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jayofdoom

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OpenStack Ironic developer, Gentoo developer

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Honestly they kinda screwed over people -- like me -- who tried to avoid the MAX planes for a while. I'd specifically book around the MAX planes and then they would change equipment at the last minute into a MAX. There is no meaningful "knob" an aviation consumer can turn to express an aircraft preference, and given how US airspace works, you often don't have a meaningful choice in carrier (unless you're willing to take on extra stops).

Why Gentoo? 2 months ago

It's pretty consistent. If you check out something from a Gentoo-official repo, it's going to have been created by humans without the use of LLM tooling. LLM tooling is used for the kernel, systemd, and a litany of other packages -- trying to run a "non-LLM OS" is more like a fork of the whole ecosystem than a distribution.

I can appreciate the concept that Gentoo is placing a high value on human curation. I used to be firmly against our anti-LLM policy, but honestly it's a pretty strong differentiator from other distributions -- and I'm getting more and more sick of AI tech in general.

(note: I am a Gentoo developer)

There are over 600 different people contributing to OpenStack in a given six-month release cycle. Approximately 60% of total code by commit count is from Red Hat employees. I'm one of the 600 that don't work at Red Hat, and there are a lot of us.

You should get a sense of the scale of a project before summarily declaring that it has a single point of failure.

This is true, sadly -- but the documentation exists and community is friendly to those who wanna build those skills. It's extremely difficult to build something the size of OpenStack without making it so configurable that operating it needs a decoder ring. I'm doing everything I can in Ironic to make it more friendly and flexible out of the box, but it's a difficult problem to solve.

I always tell people: OpenStack can do almost anything you want... if you can configure it to do so :).

There's a reason I point out the longevity of OpenStack. As a project, it has significant corporate sponsorship and policies to ensure that one entity can't take over control of it. For instance; the OpenStack Technical Committee is never permitted to have a majority membership made up of a single entity's employees. This means that even though Red Hat, at this stage in it's development, has a majority of contribution, the project itself can never be taken over by a single entity.

People find project governance, and particularly "corporate" involvement in open source to be distasteful -- but in my experience, and OpenStack is a winning example of this -- setting up good boundaries to let companies work together has proven to be sustainable.

More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter. OpenStack has been around for closing in on two decades, running clouds and being mostly governance-drama-free.

It's not surprising that a proprietary ecosystem built on open source software locked up behind a gate doesn't make a worthwhile ecosystem for building open source tooling against.

I had the same thought, as an OpenStack developer as well (TBH I don't remember if my username here identifies me or not). Yeah, we can apply as an exceptional case, but realistically us being excluded shows the criteria is very much directed towards "github style" open source.

I used to go to a members-only bar in Apex, NC (in NC, at least at the time, if >50% of your sales was alcohol, you had to be a "club"). The last time I ever went there was when someone called the bartender and "reported" a DUI checkpoint down the road and they announced it in the bar.

Why do some folks think it's OK to put other people at risk to this level?

Slackware has no package manager or installer. It's just an extra step removed.

I didn't say Gentoo has no package manager (it does; and it's great!)

Thanks for posting this! It's been a nice first year as a Gentoo developer. Everyone has been kind and helpful to me as I've been figuring things out.

I want to highlight something: Gentoo's developer onboarding system is EXCELLENT. Starting as an active member of the general community, you talk an existing developer into being your mentor and fill out an open book test ( https://projects.gentoo.org/comrel/recruiters/quizzes/ebuild... ) which later is graded/corrected in a couple of meetings which I'd equate to the "job interview". I wish more open source projects (including my own) had such well-documented, straightforward processes to gain commit access. I appreciated the process of doing the quiz as it helped me close gaps in my knowledge.

I always tell people this:

With Red Hat, Anaconda is the installer. With Ubuntu, ubiquity.

etc ...

With Gentoo -- YOU are the installer. This means you have to be ready to perform -- more or less manually -- many of the tasks automated in other distributions. I sorta see this as the same as a tutorial level in a video game: you learn how to read and follow the wiki which is essentially the key to success in Gentoo.

Gentoo is often at the forefront of identifying and helping resolve integration issues between different software projects, particularly when it comes to compiler tech (e.g. fixing packages so they can be built properly with LTO, or with LLVM as well as GCC) or other backend-detail-minutia which makes the whole system better without always being visible to the end user.

Honestly this is just sorta a Tuesday for an advanced Gentoo user? There are lots of ways to do this documented on the Gentoo wiki. Ask in IRC or on the Forum if you can't find it. "Catalyst" is the method used by the internal build systems to produce images, for instance https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Catalyst.

This is called "digital sovereignty", and it has been a major topic for OpenInfra foundation and other open source cloud foundations. Open source, and open cloud software, is the way to ensure your data can stay inside your own borders and be governed by your local laws. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvz2PcHq0yY is one example of folks talking about this, but realistically you can find talks from OpenStack/OpenInfra going back 4/5 years on this topic.

In OpenStack, we explicitly document what our log levels mean; I think this is valuable from both an Operator and Developer perspective. If you're a new developer, without a sense of what log levels are for, it's very prescriptive and helpful. For an operator, it sets expectations.

https://docs.openstack.org/oslo.log/latest/user/guidelines.h...

FWIW, "ERROR: An error has occurred and an administrator should research the event." (vs WARNING: Indicates that there might be a systemic issue; potential predictive failure notice.)