Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Benoit PAPILLAULT <benoit.papillault AT sourcemage.org>]

Hello fellow SourceMagers!

According to our new voting rule, I accept the nomination of being your
new ISO Team Lead and would to convince yourself why I will be good at
this position and why i would like to be at this position.

First of all, I'd like to remember people about some facts. ISO Team was
created on 2003-04-03 by our former Project Lead Eric Schabell and was
leaded by a former SourceMage user : low [0]. I joined the project one
month later and immediately decided to contribute. An installation ISO
was needed and I thought that it would be a good challenge because I had
never done such a thing. I worked hard with low and around one month
later, a first ISO was available!

Then, new ISO were produced, either by me, Unet (our current ISO Team
Lead up to now), hgg (a former SourceMage user) or de_Moya (no longer
active). I contributed or directly produced more than 10 ISO. Major
improvements have been made:

* a cauldron p4 repository is now use daily and contain all scripts and
instruction to produce new ISO
* starting on x86 only, ppc and x86-64 architecture has been added
(sparc/sparc64 still on the way)
* improving the quality of the stable grimoire has also increased the
quality of the ISO build process
* work was done to compress the ISO to fit on mini-CD
* work was done to install spells from cache tar.gz (instead of having a
big tar.gz in early ISO).

But since a lot of months, we are missing a key position in the ISO
Team: an active Lead documenting what the ISO build process should be or
should not be and taking decision.

Right now, I have the opportunity to become your ISO Team Lead. My plan
is the following:

* continue the work I have been doing so far : updating ISO with
sorcery/grimoire updates and releasing ISO
* be a Lead : as such, anyone can contribute in code form (throught p4)
or proposal form (if you have a nice idea). Of course, work done by
current members (mainly Karsten and David) will be integrated
* help people in my team work in the same direction. This direction will
of course discussed first with any interested people and in case of
conflict, I will be able to carry on an "official" decision if
appropriate. Of course, anyone is free to work on their own decision,
except it will not be directly integrated. This is how i've been leading
the speedtouch [1] driver development or how i do at work [2] (except in
real work, you have to work all day long).
* release a new ISO weekly or biweekly (not decided yet). This is a new
point agreed on the last developper meeting [3]. It means that ISO will
be untested in those releases (those are tests ISO anyway), but then you
won't have to wait month to be able to test bugs fixed and it will help
ISO testing.

See my online resume [2] to know about my programming skills (it would
be too long here :-)).

Happy voting and choose the way your next ISO will be!

Benoit PAPILLAULT, ISO guru

[0]https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-announce/2003-March/000004.html
[1]http://speedtouch.sourceforge.net/
[2]http://benoit.papillault.free.fr/emploi/
[3]http://wiki.sourcemage.org/index.php?page=Meeting+log+2005-05-08