Nostalgia: The Amazing Spider, Man

As Mike pointed out, Spider is no longer a Gentoo developer. Logically, this makes sense, because he has not done any development for Gentoo in a long time. However, Spider was one of the early pillars of the Gentoo project. He holds an especially poignant place in my heart, because he and I joined Gentoo at about the same time (followed closely by Matt Kennedy). And he and I were the ones responsible for Gentoo’s Great libpng Debacle of 2002. We were just three weeks old at the time, and we happily broke every user’s system. I have talked about this in other fora (I think -core mailing list), but I’ll do it publicly here.

When we screwed up, we realised pretty quickly what we’d done. We’d had the best of intentions, of course. For the record, we unmasked libpng-1.2 to replace libpng-1.0. That, of course, was an API change, and so everyone running anything that depended on libpng (think gnome, gimp, all of KDE) had a broken system. The KDE users got it the worst of all. To complicate matters, someone in the press had just finished installing her brand new Gentoo Linux system (1.0_rc6) with a brand spanking new KDE, and did her first update. Her dismay is probably archived on the -user mailing list somewhere.

Anyway, the point of this story is to echo what Spider said about those early days. We didn’t get beaten up. Users were irritated, but understanding. Our fellow developers were amused, and understanding. Daniel was unaware, but understanding once he found out. Spider, in his forward-thinking, had had an update script in files/ in place long before the unmasking, so the only thing was to inform the userbase about it, and their pain was automatically taken care of (albeit, their pain of waiting was not, but hey, they ran Gentoo). Me, I learned to be very very very very careful about bumping libraries.

And I learned that lesson (gasp!) without being called “stupid” or a “moron” or a member of “the peanut gallery” or any number of derogatory terms that get strewn about like so much confetti these days. Listen carefully, kids, to your Uncle Seemant: mistakes happen. We can choose to use them as tools for learning, or choose to use them as weapons against the people who made them. One is civil.

Spider was part of that civil culture. He turned me back onto Gnome after I’d fallen out of love with it (at the time he started, he’d amassed his own personal overlay with the next version of gnome — of course, at the time, we didn’t call them “overlays”).

I will miss Spider greatly. Even though, he wasn’t active for a long time, it was a personal comfort to me to know that my brother-in-arms was still a part of Gentoo. To me, he’s inextricably intertwined in Gentoo.

Spider, best of luck to you, and I hope that you’ll stick around.