drobbins

Hi All,
At this time, I have made next-release the recommended release of Funtoo Linux for most people, as it has a very recent release of gcc and has more modern support for applications. 1.4-release is still available but unless you are specifically looking for a stable release, most users will want to install next-release at this time.
If you go to the https://www.funtoo.org/Download link, you will see that next-release stages are now available for all x86-64bit builds of Funtoo Linux including amd64-zen3, as well as riscv-64bit and raspi4-64bit. Soon, I will be updating install documentation to reflect this fact.
If you would like a build of 1.4-release, you can always grab it from https://build.funtoo.org directly, and I wlll be looking into making wiki improvements so that the Download page will inform users when this option is available.

New Direct CDN Beta!
A new Funtoo Direct CDN infrastructure is currently in beta. Leveraging our kind support from CDN77, this new infrastructure vastly improves distfile downloads. I will describe some of the technology behind this in a future post, but for now just know it fixes a "lot of things", and you can test it out by adding the following to your /etc/make.conf:
GENTOO_MIRRORS="https://direct.funtoo.org" In the next Funtoo release of Portage, coming in the next few days, this CDN will become our default (meaning portage will use this new CDN after an upgrade without any /etc/make.conf setting) and the older fastpull will be deprecated.
Jira Changes!
I've made several changes to Jira that the Funtoo Community should be aware of. The Jira workflow has been optimized -- all new issue will now be in the "Needs Triage" state. Funtoo Senior Staff will be able to triage issues, filling out an Impact field describing the impact of the issue, and setting a Priority to more clearly reflect the severity of the issue and its negative impact. Once an issue has been triaged, it is then ready to be worked on by a member of the Funtoo Community.
There is also now a hard-limit maximum of 5 issues that any given user may have in an "In Progress" or "Test/Integration" state at one time. This was done to prevent people (such as myself -- I am the worst offender) of accumulating many, many issues that are theoretically in progress but are really stalled. To help make this less painful, you can now move issues out of your "in progress" stack by clicking "stalled" -- this will result in the issue being unassigned from you and moved into the "Work Queue". 
In the past, "Work Queue" could not be touched by mere mortals, meaning you couldn't "Start Work" on anything in Work Queue, making this issue state kind of useless to anyone. This limitation has been removed! This means that you should not be afraid to use the "Stalled" button to move things out of your In Progress bucket, because you can always "Start Work" on these issues again when you are ready to resume work.
As part of this new change, I have also moved 50+ issues from "In Progress" to "Needs Triage". If anyone needs an issue triaged so that it can be moved back to "In Progress", please let @drobbins or @seemant know! (Otherwise we will triage the issues as soon as we can.)
So, how do you know when you've reached your 5-issue In Progress limit? Jira currently doesn't show you any warning -- you will just not be given the option to "Start Work" on any new issues. Want an easier way to keep track of what is in your In Progress stack? -- Use this query:  https://bugs.funtoo.org/issues/?filter=12503 (To find this in the future, go to Jira -> Issues -> My Bugs In Progress).
The goal of these Jira changes is to help to optimize our overall utilization of Jira to increase our velocity, and also ultimately allow "In Progress" status to reflect the reality of what is truly being actively worked on, and help us to work better as a distributed team. This also positively coerces us to close out those "almost done" issues to free up our availability, which I think is a really good development practice.
I am continually open to feedback about Jira so if you have some additional suggestions on how to improve things, be sure to find me on Discord and let's chat!

We currently have a problem -- there is way too much happening with Funtoo Linux.
So we have WAY TOO MANY *MAJOR* announcements. Let's try to get through all of them!
Funtoo Linux has its own LiveCD/LiveUSB! Many thanks to @coffnix and @pnoecker for making this happen! The official install docs have been updated to reference this LiveCD, and it will be perpetually downloadable from https://build.funtoo.org/livecd/. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, it's running our official debian-sources kernel, so it will recognize the hardware supported by Funtoo. It's in sync with Funtoo stage3's. Yay. It also has NetworkManager available so the "nmtui" command can be used to set up your network. That's a convenience, but not really that impressive. What IS impressive is that included on the LiveCD is our innovative fchroot tool, which allows you to "chroot" into arm-64bit, arm-32bit and riscv-64bit filesystems thanks to the power of QEMU! This makes it an ultra-powerful rescue image. Other cool and amazing things are on the LiveCD. You can eventually learn about everything LiveCD here as we get this page done: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD
There's MORE:
Ryzen "Zen 3" stages now available, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/Amd64-zen3  SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V stages, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/SiFive_Freedom_U740 -- thanks @calrama 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4/400 stages, running next-release! With GNOME and lxqt support! https://www.funtoo.org/Raspberry_Pi_4! Raspberry Pi 4 will be moving to an "A" support level in Funtoo momentarily and will be part of our official install docs soon. Also, in case you didn't notice above, lxqt stages are available for amd64-zen3 and raspi4, and will be appearing gradually for all other subarches! And also if you did not notice, the updated next-release builds  are starting to appear for download! (RISC-V, Raspberry Pi 4 and AMD Ryzen "Zen 3" will only be available for next-release.)
OK, that's all the announcements we have for now. Please return to whatever you were doing before you read this announcement.
Thanks to the Funtoo user community who helped to make this all happen. Besides these announcements, there are many other improvements and fixes that have been incorporated into Funtoo. If you have helped, thank you from me as well as the others who will enjoy your improvements. Let's keep pushing forward to build on these amazing successes.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins, BDFL.
 

We currently have a problem -- there is way too much happening with Funtoo Linux.
So we have WAY TOO MANY *MAJOR* announcements. Let's try to get through all of them!
Funtoo Linux has its own LiveCD/LiveUSB! Many thanks to @coffnix and @pnoecker for making this happen! The official install docs have been updated to reference this LiveCD, and it will be perpetually downloadable from https://build.funtoo.org/livecd/. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, it's running our official debian-sources kernel, so it will recognize the hardware supported by Funtoo. It's in sync with Funtoo stage3's. Yay. It also has NetworkManager available so the "nmtui" command can be used to set up your network. That's a convenience, but not really that impressive. What IS impressive is that included on the LiveCD is our innovative fchroot tool, which allows you to "chroot" into arm-64bit, arm-32bit and riscv-64bit filesystems thanks to the power of QEMU! This makes it an ultra-powerful rescue image. Other cool and amazing things are on the LiveCD. You can eventually learn about everything LiveCD here as we get this page done: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD
There's MORE:
Ryzen "Zen 3" stages now available, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/Amd64-zen3  SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V stages, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/SiFive_Freedom_U740 -- thanks @calrama 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4/400 stages, running next-release! With GNOME and lxqt support! https://www.funtoo.org/Raspberry_Pi_4! Raspberry Pi 4 will be moving to an "A" support level in Funtoo momentarily and will be part of our official install docs soon. Also, in case you didn't notice above, lxqt stages are available for amd64-zen3 and raspi4, and will be appearing gradually for all other subarches! And also if you did not notice, the updated next-release builds  are starting to appear for download! (RISC-V, Raspberry Pi 4 and AMD Ryzen "Zen 3" will only be available for next-release.)
OK, that's all the announcements we have for now. Please return to whatever you were doing before you read this announcement.
Thanks to the Funtoo user community who helped to make this all happen. Besides these announcements, there are many other improvements and fixes that have been incorporated into Funtoo. If you have helped, thank you from me as well as the others who will enjoy your improvements. Let's keep pushing forward to build on these amazing successes.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins, BDFL.
 

We currently have a problem -- there is way too much happening with Funtoo Linux.
So we have WAY TOO MANY *MAJOR* announcements. Let's try to get through all of them!
Funtoo Linux has its own LiveCD/LiveUSB! Many thanks to @coffnix and @pnoecker for making this happen! The official install docs have been updated to reference this LiveCD, and it will be perpetually downloadable from https://build.funtoo.org/livecd/. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, it's running our official debian-sources kernel, so it will recognize the hardware supported by Funtoo. It's in sync with Funtoo stage3's. Yay. It also has NetworkManager available so the "nmtui" command can be used to set up your network. That's a convenience, but not really that impressive. What IS impressive is that included on the LiveCD is our innovative fchroot tool, which allows you to "chroot" into arm-64bit, arm-32bit and riscv-64bit filesystems thanks to the power of QEMU! This makes it an ultra-powerful rescue image. Other cool and amazing things are on the LiveCD. You can eventually learn about everything LiveCD here as we get this page done: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD
There's MORE:
Ryzen "Zen 3" stages now available, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/Amd64-zen3  SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V stages, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/SiFive_Freedom_U740 -- thanks @calrama 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4/400 stages, running next-release! With GNOME and lxqt support! https://www.funtoo.org/Raspberry_Pi_4! Raspberry Pi 4 will be moving to an "A" support level in Funtoo momentarily and will be part of our official install docs soon. Also, in case you didn't notice above, lxqt stages are available for amd64-zen3 and raspi4, and will be appearing gradually for all other subarches! And also if you did not notice, the updated next-release builds  are starting to appear for download! (RISC-V, Raspberry Pi 4 and AMD Ryzen "Zen 3" will only be available for next-release.)
OK, that's all the announcements we have for now. Please return to whatever you were doing before you read this announcement.
Thanks to the Funtoo user community who helped to make this all happen. Besides these announcements, there are many other improvements and fixes that have been incorporated into Funtoo. If you have helped, thank you from me as well as the others who will enjoy your improvements. Let's keep pushing forward to build on these amazing successes.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins, BDFL.
 

We currently have a problem -- there is way too much happening with Funtoo Linux.
So we have WAY TOO MANY *MAJOR* announcements. Let's try to get through all of them!
Funtoo Linux has its own LiveCD/LiveUSB! Many thanks to @coffnix and @pnoecker for making this happen! The official install docs have been updated to reference this LiveCD, and it will be perpetually downloadable from https://build.funtoo.org/livecd/. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, it's running our official debian-sources kernel, so it will recognize the hardware supported by Funtoo. It's in sync with Funtoo stage3's. Yay. It also has NetworkManager available so the "nmtui" command can be used to set up your network. That's a convenience, but not really that impressive. What IS impressive is that included on the LiveCD is our innovative fchroot tool, which allows you to "chroot" into arm-64bit, arm-32bit and riscv-64bit filesystems thanks to the power of QEMU! This makes it an ultra-powerful rescue image. Other cool and amazing things are on the LiveCD. You can eventually learn about everything LiveCD here as we get this page done: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD
There's MORE:
Ryzen "Zen 3" stages now available, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/Amd64-zen3  SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V stages, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/SiFive_Freedom_U740 -- thanks @calrama 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4/400 stages, running next-release! With GNOME and lxqt support! https://www.funtoo.org/Raspberry_Pi_4! Raspberry Pi 4 will be moving to an "A" support level in Funtoo momentarily and will be part of our official install docs soon. Also, in case you didn't notice above, lxqt stages are available for amd64-zen3 and raspi4, and will be appearing gradually for all other subarches! And also if you did not notice, the updated next-release builds  are starting to appear for download! (RISC-V, Raspberry Pi 4 and AMD Ryzen "Zen 3" will only be available for next-release.)
OK, that's all the announcements we have for now. Please return to whatever you were doing before you read this announcement.
Thanks to the Funtoo user community who helped to make this all happen. Besides these announcements, there are many other improvements and fixes that have been incorporated into Funtoo. If you have helped, thank you from me as well as the others who will enjoy your improvements. Let's keep pushing forward to build on these amazing successes.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins, BDFL.
 

We currently have a problem -- there is way too much happening with Funtoo Linux.
So we have WAY TOO MANY *MAJOR* announcements. Let's try to get through all of them!
Funtoo Linux has its own LiveCD/LiveUSB! Many thanks to @coffnix and @pnoecker for making this happen! The official install docs have been updated to reference this LiveCD, and it will be perpetually downloadable from https://build.funtoo.org/livecd/. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, it's running our official debian-sources kernel, so it will recognize the hardware supported by Funtoo. It's in sync with Funtoo stage3's. Yay. It also has NetworkManager available so the "nmtui" command can be used to set up your network. That's a convenience, but not really that impressive. What IS impressive is that included on the LiveCD is our innovative fchroot tool, which allows you to "chroot" into arm-64bit, arm-32bit and riscv-64bit filesystems thanks to the power of QEMU! This makes it an ultra-powerful rescue image. Other cool and amazing things are on the LiveCD. You can eventually learn about everything LiveCD here as we get this page done: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD
There's MORE:
Ryzen "Zen 3" stages now available, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/Amd64-zen3  SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V stages, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/SiFive_Freedom_U740 -- thanks @calrama 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4/400 stages, running next-release! With GNOME and lxqt support! https://www.funtoo.org/Raspberry_Pi_4! Raspberry Pi 4 will be moving to an "A" support level in Funtoo momentarily and will be part of our official install docs soon. Also, in case you didn't notice above, lxqt stages are available for amd64-zen3 and raspi4, and will be appearing gradually for all other subarches! And also if you did not notice, the updated next-release builds  are starting to appear for download! (RISC-V, Raspberry Pi 4 and AMD Ryzen "Zen 3" will only be available for next-release.)
OK, that's all the announcements we have for now. Please return to whatever you were doing before you read this announcement.
Thanks to the Funtoo user community who helped to make this all happen. Besides these announcements, there are many other improvements and fixes that have been incorporated into Funtoo. If you have helped, thank you from me as well as the others who will enjoy your improvements. Let's keep pushing forward to build on these amazing successes.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins, BDFL.
 

Hi Everyone,
The 2022-02 stage3 tarballs are now available for download. Enjoy.
Best,
Daniel

Hello, everyone! Here's a summary of things going on in the Funtoo community -- and there is a lot to talk about:
First, we'll start with the March Stages Refresh -- All Funtoo stage3's have been rebuilt as of 2022-03-10 or so and contain the latest package updates.
Funtoo Community Live Streams -- @siris has been running Funtoo Community Hacking Live Streams on Funtoo Discord -- These have been happening twice weekly and are a great way to get familiar with creating Funtoo autogens and just connecting with other people hacking on Funtoo. You can view upcoming Live Streams by going to our Discord and looking at the "Events" list. This link will show you open autogens on our bug tracker than you can help to tackle, and this wiki link will show you PR's that were turned into autogens, so you can learn from the past work of others.
Projects, Projects and More Projects! -- I've been building out a Projects infrastructure on the wiki, and as of right now we have launched over 12 projects! You can view the projects list on the right side of https://www.funtoo.org, and there is a live feed of project updates on the main page, too. This project infrastructure exists to help build out our efforts and also help users to find ways to get more involved. More is coming...
Security Project -- Is now officially organized, and actively engaged in addressing CVEs and other potential security vulnerabilities in Funtoo. There has been a very significant focused effort to fix CVEs in the past few weeks. Thanks to @mrl5 and @invakid404 and other community members for efforts here.
Evolved Bootstrap Project -- This is a project that @pnoeckerand I are spear-heading, with significant contribution from @invakid404 and @alex2101 -- documenting the steps on one wiki page that can be used to build out a cross-toolchain. What is the significance of doing this? Well, it will serve as a foundation for more innovation in the future in regards to Funtoo. We're starting phase 2 of this effort now that we have a PowerPC 64-bit cross-toolchain as well as an ARM-64bit MUSL toolchain documented. Phase 2 involves documenting -- on one wiki page -- how to build up a Gentoo/Funtoo system using the cross-toolchain. Getting all the steps on one wiki page is important, because bootstrapping a compiler toolchain is very order-dependent and having the big picture of the steps and their order helps us to streamline and innovate the process, which is harder to do when everything is isolated in individual ebuilds. Expect some interesting things to come from this project in the future.
Telemetry Project -- @siris has launched the Telemetry project, which is now starting phase 3. The goal of phase 3? No less than engineer a custom Golang Funtoo Prometheus exporter on code.funtoo.org that can expose all types of fun and useful Prometheus metrics about a Funtoo Linux system. Exciting stuff!
Languages Project -- @seemant has organized an umbrella Programming Languages Project, whose goal is "to enable developers to embrace Funtoo Linux as their preferred platform for programming. We aim to do this by ensuring that each programming language is able to supply a reasonably stable version and a reasonably up to date version of each language, as appropriate." @alex2101 is doing some excellent work in helping us to finally deprecate python2.7 in next-release. Find out more at the Funtoo Programming Languages project page and in the #languages project channel on Funtoo Discord.
New Funtoo Software Releases -- We have recently seen the release of fchroot 0.2.2 (major update), ego 2.8.6 (including fixes for AMD microcode), as well as metatools 1.0.2 (major release with no need for mongodb).
Beyond these things, there's even more stuff going on -- these are just the highlights. To connect with any of these efforts, please visit us on Discord. We look forward to working with our users to move these various efforts forward 🙂
Best,
Daniel

Hello, everyone! Here's a summary of things going on in the Funtoo community -- and there is a lot to talk about:
First, we'll start with the March Stages Refresh -- All Funtoo stage3's have been rebuilt as of 2022-03-10 or so and contain the latest package updates.
Funtoo Community Live Streams -- @siris has been running Funtoo Community Hacking Live Streams on Funtoo Discord -- These have been happening twice weekly and are a great way to get familiar with creating Funtoo autogens and just connecting with other people hacking on Funtoo. You can view upcoming Live Streams by going to our Discord and looking at the "Events" list. This link will show you open autogens on our bug tracker than you can help to tackle, and this wiki link will show you PR's that were turned into autogens, so you can learn from the past work of others.
Projects, Projects and More Projects! -- I've been building out a Projects infrastructure on the wiki, and as of right now we have launched over 12 projects! You can view the projects list on the right side of https://www.funtoo.org, and there is a live feed of project updates on the main page, too. This project infrastructure exists to help build out our efforts and also help users to find ways to get more involved. More is coming...
Security Project -- Is now officially organized, and actively engaged in addressing CVEs and other potential security vulnerabilities in Funtoo. There has been a very significant focused effort to fix CVEs in the past few weeks. Thanks to @mrl5 and @invakid404 and other community members for efforts here.
Evolved Bootstrap Project -- This is a project that @pnoeckerand I are spear-heading, with significant contribution from @invakid404 and @alex2101 -- documenting the steps on one wiki page that can be used to build out a cross-toolchain. What is the significance of doing this? Well, it will serve as a foundation for more innovation in the future in regards to Funtoo. We're starting phase 2 of this effort now that we have a PowerPC 64-bit cross-toolchain as well as an ARM-64bit MUSL toolchain documented. Phase 2 involves documenting -- on one wiki page -- how to build up a Gentoo/Funtoo system using the cross-toolchain. Getting all the steps on one wiki page is important, because bootstrapping a compiler toolchain is very order-dependent and having the big picture of the steps and their order helps us to streamline and innovate the process, which is harder to do when everything is isolated in individual ebuilds. Expect some interesting things to come from this project in the future.
Telemetry Project -- @siris has launched the Telemetry project, which is now starting phase 3. The goal of phase 3? No less than engineer a custom Golang Funtoo Prometheus exporter on code.funtoo.org that can expose all types of fun and useful Prometheus metrics about a Funtoo Linux system. Exciting stuff!
Languages Project -- @seemant has organized an umbrella Programming Languages Project, whose goal is "to enable developers to embrace Funtoo Linux as their preferred platform for programming. We aim to do this by ensuring that each programming language is able to supply a reasonably stable version and a reasonably up to date version of each language, as appropriate." @alex2101 is doing some excellent work in helping us to finally deprecate python2.7 in next-release. Find out more at the Funtoo Programming Languages project page and in the #languages project channel on Funtoo Discord.
New Funtoo Software Releases -- We have recently seen the release of fchroot 0.2.2 (major update), ego 2.8.6 (including fixes for AMD microcode), as well as metatools 1.0.2 (major release with no need for mongodb).
Beyond these things, there's even more stuff going on -- these are just the highlights. To connect with any of these efforts, please visit us on Discord. We look forward to working with our users to move these various efforts forward 🙂
Best,
Daniel

Hello, everyone! Here's a summary of things going on in the Funtoo community -- and there is a lot to talk about:
First, we'll start with the March Stages Refresh -- All Funtoo stage3's have been rebuilt as of 2022-03-10 or so and contain the latest package updates.
Funtoo Community Live Streams -- @siris has been running Funtoo Community Hacking Live Streams on Funtoo Discord -- These have been happening twice weekly and are a great way to get familiar with creating Funtoo autogens and just connecting with other people hacking on Funtoo. You can view upcoming Live Streams by going to our Discord and looking at the "Events" list. This link will show you open autogens on our bug tracker than you can help to tackle, and this wiki link will show you PR's that were turned into autogens, so you can learn from the past work of others.
Projects, Projects and More Projects! -- I've been building out a Projects infrastructure on the wiki, and as of right now we have launched over 12 projects! You can view the projects list on the right side of https://www.funtoo.org, and there is a live feed of project updates on the main page, too. This project infrastructure exists to help build out our efforts and also help users to find ways to get more involved. More is coming...
Security Project -- Is now officially organized, and actively engaged in addressing CVEs and other potential security vulnerabilities in Funtoo. There has been a very significant focused effort to fix CVEs in the past few weeks. Thanks to @mrl5 and @invakid404 and other community members for efforts here.
Evolved Bootstrap Project -- This is a project that @pnoeckerand I are spear-heading, with significant contribution from @invakid404 and @alex2101 -- documenting the steps on one wiki page that can be used to build out a cross-toolchain. What is the significance of doing this? Well, it will serve as a foundation for more innovation in the future in regards to Funtoo. We're starting phase 2 of this effort now that we have a PowerPC 64-bit cross-toolchain as well as an ARM-64bit MUSL toolchain documented. Phase 2 involves documenting -- on one wiki page -- how to build up a Gentoo/Funtoo system using the cross-toolchain. Getting all the steps on one wiki page is important, because bootstrapping a compiler toolchain is very order-dependent and having the big picture of the steps and their order helps us to streamline and innovate the process, which is harder to do when everything is isolated in individual ebuilds. Expect some interesting things to come from this project in the future.
Telemetry Project -- @siris has launched the Telemetry project, which is now starting phase 3. The goal of phase 3? No less than engineer a custom Golang Funtoo Prometheus exporter on code.funtoo.org that can expose all types of fun and useful Prometheus metrics about a Funtoo Linux system. Exciting stuff!
Languages Project -- @seemant has organized an umbrella Programming Languages Project, whose goal is "to enable developers to embrace Funtoo Linux as their preferred platform for programming. We aim to do this by ensuring that each programming language is able to supply a reasonably stable version and a reasonably up to date version of each language, as appropriate." @alex2101 is doing some excellent work in helping us to finally deprecate python2.7 in next-release. Find out more at the Funtoo Programming Languages project page and in the #languages project channel on Funtoo Discord.
New Funtoo Software Releases -- We have recently seen the release of fchroot 0.2.2 (major update), ego 2.8.6 (including fixes for AMD microcode), as well as metatools 1.0.2 (major release with no need for mongodb).
Beyond these things, there's even more stuff going on -- these are just the highlights. To connect with any of these efforts, please visit us on Discord. We look forward to working with our users to move these various efforts forward 🙂
Best,
Daniel

Hello all and happy 2022!
So, I've been around for about 60 days now, and I wanted to share some of what I've been doing and some thoughts from Daniel and the development team.
I've been slowly getting to know the Funtoo ecosystem more and more each day.  From exploring the Funtoo system from a predominantly Gentoo context to combing through JIRA to having voice chats on Discord with some of y'all.
During our time in Gentoo, Daniel and I interacted with users via:
IRC, bugzilla, and mailing lists (and btw, the website was generated xml that Daniel had written and designed).  Later on, the forums came along and blogs came along between when Daniel left and when I left.  Since that time, the world has changed a little bit.  IRC has been replaced by Discord and Telegram, bugzilla replaced by JIRA, and not a lot happening on the mailing lists, and Twitter is a new addition (and now the website is another avenue for direct interaction for the Funtoo community.
Last week I invited everyone in the #general Discord channel to ping me if you'd like to schedule a 1 hour chat with me.  We can talk about anything you like. And now I’m opening that invite up to all of you as well. If you can see this and want to chat, please let me know so that we can schedule some together.   Although..based on the conversations I've already been having, I reckon we'll talk mostly about Gentoo and Funtoo things 🙂.
Thank you for your patience with all the JIRA emails lately, that's because I was going through each open ticket one by one, to bring everything up to date, and jump start some that had languished. I took a second pass through the tickets to tag them.  Within a day, community members were using the new tags/labels. Thank y'all for noticing and adopting 🙂
The goal is for us to start creating a plan for Funtoo development. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll start to communicate about where we’ll be focusing our efforts.  Most importantly, we’ll be focusing extensively on improving the experience for those of you who want to learn how to write ebuilds and autogens and want to share your ebuilds and autogens with the rest of the community.
 
I’ll provide another update next month,  near the 90-day mark.  Meanwhile, I’d love to chat with y’all..
 
Please feel free to book a time on my calendar, or get in touch with me via DM on Discord, Telegram or the forums. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 930PM PDT (530AM UTC +1 day) please join us in the Voice channel in Discord, where @sirisis leading an educational series via screenshare. Come learn about making ebuilds, autogen'ing ebuilds, and more.
 
Looking forward to get to know ayou.
 
Cheers,
Seemant

 

I want to announce a new Funtoo project that we're calling "Evolved Bootstrap".
Here's the idea. Imagine you have access to a computer. It's not running Funtoo or even Gentoo, and it may even not truly be a Linux system. But there's a C compiler on the system. Now, imagine there was an easy way to build Funtoo entirely from source code -- even for a completely different CPU architecture (ARM, PowerPC) that you are currently running. No need to download a stage3 -- everything is fully bootstrapped, entirely from source code. The Funtoo system literally emerges from nothing before your eyes, rather than relying on any pre-built download from Funtoo.
This is what is meant by evolved bootstrap, and it is also notable in that we are doing this as a community effort from the start, so we are going to be building this together.
As a start, we are going to get familiar with "CLFS", or "Cross Linux From Scratch". Linux From Scratch and the LFS ecosystem is a fantastic community project that documents how to build a complete Linux system "from scratch", as evolved bootstrap will do. It is a series of manual steps, whereas evolved bootstrap will be automated. However, I do not want to lose the positive qualities that the LFS community has established in their projects -- providing excellent living documentation on what steps are needed, and why.
We welcome you to join this effort as we get started. Please see https://www.funtoo.org/Evolved_Bootstrap for more information and join us in the #bootstrap channel in Funtoo Discord.

Today is a big day for Funtoo as metatools 1.0.0 is now available:
https://www.funtoo.org/Metatools
This page will give you information on what metatools is all about and how it forms a foundational component of Funtoo Linux development.
The big deal is that metatools is now much easier to use and understand, and also much easier to install.

Today is a big day for Funtoo as metatools 1.0.0 is now available:
https://www.funtoo.org/Metatools
This page will give you information on what metatools is all about and how it forms a foundational component of Funtoo Linux development.
The big deal is that metatools is now much easier to use and understand, and also much easier to install.

Generally you'd be learning Python 3 if you started now. There are just some minor syntax incompatibilities in the core language and there were other minor changes. And python3 has more features and extensions, and most modules work best with 3 now (many have stopped supporting 2.x.)

Today is a big day for Funtoo as metatools 1.0.0 is now available:
https://www.funtoo.org/Metatools
This page will give you information on what metatools is all about and how it forms a foundational component of Funtoo Linux development.
The big deal is that metatools is now much easier to use and understand, and also much easier to install.

I use pycharm professional (paid) because I do a lot of python. The JetBrains editors are pretty good and a 'sweet spot' in terms of functionality and usability. The python-code-related features really are helpful.

Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

New next-release stage3 and GNOME images are now available at https://build.funtoo.org/next. These images have several updated things but are intended for active development only and not for production/stable systems.
Please install them and help us test out GNOME and get other desktop environments supported!
Builds are only currently available for amd64-zen2 and intel64-skylake.
Please note that next-release is inherently unstable and thus can break at any time. The current status of next-release is that basic stage3's and GNOME stage3 should work fine, and we are expanding out from here to find issues and address them via the bug tracker.

New next-release stage3 and GNOME images are now available at https://build.funtoo.org/next. These images have several updated things but are intended for active development only and not for production/stable systems.
Please install them and help us test out GNOME and get other desktop environments supported!
Builds are only currently available for amd64-zen2 and intel64-skylake.
Please note that next-release is inherently unstable and thus can break at any time. The current status of next-release is that basic stage3's and GNOME stage3 should work fine, and we are expanding out from here to find issues and address them via the bug tracker.

Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Funtoo Community,
One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂)
Why is this distinction important?
In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. 
I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community.
That is why it's so important.
I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail:
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins
also a user of Funtoo 🙂

@zoggalso, I should say that I do appreciate you connecting and communicating your thoughts. For someone who is not as involved, perception is the reality. So I will look at what I can do to improve this, and welcome your involvement as well to try to address these things.
For roadmap, a lot of this has come down to LACK OF TRUST. On freenode, I had people actually doing 'silent forks' of Funtoo and ripping off my ideas. I have had people who I have told about future plans start to try to do them -- but leave me out! So many people are trying to 'make a splash' in software, and are not necessarily ethical about how they do it. So I am bitter about this. I am bitter because I actually LIKE to share my future ideas, but I have been REPEATEDLY BURNED by doing this. So now I am cautious. A lot of this relates to why we left freenode even before it self-imploded. There was too much 'sniping' of ideas and 'fake friends' who were just trying to get some ideas that they lacked themselves. But without any collaborative spirit. And even some outright nastiness. I got sick of it. I decided we'll move to discord, and have more of an independent space. And it will piss off some people -- but fortunately some of the people I pissed off (not all for sure) were those I wanted to get away from!
So yes, there is a lot of bitterness about this. And then being asked to share more -- you can imagine how this triggers a lot of unpleasant feelings. Damned if I do, damned, if I don't. You probably had no idea you were touching such a nerve when you made your original post. So much to unpack here. This will at least be an interesting thread for people to read.