tecosystems

Thanks, Donnie

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Between my last post and the conversations here at EclipseCon, it’s been nothing but developers, developers, developers. But I wanted to take the time to thank one developer in particular; Gentoo’s Donnie Berkholz, a Friend of RedMonk, and whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year. Donnie’s been hard at work for a while now in breaking the monolithic X package in Gentoo into dozens (hundreds?) of separate subcomponents, modular X – a monumental undertaking. The componentization of the X package not only allows for fewer barriers to entry for X devs, it allows for more flexible remediation of individual pieces of X.

As with all of the other maintainers of Gentoo, not to mention other distros, Donnie’s not paid for this work at all. But the quality of the documentation they produce – such as the modular X migration guide here – surpasses that of any commercial operating system I’ve worked on.

So I just wanted to publically say “Thanks Donnie;” the effort is very much appreciated by this happy user. After following the directions this weekend, I upgraded to modular X with no problems whatsoever. I’ll probably break X when I get around to implementing Xgl, but for now I’m issue free.

5 comments

  1. +1

    I was shocked how easy it was to move to modular X. XGL with Gnome is worth the upgrade. I still get performance issues with KDE. Take the plunge.

  2. first time i’ve gotten DRI to work as well.

  3. Thanks for the note. =) Appreciation for what I do is rare, so it’s even more meaningful when I get it.

    Funnily enough, I see lots of room for improvement in that guide (must be the copy editor in me). I just haven’t spent time on it for a few months since I’m trying to get the actual packages working better. Might enter ~arch as soon as tonight.

  4. no problem at all – the thanks are well, well deserved. not to mention overdue.

    anyhow, on the documentation front: let me know if there’s any way i can help there. happy to give back some time/effort if there’s something i can assist with.

  5. Just came across your response today, because I forgot to subscribe. =) If you or anyone you know would like to help Gentoo in documenting high-availability or high-performance cluster setup, that’s something I’m really looking for right now. Our current documentation is weak on the HPC side and mostly nonexistent on the HA side.

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