11/21/2008
The Gentoo Council
It’s been a long time since I’ve written on my blog but I figured that since I am now a member of the Gentoo Council, it’s time I start writing again. I’ll start with a little summary of the Council and what’s been going on lately.
The Gentoo Council is a group of elected Gentoo Developers that are elected on a yearly basis by the developer body as a whole for the purpose of deciding on global issues and policies which affect the Gentoo Linux Distro as a whole or part. The Gentoo Council serves as the technical oversight to the the entire project. We are charged with representing the will of the developer body, while maintaining the best interest for Gentoo and it’s user base. In effect, the Gentoo Council derives its authority from the developer body, this is what differentiates it from the Gentoo Foundation, which handles the financial side of Gentoo.
Gentoo Council meetings are bi-monthly for 1-hour sessions. These sessions are always held publicly on IRC on Freenode in #gentoo-council at 2000 UTC on the 2nd and 4th Thursday’s of the month (with the exception of major holidays). We welcome all interested parties to come join us.
The Council’s agenda items are set by user and/or developer requests on the gentoo-dev and gentoo-council mailing lists. If there are no agenda items set this way or not enough items to occupy the entire 1-hour allocated meeting time, then opened bugzilla entries assigned to the Council are discussed.
Currently the Gentoo Council has one open seat and at the last meeting the Council voted 5 to 1 to open up nominations for 1 week and hold elections for 1 week in place of taking the next person in line from the previous election.
The Council is also taking up issues such as inactive architectures, deploying as-needed by default for the user base, and a scm marking for ebuilds. Recently decided items include approving PMS to be a draft specification for EAPI=0, approving EAPI=2 for use in the tree, and how to handle developers that have been removed from the Gentoo project.
Filed under: Linux
3 Responses to “The Gentoo Council”
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November 24th, 2008 at 4:27 am
[...] The Gentoo Council [...]
November 24th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
What do you mean, “how to handle developers that have been removed from the Gentoo project?” That’s vague and open-ended in a bad way.
November 24th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Steven,
It unfortunately is a negative thing. In the past there have been Gentoo Developers that have been removed from the project due to infrastructure abuse, due to user abuse, and other developer abuse. It’s a very delicate situation and not something we want to ever happen, but it is something that we need to be aware of and have a proper documented procedure to protect everyone involved in the situation.