Wouldn't it be nice ...

I moved my blog over to wordpress.com because of a number of problems including increased spam, lack of reader stats, and insufficient customizability. This will be my last post here. The new location:

http://dberkholz.wordpress.com/
http://dberkholz.wordpress.com/feed/atom (news feed)

Follow me there, where we'll continue the fun and excitement of random spurts of posting followed by extended inactivity.

People were so busy complaining about my pie chart that most of them apparently didn't have a chance to think about the meaning of the actual data. To try helping people look at the information rather than its presentation, here's a bar chart of the same information:

I don't recommend looking at it because you may go blind, but I've made available the (extremely ugly) script that created this.

I ran a quick, informal poll on the internal Gentoo developers' list last week, and tonight I began analyzing the results. 50 developers responded to my 9-question survey, and I'm going to post the results of 1 question at a time.

First question: What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?



Technical issues are way down on the list. Developers' top 5 issues are manpower, publicity, goals, developer friction, and leadership. It's good to see that we've been addressing at least a couple of them with the newly energized public relations project and work on the Code of Conduct. Other issues that have been ongoing for quite a while now are the lack of distro-wide vision and goals. The Council could provide those by increased activity and taking stronger stands in particular directions, and that's part of the reason I did this survey—to figure out which directions our developers care about. I think part of the problem is that nobody sits around pondering directions and ideas. Everybody's busy working in their own little areas and not thinking about the big picture. Manpower, or lack of it, is another issue I'm indirectly addressing in my push for greatness, which I'm going to post more about at some point (I promise!).

To create this chart, I used Google's excellent chart API. The neat part about the API is that it's simply a URL, so you can construct it with any language. I used a shell script since I was already fiddling around with awk. Any answer with less than 4 respondants was grouped into Other to make the rest of the chart readable.

Everybody who went to LCA entered their distro, editor, and shell upon registration. Peter Lieverdink posted graphs of the results.

Gentoo made an excellent showing, coming in 4th after Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. This is particularly neat because LCA attendees fit Gentoo's target audience really well: developers and power users.

Thanks to Daniel Black for the link to that graph.

This won't be a long post, because I'm tired. Sorry for the dearth of posts on here, but I've been busy writing other things—see below.

For anyone who hasn't heard, I took over as lead of Gentoo's public relations efforts a little over two weeks ago. Three days earlier, I wrote an LWN article concluding that Gentoo isn't falling apart, but it's totally failing to communicate. After writing that article, I realized that somebody had to step up to deal with this problem—who better than me?

My focus right now is showing people that Gentoo development is just as alive as it's ever been. I'm doing this by opening windows into development through more frequent news postings, with links to discussion forums to respond to the posts. Doing this, combined with writing to people ("You will") rather than about them (saying "Users will..."), will help build better relationships with our users.

Another part of improving the perception of a lively, active community is updating the look of our website. The old website redesign never made it to fruition, so a few of us have begun taking a look at how far it got, what happened, and what to do now. At a minimum, I'd like to make some slight changes to give our site a face lift. The design hasn't changed for 6 years now, and it shows.

One major, easily fixable problem with our website is that there's no obvious place to go for users who want to contribute. There should be a big "Get involved!" or "Help Gentoo!" link right up at the top of the page, next to "Get Gentoo!" All this requires is a little webpage that describes all the ways people can help. In fact, the whole website isn't task-oriented enough. This needs to change.

In the future, I'm going to begin improving the "press" aspect of PR, based on my notes from an excellent talk by Josh Berkus at OSCON 2006 on public relations for OSS projects. The main ideas here are providing a press kit for reporters with all the basic info they want, building relationships with local reporters by using local Gentoo contacts, putting together some case studies of people and businesses using Gentoo in interesting ways, and improving our process for creating and posting news and press releases.

Finally, any Gentoo users can help improve Gentoo by simply advocating it to Linux users you know, giving demos and talks at Linux user group meetings or conferences, promoting it in articles, or writing in your blog about something Gentoo does really well.

That's a question a lot of people have been asking lately, with the news about the nonprofit foundation, the lack of news updates on the homepage, and the canceled release. I answer it in a short LWN article.

I just committed xorg-server 1.4.0.90, which is a prerelease for 1.4.1. Here's the Gentoo ChangeLog:

Bump to 1.4.1 release candidate. It's gotta be an improvement over 1.4, so i'm letting it go into ~arch.

(#192221) 'xorg-server-1.4 - keyboard LEDs do not work' fixed upstream.

(#201047) 'xorg-server 1.4 no longer loads xmodmap via xinitrc properly' fixed upstream.

(#197104) 'xorg-server-1.3 and 1.4 consumes 100% CPU, locking the keyboard, apparently triggered by opening an OpenOffice pulldown menu' fixed with patch from master branch.

(#196019) 'xorg-server creates unnecessary file /etc/X11/X11/Xsession.d/92xprint-xpserverlist' fixed by not installing the same file twice to 2 different places (Andy Crook).

(#195886) 'xorg-server-1.4.0-r2 built with hal USE flag crashes on shutdown if dbus service is not running' fixed upstream.

(#195551) 'xorg-server-1.4 fails to build w/kdrive on amd64' fixed with Makefile.am patch designed for easier sed but unsuitable for upstream because the line gets too long (Michael Gorse).

(#194503) Don't spit versions when showing drivers to rebuild via qlist, and also provide a command for people to do it themselves later.

The upstream X.Org change list is available here.

I've been talking with Lance lately about setting up a good development machine, and GCC 4.3 (still unreleased) came up so I checked out its changes. Here's a few I found particularly cool:

• A new forward propagation pass on RTL was added. The new pass replaces several slower transformations, resulting in compile-time improvements as well as better code generation in some cases.


• A new command-line switch -frecord-gcc-switches has been added to GCC, although it is only enabled for some targets. The switch causes the command line that was used to invoke the compiler to be recorded into the object file that is being created. The exact format of this recording is target and binary file format dependent, but it usually takes the form of a note section containing ASCII text. The switch is related to the -fverbose-asm switch, but that one only records the information in the assembler output file as comments, so the information never reaches the object file.


• A new internal representation for GIMPLE statements has been contributed, resulting in compile-time memory savings.


• A new command-line option -fdirectives-only has been added. It enables a special preprocessing mode which improves the performance of applications like distcc and ccache.


• Experimental support for the upcoming ISO C++ standard, C++0x


• Fortran: The -fexternal-blas option has been added, which generates calls to BLAS routines for intrinsic matrix operations such as matmul rather than using the built-in algorithms.


• Fortran: Support to give a backtrace (compiler flag -fbacktrace or environment variable GFORTRAN_ERROR_BACKTRACE; on glibc systems only) or a core dump (-fdump-core, GFORTRAN_ERROR_DUMPCORE) when a run-time error occurred.


• Java: libgcj now supports all 1.5 language features which require runtime support: foreach, enum, annotations, generics, and auto-boxing.


• x86/amd64: Tuning for Intel Core 2 processors is available via -mtune=core2 and -march=core2.


• x86/amd64: Code generation of block move (memcpy) and block set (memset) was rewritten. GCC can now pick the best algorithm (loop, unrolled loop, instruction with rep prefix or a library call) based on the size of the block being copied and the CPU being optimized for. A new option -minline-stringops-dynamically has been added. With this option string operations of unknown size are expanded such that small blocks are copied by in-line code, while for large blocks a library call is used. This results in faster code than -minline-all-stringops when the library implementation is capable of using cache hierarchy hints.


• x86/amd64: Support for SSSE3 built-in functions and code generation are available via -mssse3.


• x86/amd64: Both SSE4.1 and SSE4.2 support can be enabled via -msse4.


• x86/amd64: GCC can now utilize the ACML library for vectorizing calls to a set of C99 functions on x86_64 if -mveclibabi=acml is specified and you link to an ACML ABI compatible library.


• MIPS: libffi and libjava now support all three GNU/Linux ABIs: o32, n32 and n64. Every GNU/Linux configuration now builds these libraries by default.


• The configure options --with-pkgversion and --with-bugurl have been added. These allow distributors of GCC to include a distributor-specific string in manuals and --version output and to specify the URL for reporting bugs in their versions of GCC.

I'm already using GCC 4.2, but I hadn't really looked into its changes either until now:

• OpenMP is now supported for the C, C++ and Fortran compilers.


• A new command-line option -Waddress has been added to warn about suspicious uses of memory addresses as, for example, using the address of a function in a conditional expression, and comparisons against the memory address of a string literal. This warning is enabled by -Wall.


• C++: -Wextra will produce warnings for if statements with a semicolon as the only body


• C++/libstdc++: Enabled library-wide visibility control, allowing -fvisibility to be used.


• x86/amd64: -mtune=generic can now be used to generate code running well on common x86 chips. This includes AMD Athlon, AMD Opteron, Intel Pentium-M, Intel Pentium 4 and Intel Core 2.


• x86/amd64: -mtune=native and -march=native will produce code optimized for the host architecture as detected using the cpuid instruction.

LWN just published my story of this name as premium content. I ran a number of analyses on Gentoo's CVS commit history, kindly provided by Robin Johnson, to look at what happened to our developers and our commits over time. If you want to know the results now (rather than waiting until the content becomes free), subscribe to LWN—the best Linux and open-source software news.

Gentoo is good. How do we make it great?

Over the past year or so, I've read a few books, and I want to use those ideas to build a better Gentoo. The books:

• Good to Great, by Jim Collins


• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni


• The Art of Project Management, by Scott Berkun


• The Power of Focus, by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Hewitt

I plan to write a short series of posts discussing the lessons in these books and how to apply them to Gentoo. In this post, I'm going to summarize the concepts of "Good to Great." I'll discuss how we can apply them to Gentoo in a later post. The book explains what it takes to transform a good company into a great one. It's a comparison of companies that made a transition from good to great (thus the title) with companies that remained merely good. Jim Collins and his group reduced the differences to a remarkably small set:

• Level 5 leadership: The leaders of great companies aren't charismatic, big-name CEOs. They're humble, and their ambition is for the company, not for themselves.


• First, get the right people: Before you decide what to do and where to go, get the right people in the right spots. Otherwise, you've got the wrong people creating the wrong vision, strategy, etc., which the right people are then forced to implement. Concrete implementations:
  
  
  
  • "When in doubt, don't hire—keep looking. (Corollary: A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.)"
  
  
  • "When you know you need to make a people change, act. (Corollary: First be sure you don't simply have someone in the wrong seat.)"
  
  
  • "Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. (Corollary: If you sell off your problems, don't sell off your best people.)"
  
  
  
  The right people have the right innate abilities and character traits, not necessarily the specific knowledge and skills. For example, look for work ethic, dedication, and problem-solving ability, not ebuild-writing skills and knowledge of bash.
  


• Confront the brutal facts: Don't deny reality, or you can't make the right decisions. To do this, create an environment where everyone can be heard, so the truth can come out. Don't lose faith that you will win eventually, but accept the reality of now.


• The Hedgehog Concept: Only do things that overlap in the three circles:
  
  
  
  • You're passionate about it
  
  
  • You can be the best in the world at it
  
  
  • It drives your resource engine
  
  
  
  The resource engine is a combination of time (how well we attract contributors), money and brand (how well we create a community), drawn from an accompanying monograph for the social sectors.
  


• Build a culture of discipline: Create a culture of self-disciplined people who are "fanatically consistent with the three circles." Bureaucracy arises to compensate for incompetence and poor discipline due to having the wrong people. If you've got the right people, you don't need the bureaucracy.


• Technology accelerators: If a new technology fits into your Hedgehog Concept, become a pioneer. If not, settle for decent, or drop it altogether if you can.


• The flywheel and the doom loop: Transforming from good to great is not quick. It's a flywheel, slowly building momentum. From outside, all people see is the breakthrough, but from inside there's a prior buildup. Merely good companies couldn't build momentum—they jumped around from focus to focus, never getting anywhere with any of them. You don't need to spend effort getting people behind your idea. Show them the results, and they'll follow you.

That's my ranking in the "Top Linux blogs," according to Don Marti. I'm a little confused how that happened, given how rarely I've blogged lately. Perhaps he knew I had some more good ideas in the pipeline. =)

I recently posted about making Gentoo a better tool. A requirement for being a good tool is being a tool that doesn't break—thus, we need to improve our quality to a more reliable level. I'm going to mention a few ideas to start this discussion, which I hope the rest of our community will participate in.

First, we essentially have no code review. About the only time any code in Gentoo is reviewed is before and during a developer's training, with a notable exception being the requirement to post eclasses to the gentoo-dev list. Increasing our code review ought to result in an increase in quality, in ability to justify code in words, and in a stronger community of contributors.

How do we increase code review? One idea is to require reviewer approval prior to committing, but this isn't the best answer for Gentoo. We've always been a pretty open community. Developers aren't prohibited by ACL from committing anywhere in our ebuild repository, so I don't think they would accept additional requirements that increased the burden of contributing.

Instead, let's create a gentoo-commits mailing list or RSS feed(s), with full diffs. We should use this tool in many different ways.

• Each team should use it internally to review all commits to its packages.


• Mentors should continue to follow their mentees' commits well after they're granted commit access (6 months minimum, and I recommend forever).


• Mentees should also review their mentors' commits, first to learn and later to review.


• Every developer should have at least one reviewer and review at least one other developer. This should be formal and documented to ensure it's happening.

These uses will require that the commit diffs be easily filterable by both committer and files affected. RSS feeds could be made available based on developer or herd, and e-mail lists could contain the information in e-mail subjects or headers.

Second, we should improve our unit testing, where the units are individual packages. This can be both automated and performed by developers and arch testers. Although a number of packages have a useful, working test suite, most lack one. For these packages, we should attempt to provide something automatable in src_test() even when a test suite is absent. Failing that, we should print out a checklist in src_test() of tests to perform before stabilizing a package. There should never be an empty src_test().

Another package-level testing approach is to create solid, automated tinderboxes. This remains unrealistic for our entire database of 10,000+ packages, but we should at least get this going for our "system" set and perhaps for some of the most common sets of packages for servers and desktops. Exactly how to set this up remains a question, since there's a lot of tinderbox code floating around. Bonsaikitten has some almost-working code based on swegener's work; Catalyst has some tinderboxing capability; or we could look into using Mozilla's tinderbox.

Third, we should improve our integration testing, on the entire repository level. Our main source of testing here will be our users, because they have infinitely more combinations of build options and hardware than we can reproduce on Gentoo infrastructure. But how can we take advantage of this testing to improve our quality? By creating an additional, time-lagged set of rsync mirrors with additional QA checks, we could allow users who want to test the latest and greatest software to help those who want stable and solid software.

We already have keywords for ~arch and arch, but they're still too mixed. A problem in ~arch ebuilds can break the entire tree for all users. They really need a stronger separation. Perhaps the separate repositories should be ~arch versus stable. But another way to do it is to add a delay to the second set of repos, anywhere from 24 hours to a week. This delay allows us time to encounter major problems in the fast-sync repos, fix them, and carry the fixes over to the slow-sync repo. But we'll need a way to make this really easy to do. It feels like branching with periodic merges, along with cherry picks of major bugfixes, is the right way to do this. Unfortunately, CVS sucks at this. We may need to migrate to a more capable version-control system before this option becomes realistic. In addition to the user testing, we could add a tinderbox into the slow-sync repos to require that they build with the most common configurations.

To sum up, I want to increase code review, unit testing, and integration testing. These three things will strengthen Gentoo's quality, reputation, and community.

Reading the PressThink blog, I came across a couple quotes that apply well to open-source projects:

I kept thinking about a famous passage from Christopher Lasch, the great social critic and historian who died in 1994— before the rise of the Web. In the Revolt of the Elites, he said we learn more from argument than from information, not because opinions are weighter than facts, but because to argue for your ideas (in public) puts those ideas at risk. And that is how we learn. ...

Lasch in his book:

If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of thought and expression, and sound judgment… small communities are the classic locus of democracy— not because they are “self-contained,” however, but simply because they allow everyone to take part in public debates. Instead of dismissing direct democracy is irrelevant to modern conditions, we need to re-create it on a large scale.

At OSCON, I gave a lightning talk on what's happened in Gentoo in the past year. It was part of a big session covering about 15 or 20 different projects, and it's been a lot of fun both times I've done it. Here's the slides: [ODF] [PDF]

If any of you are LWN readers and would really like to see coverage of any specific sessions or topics at OSCON, please leave a comment on here and I'll see what I can do.

CIA commit stats: 328 messages so far today

I'm giving a short talk at OSCON next week on Gentoo's progress in the past year. So please comment on my blog to let me know areas you want me to cover. I'm open to any and all ideas.

Thanks!

BTW: Anybody living near Portland got a couch I could crash on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday of next week (July 24-26, 2007)?

Gentoo is a metadistribution, meaning you're supposed to built whatever you want with it. And we provide some of the tools to make that a reality, but we stop short. We still make it too hard to do what you want with Gentoo. Here's some of the ideas I want to explore over the next year:

• Increased binary package support: We already have an experimental tinderbox setup to build packages for a variety of architectures. I want to investigate increasing our collection of binary packages to make a fairly complete installation possible using only binaries.


• Repositories for user-created distributions: We have tools like Catalyst to create basic installations with stage3 or stage4 tarballs, but it's still hard to get what you want with them. We should make a repository of Catalyst spec files for a variety of purposes, and we should also add an accompanying mirror of the created tarballs so anyone can use them. We could also revive the Seeds project to create not just vanilla stage4 tarballs but fully fledged, preconfigured installations customized for specific purposes like LAMP servers, development machines, various cluster nodes, GNOME/KDE/Xfce desktops, etc. We already have the possibilities; we need to share our tools.


• Creating the Gentoo metacommunity: In addition to letting you create your own distribution from Gentoo, I want Gentoo's community to be what you want it to be. We're in the middle of adding a few new mailing lists because our primary development list is drowning in noise. We made gentoo-project for non-technical general talk and gentoo-dev-announce for development-related information so developers don't need to slog through gentoo-dev. I want to take that a step further by forming stronger Gentoo microcommunities around specific areas and moving discussion about those areas to their IRC channels and mailing lists. Our development community has grown too big to keep everything on a general development list. Everyone tries to chip into every discussion, even if they have no relation to it or are unaffected by it.


• Excellence: Gentoo's QA is not the greatest. What can we do to improve this? Some automated tools exist for pre-commit checking; can we add anything server-side? Can we add some build servers for critical system packages, so they don't make it to users before building in a predefined set of common configurations? Can we improve our developer recruitment or add new training for existing developers? How can we renew and strengthen our commitment to excellence? You can't create a tool with Gentoo if it's broken.


• New tools for new places: This is more of an exploratory idea. I'd like a team of contributors to research all the places people use Gentoo, and put together a collection of tools we're missing. Further, we need to do more extensive research on other distributions to see what sorts of tools they have that we lack. I have no symptoms of NIH syndrome, so I'm happy to pull in working tools written for other distributions; I already did this for many of Fedora's system-config-* tools last year.


• Resolving the meta vs. specificity conflict: Gentoo's status as a metadistribution sometimes produces conflicts between the goals of various projects and teams within Gentoo. Sometimes a person simply needs to make a decision of how to deal with it: pick one, or find a way to do both? Many people remarked over the past couple of years that we're lacking strong leadership and overarching goals, which would give us some consistent way to decide which projects will "win." As Seemant has said, Gentoo is a framework, a metadistribution, not a place that forces people to go a certain way. We should strive to enable contributors to follow whichever path beckons to them. But where is Gentoo going, and where should it go? You decide. The innovators and leaders can only suggest places for it to go, so the rest of the community has to follow them to our destination.

I hate reading Q&A interviews. They're a huge waste of time, and they say to me that the journalist quit halfway through his job. I'm not disparaging the Q&A format as a whole, which can work great outside of interviews, but I despite seeing it in them.

Here's why. When a journalist writes a story, the process goes something like this. First you think of an idea. Then you think about who to talk with about that idea. Next, you make a list of questions to ask them. Then the interview: you ask the questions and write down the answers. This is where the Q&A format gives up. After the interview, you do the most important part of your job—you synthesize the information, making connections between all your interviewees, other sources, and prior knowledge. Then you put time into writing a clear and concise story that doesn't include anything beyond what's needed.

As the reader, I expect you, the journalist, to invest your time wisely so I don't waste mine drawing all the conclusions you should've drawn for me. I expect you to cut the material that's unrelated to the story you're telling. Don't stop at the Q&A; write the story.

A big ruckus came up on the Gentoo development list in the past couple of weeks, and part of it involved Gentoo contributors and their motivations. I'm sure most of us have heard that open-source software is about scratching your own itches, but I'm not sure that everyone really understands what that means.

For me, what it means is that my time on Gentoo needs to fulfill me in some way. If not, then I've got tons of other places to invest my free time. It does not mean every change I make fixes a problem I encountered. It does mean every change I make has some return in value. What's value?

• Functionality: A feature or bug fix that directly affects a program I use


• Pride: My reputation as a developer relies upon clean, bug-free code. It's important that my code is beautiful and functional.


• Gratitude: Thanks from someone else for the time I spent on their problem


• Reciprocity: An expectation that others will contribute in areas I care about if I work on things they care about


• Stimulation: Spending time around other smart people who care about the same things

All of these are selfish, because I'm directly getting some sort of value out of my time and contribution. Many times, Gentoo developers have said they develop for themselves. That's what they mean. Consequently, the people I care about making changes for are people who give me something I value in return. If you're contributing in some way, I want to help you. If not, what's my motivation?