Wednesday, December 02, 2009

A parting gift

I have become increasingly unreliable concerning my activities within the Gentoo developer community during the last year. Now I finally arrived at the point where I consider the only reasonable solution to leave the Gentoo team. The final drop has been the fact that I promised Sebastian the next layman release. But week after week I did not find the time to work on the next version thus failing the promise.

With my commercial endeavours within the Kolab and Horde communities thriving I have to be realistic: The workload won't suddenly fade during the next year(s?). I would have liked to include Gentoo into the portfolio I get paid for but I was unable to achieve that. Chances are that I would be even less responsive concerning Gentoo in the future.

This is no easy decision for me as I do like Gentoo and feel strongly for some of the stuff I did for Gentoo. It is not easy to drop these projects. I would have made the choice earlier in order to clarify the situation if I would not care that much about Gentoo. But I left people with an unresponsive maintainer this way and I'm sorry for that.

There is one final thing I'd like to leave as a parting gift to the Gentoo community.

As some of you may know I wrote a german book about Gentoo. When I initially started the project I asked the publisher if there would be any possibility to produce a free version of that book, too. Writing about free software feels strange to me if the things I write are not free. But books are not software and I had to accept the commercial realities of the project at that time.

But I mentioned above that things for my little one-man-company are going well and so I did buy the rights to my book back. It has now been published under a free license and is available for download here. The latex source for the book is here.

Time to say goodbye. Sigh...

Monday, October 12, 2009

layman moves from subversion to git

In preparation for layman-1.2.4 the repository has been converted from subversion to git. The new repository can be found at git://layman.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/layman/layman

Thursday, January 01, 2009

layman-1.2.3 is out

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:
  • Support setting the terminal screen width (#253016)
  • layman -S fetches each overlay twice (#253241)
I can't seem to get layman bug free these days. I already wanted to mark the newer version stable months ago. Let's hope there'll be a longer bug free period now ;)