Monthly Archives: December 2008

gentoo

Today’s rant: What is ‘bikeshedding’ ?

December 31, 2008 – 12:08 pm

I knew the general concept of this word but it was thrown around today so I decided to research it.

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (also known as the bicycle shed example, and by the expression colour of the bikeshed) is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. source

Made famous in software development by Poul-Henning Kamp (FreeBSD dev)

“The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.” source

Seems to be true to me. We shouldn’t needlessly argue about trivial details.

I leave you with this..Is there a software development group in existence that does not bikeshed?:

Futile investment of time and energy in marginal technical issues, often including annoying propaganda. (as defined by Wiktionary)

I doubt it, but is it always a bad thing? Comments?

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gentoo prefix

Gentoo Prefix now supports FreeMiNT

December 24, 2008 – 11:40 am

So..what does this mean? In a nutshell..Gentoo Prefix works on the OS that runs on an Atari. Cool, eh?

We owe this to the hard work of AlanH, as seen here and here.  As always, we are at #gentoo-prefix and the gentoo-alt mailing list if you are interested.

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gentoo prefix

Gentoo Prefix Updates

December 12, 2008 – 1:45 pm

It has been awhile since I last wrote about the Gentoo Prefix project. I will update the inquiring minds that want to know…

  • Gentoo Prefix’s irc channel is now #gentoo-prefix. We use to inhabit #gentoo-alt but had some reports that new users were looking for us in -prefix. Also no one involved with the Prefix project had administrative powers over the old channel either. Since we were the only users of the -alt channel, I also had a redirect set up from there to the new channel.
  • New style profiles are done. Before I joined the Prefix project, our Linux support needed some love. The old profiles were mimicking the default-linux ones in gentoo-x86 but they didn’t do inheritance very well. The new style profiles for Linux inherit the 2008 Gentoo profiles and allow Gentoo Prefix users to exploit the work done by the x86 & amd64 arch teams automatically. The old profiles contained a static multilib mask and other files.  Since Gentoo Prefix is anything but ‘default’ we chose a new root directory in $PORTDIR/profiles/ called ‘prefix’ – this seemed to make the most sense. The new profiles are designed to go into the portage tree when appropriate without any major structure changes. Long story short, soon we will be deprecating the default-prefix/ profiles in favor of the new style.
  • We set up another rsync mirror. As expected, the load is balanced pretty well now.
  • Over 2000 packages in the Prefix tree.  Roughly 15% of the Gentoo portage tree.

I’m excited for this project (still). It seems that we have a new active user or two every week, submitting bug reports, helping out in irc, etc.

Thanks for listening.

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school

School

December 10, 2008 – 1:10 pm

One final down – no problem.

One final tomorrow – medium difficulty.

One final a week from tomorrow – sad face.

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gentoo

Thank you for using Gentoo.

December 2, 2008 – 12:16 pm

Thank you very much. I will test when I get home.
Quick developer responsiveness like this makes me feel
that Gentoo is a high-quality and well maintained distribution.
It also makes me feel part of it.
Thank you for doing this for a community distribution.

- Gentoo user (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249390#c3)

Just wanted to say thanks myself to all the Gentoo Users out there that are participating in this “community distro” as well. You are the people that keep this machine rolling and keep Gentoo devs motivated.

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