About one year ago Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. announced my entrance into the world of being a Gentoo developer. So it is time for a little retrospective on how I came here, what I expected and what I achieved. First of all I want to thank my recruiter Christian, and of course my two mentors Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. and Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. (Jackson).

Anyway, one year is the half-life of the common Gentoo developer according to Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. analysis of the commit stats.

We've come a long way, baby

After being a simple user for some time, just contributing bug reports from time to time and following development by Planet and Weekly Newsletter (GWN), I decided to put something more in a project I thought that was worth it. The catalyst was a request for testers for the x86 architecture in an issue of the GWN, so I contacted the x86 team and soon became part of the people who ensured that the stable branch is mostly reliable and tested for users. My task was to work on stabilisation requests filed by package maintainers and give feedback. More testing made it easier for the architecture developers to stable the package. Some might call it a boring job, but nonetheless important.

Additionally to that I started contributing to the Sunrise overlay and soon became more familiar with ebuilds and the like by the tight reviewing process. This helped me a lot to pass the quizzes and be more secure when handling the real tree.

Mid-August Joshua asked me if I would be interested in becoming a developer...it is funny to read the log file again about that conversation as I had real concerns and asked for some time to think about it. In the end I agreed.

We've got to move these refrigerators

So clearly I wanted to stay with the x86 team and help stabling packages, on the other hand the Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. looked like it could need some more hands. Not being really familiar with the latter, just a enthusiastic user, I wanted to bring down the number of bugs for both parties. No big vision, I just wanted to be the busy bee and do some administrative work that needs to be done.

Can we fix it? -- Yes, we can!

So what did I reach? The bare number is quite impressive, on the time of writing I have 4420 commits done for Gentoo, Sunrise and some related projects. But keep in mind that a KDE stabilisation will earn you 400 commits in some hours and the work is done by a script. All the goals reached are always the achievement of a team, sometimes only two people, but not being alone prevents one from doing stupid things. Talking over ideas saved a lot of users from being sent to hell.

x86

This is the part I am really proud of. The number of bugs for the x86 architecture never reached more than 60 bugs, while the typical value is around 10, which is really good. Not much to say, except that we will try to perfom as well as ever. For all architectures Matthias Langer plus some more contributors worked on the Gentoo Arch Testing Tool, which will help us architecture devs quite a bit.

GNU Emacs

Not so many commits went into the GNU Emacs ebuilds but the more interesting features can be found here. Sadly, shortly after I joined, Matthew Kennedy left Gentoo and I was alone with the Emacs beast. But things got done and especially after the arrival of Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. , things were moving faster. We introduced the Emacs overlay (together with the XEmacs team), documented our eclasses, introduced a nice Emacs mode for ebuilds/eclasses/eselect modules, made the Emacs ebuilds more robust, wrote a maintainer documentation, bumped a lot of packages, brought stable branch up-to-date (still work in progress) and created an eselect module that lets users choose the wanted Emacs version in a simple way without any file collisions. We also fixed more than 30 packages that had USE=emacs but their support was sometimes badly broken. On request of the Common Lisp team we joined forces in the Gentoo Lisp Project.

How do I feel by the end of the day?

Up to know I had a lot of fun with Gentoo. Working with all those great people is just wonderful, so I hope I can keep the pace and provide my share to this excellent distribution.

[Note: If you are bored, try to guess where all those quotes in the headings came from.]