Dan Armak: A Long Overdue Send-off

You know, Dan left Gentoo a few months ago. And he was another who left with a whisper rather than a bang. Dan (danarmak) was already a developer when I joined. At the time, I couldn’t stand KDE. I was a fluxbox user. A few months prior to my joining, Dan had basically become Gentoo’s KDE team. He took care of all the version bumps, he made the decision (a very good one, by the way) to have the /usr/qt and /usr/kde directories in which to house the installations of Qt and KDE, respectively.

He was the classic ideal developer. He tested relentlessly, he made patches, he shot bugs, he communicated with upstream to ensure fixes and patches went back and forth. He helped people on the mailing lists, on IRC, via private email. Dan always made you feel like he maintained KDE just for you. He’s an incredibly nice person. Incredibly nice. Talking to Dan always put a smile on my face and cheered me up. (I only hope to have had a similar effect of him for a fraction of that).

You know how you love the concept of eclasses? The idea behind eclasses is that you don’t have to duplicate code. You just shove it into eclasses, inherit them in your ebuild, and you have access to them. That’s how come Ciaran was able to make the excellent versionator eclass, and how Bart Verwilst (verwilst) (another old time dev) made the flag-o-matic eclass. The first eclasses, people, were the KDE eclasses. That’s right, kids, danarmak invented the very concept. A month into my joining, I’d tried (and loved!) KDE, thanks to Dan. During one of those nights, Dan asked me if I would like to see “object orientation in bash”. Boy, did I! He pointed me at the kde eclasses (portage didn’t have native support yet). What an exciting idea! Granted, it’s not real object orientation, but I don’t have to preach the concept of eclasses to you, really. (I will, if you argue too much, in a future post).

Shortly thereafter, I took over the perl ebuilds because they were lagging and bugs were piling up. Well, I asked Dan if these eclasses would help ease the burden of perl module maintenance. He agreed they would. I presented the case to Daniel Robbins, and he liked it. Now, not only KDE, but also dev-perl were using eclasses. So Daniel threw in native support into portage itself.

And that, kids, is how come my closing dev-perl bugs for perl module updates became a mass influx of bugs for more perl modules, because people just used the eclass (and had to code nothing, basically). That led to the idea of g-cpan, which attracted Michael Cummings to the project to make g-cpan a reality, which led to him being our Perl team. That, in a nutshell, is how KDE led to Perl.

That, in a nutshell, is one snapshot of one small set of contributions that Dan Armak made to Gentoo. Two years ago, Dan went on hiatus because duty called: he was obliged to join the Israeli military for a tenure. That tenure is almost up, but he might be called again. Dan decided to leave Gentoo, because he just didn’t know where life would take him in the next few years.

Well, I’m here to say that I have a candle burning for him to return. As far as I’m concerned, Dan Armak will always be welcome back to Gentoo.

PS Thanks to spb for inspiring me to write this article. It was one of the easiest I’ve ever written.