Introduction

[Chris Larson]

Greetings,

I subscribed to the list a while back, but I don't believe I ever got
around to introducing myself.

My name is Chris Larson, but am most well known as Kergoth.  I work in
the embedded Linux field.  I've done work on bootloaders, kernel,
userland, distro, build tools, etc.  I founded the OpenZaurus Linux
distro for the Sharp Zaurus line of PDAs, and created the OpenEmbedded
project, which was originally a portage fork.  It exists because I got
tired of gmake's limitations, and all of the existing distribution
tools were limited, either lacking crosscompilation support, or
expected to run the tools only -on- that distribution.  I wanted a
tool that would run anywhere, and could target any platform, and
support multiple target packaging formats and distributions.  The
metadata repository is shared by multiple embedded distributions and
projects, so in that aspect, the goal was quite similar to that of
vcs-pkg.. collaboration.

I've hacked on debian packages and tools, redhat packages and tools,
and gentoo packages and tools, but never got around to pursuing
actually becoming a developer for any (I know just how much time a
distro can suck up..).

Most of the OE target distros are debian based, as I found most debian
distributionisms (I say that's a word, dangit) to be superior to
redhat ones, and more stable than gentoo ones (i.e. interfaces(5)),
though there are obvious exceptions.  OE can output ipk, deb, or rpm
files.  Originally it could take either our metadata format or a
source rpm as input (with a metadata conversion layer), but I doubt
that's been maintained in my absence from the project (got burned
out).  I went a couple years without messing with distribution or
build tools, but am finding my interest rekindled.

On the source control front, I've experience using and maintaining
CVS, svn, monotone, git, bk, svk, and a couple other types or
repositories.  Don't really know mercurial or bazaar, yet.  I was the
buildmeister / configuration management guy and a core developer of
the Opie project (fork of Qtopia), also.

Recently, I've been really enjoying messing with topgit and
pristine-tar.. there's definate potential there, and I'm debating
writing a new tool to better support that methodology for us crazy
embedded folk :)  I have a quick hack of a tg-rename here, by the way.
 It just updates the head & top-bases refs and zips through the
branches, updating .topdeps for each, in case anyone wants such a
thing.

Sorry for the disorganization of that intro, I tend to wander at times ;)
-- 
Chris Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
clarson at mvista dot com
Maintainer - Tslib
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Software Engineer
MontaVista Software, Inc.