considering PHP. Although I'd rather not write anything more advanced than "Hello World" in PHP, the fact remains that it is the defacto standard web development platform in the open source world. However implementing the next generation packages.g.o in PHP would require 1. That I learn PHP and 2. A complete rewrite of the application, therefore losing the work I've done in the past year. I'll have to get with the infra guys to discuss it with them and see what my options are.

Well there are at least half a dozen other little things I'd like to do as well. Of course this is all dependent upon the time I have to work on Gentoo stuff in the first place. In the beginning of the year I was on a job hunt so that took a lot of my time. Now that I've found new employment I've been spending a lot of time getting up to speed and preparing for my relocation to Florida next month. But I am going to try not to drop off the face of the Earth again and I'll keep you, or rather this blog, posted.

-m