I’m partly sad, but for the most part this is a weight that goes away from my shoulders, so I can’t say I’m not at least in part joyful of it, even though the context in which this is happening is not exactly what I expected.

I turned off the Gentoo tinderbox, never to come back. The S3 storage of logs is still running, but I’ve asked Ian to see if he can attach everything at his pace, so I can turn off the account and be done with it.

Why did this happen? Well, it’s a long story. I already stopped running it for a few months because I got tired of Mike behaving like a child, like I already reported in 2012 by closing my bugs because the logs are linked (from S3) rather than attached. I already made my position clear that it’s a silly distinction as the logs will not disappear in the middle of nowhere (indeed I’ll keep the S3 bucket for them running until they are all attached to Bugzilla), but as he keeps insisting that it’s “trivial” to change the behaviour of the whole pipeline, I decided to give up.

Yes, it’s only one developer, and yes, lots of other developers took my side (thanks guys!), but it’s still aggravating to have somebody who can do whatever he likes without reporting to anybody, ignoring Council resolutions, QA (when I was the lead) and essentially using Gentoo as his personal playground. And the fact that only two people (Michał and Julian) have been pushing for a proper resolution is a bit disappointing.

I know it might feel like I’m taking my toys and going home — well, that’s what I’m doing. The tinderbox has been draining on my time (little) and my money (quite more), but those I was willing to part with — draining my motivation due to assholes in the project was not in the plans.

In the past six years that I’ve been working on this particular project, things evolved:

Originally, it was a simple chroot with a looping emerge , inspected with grep and Emacs, running on my desktop and intended to catch --as-needed failures. It went through lots of disks, and got me off XFS for good due to kernel panics.

, inspected with and Emacs, running on my desktop and intended to catch failures. It went through lots of disks, and got me off XFS for good due to kernel panics. It was moved to LXC, which is why the package entered the Gentoo tree, together with the OpenRC support and the first few crude hacks.

When I started spendig time in Los Angeles for a customer, Yamato under my desk got replaced with Excelsior which was crowdfounded and hosted, for two years straight, by my customer at the time.

This is where the rewrite happened, from attaching logs (which I could earlier do with more or less ease, thanks to NFS) to store them away and linking instead. This had to do mostly with the ability to remote-manage the tinderbox.

This year, since I no longer work for the company in Los Angeles, and instead I work in Dublin for a completely different company, I decided Excelsior was better off on a personal space, and rented a full 42 unit cabinet with Hurricane Electric in Fremont, where the server is still running as I type this.

You can see that it’s not that ’m trying to avoid spending time to engineer solutions. It’s just that I feel that what Mike is asking is unreasonable, and the way he’s asking it makes it unbearable. Especially when he feigns to care about my expenses — as I noted in the previously linked post, S3 is dirty cheap, and indeed it now comes down to $1/month given to Amazon for the logs storage and access, compared to $600/month to rent the cabinet at Hurricane.

Yes, it’s true that the server is not doing only tinderboxing – it also is running some fate instances, and I have been using it as a development server for my own projects, mostly open-source ones – but that’s the original use for it, and if it wasn’t for it I wouldn’t be paying so much to rent a cabinet, I’d be renting a single dedicated server off, say, Hetzner.

So here we go, the end of the era of my tinderbox. Patrick and Michael are still continuing their efforts so it’s not like Gentoo is left without integration test, but I’m afraid it’ll be harder for at least some of the maintainers who leveraged the tinderbox heavily in the past. My contract with Hurricane expires in April; at that point I’ll get the hardware out of the cabinet, and will decide what to do with it — it’s possible I’ll donate the server (minus harddrives) to Gentoo Foundation or someone else who can use it.

My involvement in Gentoo might also suffer from this; I hopefully will be dropping one of the servers I maintain off the net pretty soon, which will be one less system to build packages for, but I still have a few to take care of. For the moment I’m taking a break: I’ll soon send an email that it’s open season on my packages; I locked my bugzilla account already to avoid providing harsher responses in the bug linked at the top of this post.