Userrep restaffing

OK, now as its not a secret anymore.

As I already said before, cokehabit was removed from his post as User Representative. It doesn't mean George is a bad person or something. Promised announcement was made on forums, but to understand reasons more clearly I suggest reading Christel's blogpost.

As you can see in that forum post, I was instated as 11th User Representative instead of George. I was flattered when suggested to do so, and of course I agreed, although the only thing that it changes in my approach is sort of responsibility I now have towards the project.

If before that I had none, now if I say something or suggest something or take upon myself something, I have to answer on that promise. That is kinda new for me in open source project, but in no way a bad thing. I'd love to contribute in any way I can, and help out as time and my knowledge will allow.

So thanks to George for his efforts and for all that he has done being User Representative.

My week with Gentoo

Ok, so few things are to be said first.

1. Blogger Beta kicks ass!! Not without few glitches, its much faster, has more features and just plain better than an old Blogger. The only problem at the moment is that Flocks' blog editor doesn't support it, but well, there is always online editor.
2. I had few talks with different people about my previous "weekly" post, complaining that I attack without reason and not necessarily rightfully. Although some of these comments are still do not seem right to me, I decided that it is correct in many ways, and as a future reference I do ask to provide a feedback when someone feels that I was, ahm, not exactly ok.
3. After what I said in 2), I decided to call it more simply "my week with Gentoo".
4. I'm moving !! I have a keys to a new place, needs a lots of cleaning :-(, but I'm feeling a little depressed over how much money it will cost me. Not something impossible, just leaves less for myself.
   

Having these worked out, this is what I have this week:

1. Few posts about Gentoo's past, present and some new directions. I find it really refreshing that seasoned developers, who have been around Gentoo for eternity see problems that need to be solved somehow (or worked out, choose whichever way you like). I think it is also good idea because any organization should review what the hell it does and how, and to refresh its ways from time to time.
2. There are some talks in dev community about Portage, about how it doesn't (or does it ?) do some things well anymore (maybe it wasn't built to scale well), and also about other package management tools. I'd suppose it should be working together with directions and "ways" chosen in 1) above, but I'm not familiar enough with any package management tool to have an opinion about internal structure. This can be either good for Gentoo, or bad - depends on how it will be implemented of course. As an initial optimist, I hope it will cause for good things.
   
3. There's a new subforum on Gentoo Forums: Gentoo User Representatives. This subforum is monitored by Userreps team and is meant for all issues around Gentoo that Userreps can help you with. Start using it if you have great ideas, but mind - its not a tech support forum. Tech support threads will be moved out.
4. Xmms package was hard-masked lately, which brought to a lot of flaming on forums and bugzilla. Although opinions are split over it, I do believe that packages without a maintainer should not be in official tree. I'm not even giving a link here to any of these discussion, because there's too much heat over it as it is. You want it - find it yourself (not that it's hard or something).
   
5. Something different now. I've recently witnessed many developers saying they don't care about users. Not for some user specifically, but in general. I won't say names, because I don't have personal issues with these developers or something, but it saddens me anyway. There's a reason for that though - I do understand the argument, but I hoped that developers would care for a general user (not me personally) while thinking about 1) and 2) above. I still think that users are the main target, and without users (or, say, without enough happy users who are not developers) it will be worse place, not better. And I still hope that in case that 1) or 2) will be implemented in full or partially, general "user" will be considered where appropriate.

Thats what I had this week. It was pretty slow because I was kinda busy and a little depressed. Sorry.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated.