Tobias Scherbaum

It took quite some time (well, nearly a year to get the buildbox moved into a datacenter – shame on me) but now automatically built stages for HPPA (hppa1.1 and hppa2.0 that is) are available on a mirror near you.

For those of you interested in geek porn, the buildbox is a HP C3700 UNIX workstation w/ 3,5 gigs of ram, a 750 mhz PA8700 cpu and two 36gb scsi-disks. A tad more powerful than the current HPPA developer box (hake.hppa.dev.gentoo.org, a HP C3600).

tobias@barsch ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor	: 0
cpu family	: PA-RISC 2.0
cpu		: PA8700 (PCX-W2)
cpu MHz		: 750.000000
model		: 9000/785/C3700
model name	: Allegro W2
hversion	: 0x00005dc0
sversion	: 0x00000481
I-cache		: 768 KB
D-cache		: 1536 KB (WB, direct mapped)
ITLB entries	: 240
DTLB entries	: 240 - shared with ITLB
bogomips	: 1497.49
software id	: 2004492210
 
tobias@barsch ~ $ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3542       1915       1627          0        591       1043
-/+ buffers/cache:        280       3261
Swap:            0          0          0

Btw. building both sets of Stages for HPPA1.1 and HPPA2.0 takes “just” some 41 hours, compared to more than previously ~55 hours on hake.

# time ./catalyst-auto -c catalyst-auto-hppa.conf
 
real    2457m13.423s
user    1567m15.030s
sys     845m25.240s

Whee!

Some months ago I had an interesting discussion with a fellow Gentoo Developer. His proposals were quite similiar (at least partially) to the ones Donnie wrote about in his post “Steps toward improving Gentoo“. Well, still … for me this proposal(s) sounds like a good (probably even the best) way to demotivate people and make them stop spending their rare spare time working on Gentoo.

Gentoo is about having fun, period. I’m doing this for fun, I bet you do as well.

Setting expectations and removing “underperforming” Developers won’t solve anything, well … it would make things even harder for the few ones left. Remember, every little minute we do spend for working on Gentoo is spent for fun and because we want to do so, not because we’re on Gentoo’s payroll. For now Gentoo’s biggest problems these days aren’t not met expectations or underperforming Developers, the biggest problem is a huge lack of man-power. Simply put, Gentoo needs you!

Bringing new people aboard should be Gentoo’s main goal for now. Identify areas we’d need more help with, start to more actively recruit people for these areas, one by one. That would improve Gentoo.