Paid support offer

Paid support offer

[Marcin Juszkiewicz]

I started own business. Main area will be OpenEmbedded consulting
as I'm one of core developers of this buildsystem.

Things which I want to cover are:

* device support
* bug fixing
* adding/altering packages
* maintenance of external branches

Those kinds of things are nothing new to me - I maintain own branch
used to build OpenZaurus, added few hundreds of packages (and changed
countless of them).

Currently I prefer remote work due to fact that I still have full time job.
Payments can be solved in two ways:

- payment per needed hours (this can be hard to count because some of it
  takes waiting for build)
- one price for whole work

I can provide invoice.

-- 
JID: hrw-jabber.org
Sharp Zaurus C-760 (OZ 3.5.x)
OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus/OPIE developer

Vi has two modes: the one in which it beeps, and the one in which it 
doesn't.

Re: Paid support offer

[José Bernardo Bandos Rodrigues]

Good luck hrw! I hope this takes off fast.

2006/9/12, Marcin Juszkiewicz <openembedded@hrw.one.pl>:
>
>
> I started own business. Main area will be OpenEmbedded consulting
> as I'm one of core developers of this buildsystem.
>
> Things which I want to cover are:
>
> * device support
> * bug fixing
> * adding/altering packages
> * maintenance of external branches
>
> Those kinds of things are nothing new to me - I maintain own branch
> used to build OpenZaurus, added few hundreds of packages (and changed
> countless of them).
>
> Currently I prefer remote work due to fact that I still have full time
> job.
> Payments can be solved in two ways:
>
> - payment per needed hours (this can be hard to count because some of it
>   takes waiting for build)
> - one price for whole work
>
> I can provide invoice.
>
> --
> JID: hrw-jabber.org
> Sharp Zaurus C-760 (OZ 3.5.x)
> OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus/OPIE developer
>
> Vi has two modes: the one in which it beeps, and the one in which it
> doesn't.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Openembedded-devel mailing list
> Openembedded-devel@lists.openembedded.org
> http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-devel
>

Re: Paid support offer

[Tim Bird]

Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:
> I started own business. Main area will be OpenEmbedded consulting
> as I'm one of core developers of this buildsystem.
> 
> Things which I want to cover are:
> 
> * device support
> * bug fixing
> * adding/altering packages
> * maintenance of external branches
> 
> Those kinds of things are nothing new to me - I maintain own branch
> used to build OpenZaurus, added few hundreds of packages (and changed
> countless of them).
> 
> Currently I prefer remote work due to fact that I still have full time job.
> Payments can be solved in two ways:
> 
> - payment per needed hours (this can be hard to count because some of it
>   takes waiting for build)
> - one price for whole work
> 
> I can provide invoice.

I am interested.  The CE Linux Forum is using OE for our Test Lab, but
we have some difficulties with it.  Maybe you can help us solve some
of these difficulties.

Here are some specifics:
 * we wish to create our own distribution with fairly minimal footprint
 but including a number of test packages.  Specifically, we have added an
 LTP package to our system, but have not (to my knowledge) pushed this
 upstream to OE.  We would like assistance with adding, modifying and maintaining
 packages:
  * would like an X11-less python package - to support test scripts on target
  written in python (but where the target does not have any graphical support).
  * would like a drop-bear that supports root access with no password
  (There's a patch for this, but we have not integrated it into our system yet)
  * would like to add several test packages (here are some candidates, in no particular order):
aiostress  fio         kernbench  reaim     sleeptest  tbench
bonnie     fsx         lmbench    scrashme  unixbench
dbench     interbench  selftest  stress

 * we would also like to set up and maintain a source snapshot mirror.
I have a sources fetch running nightly now on a dedicated machine in
our test lab (grabbing the sources for a 'bootstrap-image' distro.  But I
have not yet set up the rsync to move the snapshot files to a large server
where I can publish them on the web.  I don't think much remains to finish
this effort, but I don't have time to do it myself.

The problem we are trying to solve is that users of our test lab system may not
have access outside their corporate firewall to anything but http.  So they cannot
use subversion, monotone, or other configuration management systems to retrieve sources.
Bitbake just breaks if it ends up needing to use any of these CMSes directly.  OE will
only work for us if our users have a public repository of source that is accessible
via only http.

 * an RPM package with minimal elements that can be used to begin working
 with our OE-based distribution.  I have found that OE has a very large list of
 pre-requisites, and is very difficult to set up on my local machine.  An installer
 program which resolves these difficulties would be very useful.  Users of my testlab
 will download and build OE software on their local machines, and this needs to be
 turn-key if possible.

 * documentation for the above.

Please let me know your interest level and a rough estimate (ballpark figure) of the
amount of money each of the projects listed above would cost.  (Or let me know your
hourly rate and a rough estimate of the hours you think those would take.

Please contact me if you have additional questions.

Thanks and regards,
 -- Tim

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Electronics
=============================

Re: Paid support offer

[Koen Kooi]

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Tim Bird schreef:

>   * would like an X11-less python package - to support test scripts on target
>   written in python (but where the target does not have any graphical support).

There you go: http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/repo/?action=details&pnm=python-core

regards,

Koen
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Re: Paid support offer

[Holger Freyther]

Am 12.09.2006 um 20:04 schrieb Tim Bird:

> Here are some specifics:
>  * we wish to create our own distribution with fairly minimal  
> footprint
>  but including a number of test packages.  Specifically, we have  
> added an
>  LTP package to our system, but have not (to my knowledge) pushed this
>  upstream to OE.  We would like assistance with adding, modifying  
> and maintaining
>  packages:


Hi Tim,

regardles of paid support there are certain things where better  
communication would be awesome. E.g. I'm slowly, but steadily,  
working on infrastructure to increase the quality of BitBake,  
OpenEmbedded and the packages we build. It is progressing slowly as  
I'm doing that not as part of university, internship work but solely  
unpaid in my very limited spare time (no I'm not looking for money  
directly). I believe that some of my personal agenda matches the  
goals of CELF and other entitities so it would be really nice if  
cooperation could happen (I will write something about my QA view in  
separate mail). I do not know how feasible cooperation is but we  
should try to have a fruitful exchange of our ideas and plans. As  
long as the result will be freely available I'm confident everyone  
would be happy to see an entitty helping or contracting someone.

kind regards
	holger

Re: Paid support offer

[Tim Bird]

Koen Kooi wrote:
> Tim Bird schreef:
> 
>>>   * would like an X11-less python package - to support test scripts on target
>>>   written in python (but where the target does not have any graphical support).
> 
> There you go: http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/repo/?action=details&pnm=python-core

Thanks!
 -- Tim

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Electronics
=============================

Re: Paid support offer

[Koen Kooi]

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Holger Freyther schreef:
> E.g. I'm slowly, but steadily,  
> working on infrastructure to increase the quality of BitBake,  
> OpenEmbedded and the packages we build.

yay!

> As
> long as the result will be freely available I'm confident everyone  
> would be happy to see an entitty helping or contracting someone.

+1 on that.

I think OE has reached a point where it needs more infrastructure to do (automated) QA and
regression testing. We can solve that in more than one way, but the 2 most obvious are:

1) Formulate a plan and ruless for '3rd parties' to do testing (think tinderbox)
2) have some 'OE owned' boxen somewhere that QA and regeression test the vital parts.

Both are fairly orthogonal and can be worked on independantly. I think we should discuss
both at OEDEM to get all the noses to point in the same direction.

regards,

Koen
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Re: Paid support offer

[Richard Purdie]

On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 11:04 -0700, Tim Bird wrote:
> I am interested.  The CE Linux Forum is using OE for our Test Lab, but
> we have some difficulties with it.  Maybe you can help us solve some
> of these difficulties.
> 
> Here are some specifics:
>  * we wish to create our own distribution with fairly minimal footprint
>  but including a number of test packages.  Specifically, we have added an
>  LTP package to our system, but have not (to my knowledge) pushed this
>  upstream to OE.  We would like assistance with adding, modifying and maintaining
>  packages:
>   * would like an X11-less python package - to support test scripts on target
>   written in python (but where the target does not have any graphical support).

OE's python does not require X11. Some of the python sub modules need it
so a standard python build will build X11. Python itself will not
require it at runtime. Only the particular python modules which need X11
will have that dependency. If you don't install/use those particular
pyton modules, you won't need X11 and that won't get installed.

If you wanted to avoid building X11 at build time, that is slightly
different you could easily remove the X11 modules from the python build
but building a few extra things at build time hasn't been seen as much
of a problem when it doesn't affect the runtime dependencies.

>   * would like a drop-bear that supports root access with no password
>   (There's a patch for this, but we have not integrated it into our system yet)

As you note, that functionality already exists.

>   * would like to add several test packages (here are some candidates, in no particular order):
> aiostress  fio         kernbench  reaim     sleeptest  tbench
> bonnie     fsx         lmbench    scrashme  unixbench
> dbench     interbench  selftest  stress

I agree these would be very nice to have.

>  * we would also like to set up and maintain a source snapshot mirror.
> I have a sources fetch running nightly now on a dedicated machine in
> our test lab (grabbing the sources for a 'bootstrap-image' distro.  But I
> have not yet set up the rsync to move the snapshot files to a large server
> where I can publish them on the web.  I don't think much remains to finish
> this effort, but I don't have time to do it myself.

There have been several people working on different bits of that puzzle.
This functionality is something that will be discussed at OEDEM and I
will post a separate email with some thoughts on this subject. Recent
developments to allow concurrent task execution in bitbake should also
help with this. Hopefully, we can put something together quite quickly
to enable people to do this.

>  * an RPM package with minimal elements that can be used to begin working
>  with our OE-based distribution.  I have found that OE has a very large list of
>  pre-requisites, and is very difficult to set up on my local machine.  An installer
>  program which resolves these difficulties would be very useful.  Users of my testlab
>  will download and build OE software on their local machines, and this needs to be
>  turn-key if possible.

The issue is this is very distribution dependent. I know I could
relatively easily write a list of packages to apt-get on ubuntu but that
won't help your average redhat user. Are all your testlab users using
the same distribution?

With my company hat on for a moment, depending on your needs, I should
also mention OpenedHand (http://www.o-hand.com/) is available for
support of OpenEmbedded and/or Poky (http://projects.o-hand.com/poky).
Poky is basically a stabilised subset of the OE metadata which we offer
direct support on. Its currently undergoing development with a number of
new features that aren't on the website yet such an ARM development and
emulation environment through QEMU as well as x86 support. Its synced
with OE so OE gets benefits from poky and vice versa. 

Note that I don't want to poach work from Marcin, or be seen to be
trying to do that. Marcin is probably in a good position to help Tim but
perhaps there are other people out there Poky might appeal to. I think
the services on offer are different and will appeal to different people
with different needs and in a way the offerings more compliment each
other. This kind of information is something we really need to add to
the OE website.

I agree with some of the other posts about needing a plan for the future
and for communication between various parties to make sure we all know
where things are going and everyone's needs are accounted for.

Speaking personally, at present I do a lot more unpaid work in my spare
time on OE/bitbake/Zaurus Kernels than I do on paid projects like Poky
and with time I'm hoping that will change. I think the future is bright
and I have a lot of ideas of how things can grow but finding time to
implement them all is proving tricky! :)

Regards,

Richard