There are times to Step Up, and times to Step Down. Now is the time.

Fellow Ascendians,

After careful reflection on the state of the Ascendos project, my role 
within it, and the current circumstances of my life, I've come to the 
conclusion that my personal priorities, as well as our community's, will 
be best served by my stepping down from the 'official' role I have been 
working in for the last three months.  I was honored to take the role 
over from Troy Dawson, and am greatful for how the title and respect it 
afforded motivated me to further a very long, broad, and ambitious 
project that I had already been working on for many years.  In other 
words, I'm not at all dissatisified with the way things have progressed 
in the last three months.  But I also think everything will continue 
going in an optimal direction, if I step down, and make way for some new 
ideas and leadership directions within the project.

There are many good reasons for this decision, and being the verbose 
email composer I am, I will elaborate the most important ones.

One of the first that comes to mind is the recent discussion[1] with 
Clint Savage of GoOSe, an alternate *el rebuild community that our 
project leader Andrew Cutler has shown interest in.  First, to get an 
orthogonal response out of the way, I do challenge Clint's implication 
that the Ascendos project, at least since I've been here, has in any way 
not lived up to the ideal of involving our community transparently in 
every aspect of the project.

But the rest of Clint's recent email was otherwise a good exposition on 
the state of things, and contrasting meta-development philosophies. 
Indeed as Clint described, the direction I've been trying to take the 
project in, is one that values automation over community building.  Of 
course, my title having been 'Lead Developer', I filled that role by 
literally leading development in the direction I wanted to see it go.  I 
was leaving aspects of community building to others.  And in fact, upon 
deep reflection, I think its important to note that I actually don't 
personally want to be a part of an *el rebuild community.  To me, 
rebuilding *el is not fun or rewarding for its own sake[2].  I view it 
like, e.g. the linux kernel or firefox build system.  People aren't 
writing those makefiles and tools because that is how they'd spend their 
free time if someone else was willing to do it for them.  Instead, I'd 
presume, most do it, because while not rewarding in itself, they see the 
benefits to be reaped once things are in place, working, automated, and 
they no longer have to care about the gory technical details.

Likewise, my own personal goal, is simply an *el descendant distro, in 
which I personally have the power to trivially rebrand, and as easily as 
possible reverse decisions that upstream made, that I think are 
detrimental, or add enhancements that upstream doesn't yet believe are 
sufficiently beneficial (but might change their mind 5 years later about).

So thusly, when my ideal of-

a) git clone https://github.com/dmcclendon/ElBuild

b) ./ElBuild/el-build bake \
       distroname="DescendOS" \
       distrologo=/path/to/logo.png \
       outputdir=/path/to/mirror_root_staging_area

[c) profit!]

is sufficiently complete, I'll have that ability, and to some greater or 
lesser extent, not have to worry about the unfun gory *el rebuild 
technical details.

I had hoped that this vision, this direction of leadership, would 
inspire a following of people driven to help develop and enjoy the same 
fruits that I was aiming at.

But it doesn't seem to be the case (yet).

I also see that my personality is of a particular holy crusader / 
jihadist type, and quite possibly just not a long term best-fit for the 
Ascendos Lead Developer role.  I.e. Perhaps I'm getting in the way of 
better alternate meta development philosophies that I presently disagree 
with.  As such it just seems like a perfectly optimal time to put my 
particular vision of making the project 'debusified'[1] to an easy test. 
  I.e. if my strategy on that issue was wrong, then stepping down is the 
right thing to do.  And if my strategy was right, then it shouldn't be 
much of an issue either. Given my personal circumstances, that seems 
like the right move all around.

Personally I had been hoping to be able to support myself financially 
working full time as the Lead Developer for Ascendos.  Unfortunately, 
that hasn't come to pass.  But due to some family charity I can now pay 
my rent for at least the next 3 months or so.  And given all the 
reasoning above, I'm going to take the next month and work on the non 
*el-rebuild aspects of my personal computing development goals.  i.e. 
I'll go off and just use CentOS/ScientificLinux to rebase my rakarrack 
and NDS homebrew centered derived distros on.  Because getting those 
built, and actually using those, is what I really want to spend lots of 
time on.  Ideally I'd spend no time at all on the technical details of 
*el rebuilding.  But I consider the above el-build commandline to be a 
fairly high priority requirement for the kinds of distros I want to 
produce, so I will certainly finish implementing it sooner or later. 
But by using CentOS for a while, and sitting back and watching the GoOSe 
folks and others do the dirty work of fighting *el rebuild issues, I'll 
be able to come back later, and leverage the benefits of their open 
work.  And if they, or Ascendos fall prey to the temptation to choose 
hoarding esoteric knowledge instead of documenting or automating it, in 
order to establish some sort of rent seeking enterprise- Well, in that 
case I'll just continue to use CentOS, because I certainly can respect 
the fact that they are open[3] about their rent-seeking goals. God knows 
we all have rent to pay.  And as everyone can see, el-build as I've 
designed it so far is all I'm really interested in.  Personally I think 
of it as merely filling a feature gap that I think upstream should 
dedicate more resources to, not as a community that needs creating or 
growing (beyond just feeding whatever fixes into the build system's 
scripts as are required to keep the build system producing the desired 
output).

If anyone interested in RedHat/Ascendos/ScientificLinux/CentOS/GoOSe 
would like to fund me at 1/3 the salary I used to make at VMWare I would 
love to resume full time work on el-build targetting whichever distro 
the funder is most interested in.

But if nobody wants to fund el-build thusly paying my rent on an ongoing 
basis, I'll spend the near future on my higher-level goals, and a fair 
amount on jobsearching.

As a particularly interesting gambit, also synergistic with all my other 
angles (including a fair amount of frustration with and burnt-outness 
over gory build issues), I'm going to engage in an experiment to 
validate the path I've taken with Ascendos so far.  For the next 30 
days, we'll play the game- Ascendos' Lead Developer was just hit by a 
virtual bus.  I.e. I won't answer any communications, at least no more 
than the fairly minimal input I got from Troy as he handed the role off 
to me.  Then, for the next 30 days after that, I'll answer questions, 
but only by providing either links to code/documentation that already 
exists today, or the netsearch keywords I would encourage the questioner 
to use to research the problem at hand. Because I am genuinely confident 
in, and proud of the well documented and organized progress I laid down 
for Ascendos.  I really don't think it would be any major technical 
detriment to the project if I did get eaten by a velociraptor.

Then, 60 days from now I'll return in a traditional manner as an average 
joe generic contributor to Ascendos.  By then it should be apparent how 
much or little of my framework and philosophies the project has chosen 
to retain or evolve.  And in all likelyhood, any of several life 
directions might dictate that I then have nowhere near the free time as 
would be required to properly be in charge of any large part of any 
large user-based distro.

Absent any objections, I'm hereby thusly demoting myself from

"Lead Developer of Ascendos"

to just being

"Lead Developer of Ascendos' 'Genesis LiveOS' Subproject".

I.e. That's my goal of providing a bootstrap LiveOS that can entirely 
self-containedly and automatedly reproduce the Ascendos' distribution 
from all needed sources and bootstrapping materials.  It is certainly 
possible that my single-minded focus on that ambitious goal has or could 
get in the way of Ascendos' more important and practical short term goals.

In closing, I thank the Ascendos community for affording me the position 
of respect I've enjoyed for the last three months.  But just as there 
are times in life for everyone to 'ascend' or 'step-up', the wise also 
know when it is right to 'descend' or 'step-down', to make space for 
others to enjoy the vistas.

Remember Guantanomo Bay.

peace...

-dmc
Douglas McClendon
http://cloudsession.com/dawg

[1] Clint Savage discusses *el rebuilding meta-development and 
velociraptor issues with Ascendos-dev
http://lists.ascendos.org/pipermail/ascendos-dev/2011-Dec...

[2] Colin Waters is clearly spending mental energy in similar realms as 
I have been
http://blog.verbum.org/2011/12/06/the-gpl-and-distributin...
"
Of late I’ve become the “build guy” in GNOME it seems. One thing I want 
to clear up is I do not actually care about building just because I 
think it’s fun or interesting in and of itself. No, the reason I care 
about building is because if software doesn’t build, then clearly it’s 
not being run. And if it’s not being run, then it’s not being tested. 
And if it’s not tested, then it will be crap. In other words, a 
competent build system is necessary for not producing crap (but not 
sufficient, obviously).

That motivation established, what I want to talk about is the GPL [very 
very relevant meta-development thoughts commence...] ......
"

[3] Johnny Hughes tells it like it is
(and likewise I'll say- yes, el-build aims to make CentOS less, or at 
least differently relevant)
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_i...
"
First, there is no requirement to provide the build logs publicly, so we 
don't. It is not the hardest thing in the world to rebuild upstream 
sources, but we do not have any desire to help other people do it so 
that they can take away centos users. We did at one time help the group 
that built Oracle linux, and see what it got us, a competitor in our 
market space. Don't get me wrong, we are all for GPL software and we are 
happy to use it and provide all sources. Just not tell people how to 
make us (The CentOS Project) irrelevant.
"