On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 11:05, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

Hey everybody,

I'd like to apply for TU. I tricked Daenyth into sponsoring me. Yup. I'll sponsor him. He's a good guy and has been a great contributor to the arch-games project.

Is it true that the secret TU tower is where all the girls are kept? Don't talk about that on the public list!!!

On 06/24/10 at 11:10am, Daenyth Blank wrote:

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 11:05, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

...

Hey everybody,

I'd like to apply for TU. I tricked Daenyth into sponsoring me. Yup. I'll sponsor him. He's a good guy and has been a great contributor to the arch-games project.

...

Is it true that the secret TU tower is where all the girls are kept? Don't talk about that on the public list!!! Why not? Everyone knows that the best girls are kept in the super-top-secret Dev tower! Oops... shouldn't say that on the public list either, huh? --

On 06/24/10 11:10, Daenyth Blank wrote:

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 11:05, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

...

Is it true that the secret TU tower is where all the girls are kept? Don't talk about that on the public list!!!

methinks there are some women on this list. Thus, *all* the "girls" are certainly not "kept" "there"!

On 24.06.2010 19:48, Isaac Dupree wrote:

On 06/24/10 11:10, Daenyth Blank wrote:

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On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 11:05, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

...

Is it true that the secret TU tower is where all the girls are kept? Don't talk about that on the public list!!!

methinks there are some women on this list. Thus, *all* the "girls" are certainly not "kept" "there"!

I suspect of all the places a girl could stumble upon in the net, this one is the least likely to be it.

On 24.06.2010 20:23, Angel Velásquez wrote:

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

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I care about guidelines and consistency, though I am aware that my AUR packages aren't all fully consistent. Working on that. On LinuxTag 2010, I openly promoted my religion using my Arch shirt together with a fellow Archer. We tried our best to sound like the condescending Arch jerks that we are. Just kidding. We showed-off Arch to quite a few people who were interested, though. We met quite a few unrelated Archers on the fair as well but they didn't seem to have as much Arch-esteem as we did. Arch shirt? pictures?

LinuxTag pictures by yours truly: http://svenstaro.imgur.com/linuxtag_2010/all Observe as the Microsoft booth slowly changes during the course of the fair. We proudly wore this: http://www.linux-onlineshop.de/media/images/popup/4666_0.png We were severely outnumbered by Debian shirt people, however. As a consequence, we tried as hard as we could to make as many loud Debian-is-99%-obsolete jokes as possible. In the process, we made/found a few strong allies but we made even more enemies that, as they used Debian, obviously were orders of magnitude weaker. It all worked according to plan. Fun story: I gave some Debian guy some ISO file on an ext4 formatted USB key and he was not able to read it because his kernel did not yet support it. He didn't like my suggestion to install Arch. Strange people.

...

Is it true that the secret TU tower is where all the girls are kept? All the good ones, yes, ;) Nice, I would not have expected anything less.

Good luck with your application!

Thank you, but I will not need any luck to achieve this. Do you think I'd apply with even the slightest possibility of failure? I have made my arrangements. See you in the TU tower in a bit. Let's use the other thread for party theme suggestions and girl allocation. -- Sven-Hendrik

On 24.06.2010 17:05, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

Hey everybody, Hi

Whenever I'm not busy trying to create another cdrkit vs. cdrtools flame fest on the mailing list cdrtools is/was free, you DFSG-fetishists! *scnr*

In AUR I currently maintain 66 packages. My most important packages are multimedia/game development (...) I'm somewhat involved or at least interested in the upstream development for some of my packages (SFML, Ogre3D, SFML, Gobby, Bullet, Box2D, -gallium) Would be nice to see all the game libs in [community]. I'm using a few of them.

I'm rather interested in Python ++1

I care about guidelines and consistency ++1

Is it true that the secret TU tower is where all the girls are kept? Except for those in my cellar, yes.

Good luck and have a nice day Hubert Grzeskowiak (Nemesis#13)

On Friday 25 Jun 2010 at 22:06 Xyne wrote:

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I suspect of all the places a girl could stumble upon in the net, this one is the least likely to be it.

Well, when they do, they'll be able to confirm the stereotype of male computer geeks and their attitudes towards them.

Indeed. I've always been quite proud that the free / open source software world has projects like these: http://women.debian.org/home/ http://community.kde.org/KDE_Women http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen I know the comments were just supposed to be a bit of fun, but perhaps they highlight that something like wouldn't be a bad idea in Arch too. Pete.

On Fri, 2010-06-25 at 17:47 -0400, Andrew Antle wrote:

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I've always been quite proud that the free / open source software world has projects like these:

http://women.debian.org/home/ http://community.kde.org/KDE_Women http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen

I know the comments were just supposed to be a bit of fun, but perhaps they highlight that something like wouldn't be a bad idea in Arch too.

Pete.

Patches welcome :) , preferably from women actually involved in Arch, not pseudo-politically-correct males trying to make themselves feel better.

+1000. I haven't actually seen any females on the forum/IRC/mailing list (though to be fair names from some cultures are androgynous to my eyes). Recently on this list someone posted up linuxTag photos, there were more signs of Microsoft than women in those pics. I think this conversation has exhausted its lifetime though to be fair. Back to the TU application!

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Peter Lewis wrote:

But please don't assume you know my motivation for mentioning these projects. I'm not "trying to make myself feel better",

I'm sorry; was I "stereotyping" you? Sucks, doesn't it? :) -- Andrew

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I suspect of all the places a girl could stumble upon in the net, this one is the least likely to be it.

Well, when they do, they'll be able to confirm the stereotype of male computer geeks and their attitudes towards them.

What stereotype? I'm a computer geek, and I'm fine with women, in general and in computing. Stereotyping is bullshit generalization that doesn't actually apply to anyone in particular.

[/snip]

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Peter Lewis wrote:

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But please don't assume you know my motivation for mentioning these projects. I'm not "trying to make myself feel better",

I'm sorry; was I "stereotyping" you? Sucks, doesn't it? :) -- Andrew

I think you misunderstood my message. My point was that a conversation among TUs, i.e. people officially associated with the distro, about keeping women in towers etc. conforms to a stereotype that people have of male geeks acting disparagingly towards women. A harmless comment here or there isn't really an issue, but diverting a TU application into a conversation that ostensibly objectifies women on a public mailing list will be seen as inappropriate and possibly offensive by others. If you don't see how that might be offensive then I would say that you're part of the problem. This is relevant: http://xkcd.com/322/ Stereotypes are indeed stupid and so is acting in accordance with them. I'm really not up in arms about this. I only made a fleeting remark about it and had intended to avoid replying to your message when I saw it, but that second remark to Peter above clearly shows that you misunderstood my point so I felt the need to explain myself. Call me "pseudo-politically correct" all you want, but somehow I don't think a conversation about women locked up in secret tower belongs on this list. At the very least it has nothing to do with the AUR. Peter Lewis wrote:

On Saturday 26 Jun 2010 at 01:42 Ng Oon-Ee wrote:

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On Fri, 2010-06-25 at 17:47 -0400, Andrew Antle wrote:

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I've always been quite proud that the free / open source software world has projects like these:

http://women.debian.org/home/ http://community.kde.org/KDE_Women http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen

I know the comments were just supposed to be a bit of fun, but perhaps they highlight that something like wouldn't be a bad idea in Arch too.

Patches welcome :) , preferably from women actually involved in Arch, not pseudo-politically-correct males trying to make themselves feel better.

Absolutely, it would be rather odd and pointless if an Arch-women project were to be started by men. In the absence of any women (really are there none?), of course no patches will be forthcoming.

I think the best approach is to simply stop focusing on gender. What difference do gender, ethnicity, age, etc make on the internet? Obviously if you bring it up yourself and make it a part of the interaction then it matters, but if not then it shouldn't even need to be mentioned. As for project and groups targeted at women, I would expect them to run the risk of leading to some level of seclusion within the community. It's like saying "well, they don't seem to be integrating, so let's provide them with a little niche over there". I could easily go on, but it would veer too far into politics and is, once again, not appropriate for this list.

On 06/27/10 at 03:04am, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

On 26.06.2010 19:10, Xyne wrote:

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I suspect of all the places a girl could stumble upon in the net, this one is the least likely to be it. Well, when they do, they'll be able to confirm the stereotype of male computer geeks and their attitudes towards them. What stereotype? I'm a computer geek, and I'm fine with women, in general and in computing. Stereotyping is bullshit generalization that doesn't actually apply to anyone in particular. [/snip]

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On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Peter Lewis wrote:

...

But please don't assume you know my motivation for mentioning these projects. I'm not "trying to make myself feel better", I'm sorry; was I "stereotyping" you? Sucks, doesn't it? :) -- Andrew

I think you misunderstood my message. My point was that a conversation among TUs, i.e. people officially associated with the distro, about keeping women in towers etc. conforms to a stereotype that people have of male geeks acting disparagingly towards women. A harmless comment here or there isn't really an issue, but diverting a TU application into a conversation that ostensibly objectifies women on a public mailing list will be seen as inappropriate and possibly offensive by others. If you don't see how that might be offensive then I would say that you're part of the problem.

This is relevant: http://xkcd.com/322/

Stereotypes are indeed stupid and so is acting in accordance with them.

I'm really not up in arms about this. I only made a fleeting remark about it and had intended to avoid replying to your message when I saw it, but that second remark to Peter above clearly shows that you misunderstood my point so I felt the need to explain myself. Call me "pseudo-politically correct" all you want, but somehow I don't think a conversation about women locked up in secret tower belongs on this list. At the very least it has nothing to do with the AUR.

Peter Lewis wrote:

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On Saturday 26 Jun 2010 at 01:42 Ng Oon-Ee wrote:

...

On Fri, 2010-06-25 at 17:47 -0400, Andrew Antle wrote:

...

...

I've always been quite proud that the free / open source software world has projects like these:

http://women.debian.org/home/ http://community.kde.org/KDE_Women http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen

I know the comments were just supposed to be a bit of fun, but perhaps they highlight that something like wouldn't be a bad idea in Arch too.

Patches welcome :) , preferably from women actually involved in Arch, not pseudo-politically-correct males trying to make themselves feel better. Absolutely, it would be rather odd and pointless if an Arch-women project were to be started by men. In the absence of any women (really are there none?), of course no patches will be forthcoming. I think the best approach is to simply stop focusing on gender. What difference do gender, ethnicity, age, etc make on the internet? Obviously if you bring it up yourself and make it a part of the interaction then it matters, but if not then it shouldn't even need to be mentioned.

As for project and groups targeted at women, I would expect them to run the risk of leading to some level of seclusion within the community. It's like saying "well, they don't seem to be integrating, so let's provide them with a little niche over there".

I could easily go on, but it would veer too far into politics and is, once again, not appropriate for this list.

Woah, I did not suspect that the closing question of my application would spawn such a discussion. If anything, I was subconsciously expressing my resentment towards the lack of at least partly female people in my areas of interest, packaged in a humorous remark. That's about it. I wasn't trying to make this another heated discussion in the epic proportions of a cdrtools vs. cdrkit debate.

I imagine most ppl took your comments at face value with NO derogarory attitude toward anyone at all. I think most of this (unneed) banter was brought on by subsiquent posts. As far as matching the epic cdrtools vs. cdrkit I don't you have much to worry about.

I don't know whether I was actually being criticized here for those closing words of mine and I hope nobody actually thinks that I objectify girls like that. Believe me, I'd *much* rather have a more balanced gender ratio in my areas of interest.

I CERTAINLY don't see anything here as a neg. criticism of you.

This uneven gender ratio likely is the result of the current expectations of society and the fact that boys and girls are genetically wired to like different things. It is certainly not something we can change by alienating women and putting them into a special place like Arch Women. I think that we are probably the ones *least* at fault, or would anybody here NOT encourage a girl to try to do technical stuff? At any rate, we are too few fix this and we are probably not experienced enough in genetic engineering either.

I apologize if anybody here was actually offended by my words.

We should probably stop this here and now. Can we get back to my awesome application? If any more people want to escalate this, it should probably at least go to arch-general in the next mail.

-- Sven-Hendrik

God that would be nice. The no more or else where part. Good luck on your Voting period.

On 27.06.2010 09:56, Jaroslav Lichtblau wrote:

Hi Sven-Hendrik, I did have a closer look on your AUR PKGBUILDs and this is what came out:

PKGBUILD (csfml) W: Missing Maintainer tag PKGBUILD (irrklang) W: Description should not contain the package name. PKGBUILD (knyttstories-contrib) W: Missing Maintainer tag PKGBUILD (ogre-branch-1.4) E: Use $srcdir instead of $startdir/src PKGBUILD (ogre-branch-1.4) E: Use $pkgdir instead of $startdir/pkg PKGBUILD (ogre-branch-1.4) W: Missing Maintainer tag

Mainly minor things, just the ogre-branch-1.4 needs bigger corrections. This package was probably just adopted by you and not touched yet, according to the contributor lines in the PKGBUILD. It should not be difficult to get it fixed. I also see in few of your package a little longer decription than usual, but I don't see this as a big issue neither. Otherwise I like the overall quality of your packages. 10 installation of Arch? You look like an addict to me :) I just fixed all of those. Yeah, I did indeed not touch ogre-branch-1.4 after adopting it. The old maintainer shot me a mail that he wants me to take over and that the package is not currently broken so I did and didn't touch it yet.

Thanks for the heads-up.

Good luck with your application and I hope you find a girlfriend soon! That's what was your last remark in the application about, correct? Alas! Seen right through me. It's harder than one would think, though. Let's not go there.

-- Sven-Hendrik

On 06/24/2010 09:05 AM, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:

Hey everybody,

I'd like to apply for TU. I tricked Daenyth into sponsoring me. Rocking since 1990 in Germany, I've been using Arch Linux for around two years now and since I seem to stick with it I thought I might as well become TU. I have past experience in Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and DSL as well as a few minor ones (mostly spin-offs). I currently have about 10 Arch installations in all kinds of forms, virtual, chroot, desktop, laptop, incandescent gas.

Whenever I'm not busy trying to create another cdrkit vs. cdrtools flame fest on the mailing list I'm generally trying to be helpful on the wiki, forums, IRC and AUR. I like being pedantic about things like replaces() vs. conflicts() + provides() or $startdir/src vs. $srcdir.

In AUR I currently maintain 66 packages. My most important packages are multimedia/game development related though I tend to package whatever I think it useful or fun. While I'm aware that many Archers consider games wasteful in terms of time investment and disk space, I think the number of votes on my packages still make some of them same valid candidates for [community]. See my awe-inspiring list of packages: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?SeB=m&K=Svenstaro

I'm rather interested in Python and since PyPy might become more important in the future I will continue to take good care of that package.

I'm somewhat involved or at least interested in the upstream development for some of my packages (SFML, Ogre3D, SFML, Gobby, Bullet, Box2D, -gallium). I like trying out new fancy things. I've used all major DEs and a bunch of WMs. I maintain my own live distribution closely based on Arch Linux and archiso (live.linux-gamers.net) and in the process of creating it wrote the archiso article for the wiki.

I care about guidelines and consistency, though I am aware that my AUR packages aren't all fully consistent. Working on that. On LinuxTag 2010, I openly promoted my religion using my Arch shirt together with a fellow Archer. We tried our best to sound like the condescending Arch jerks that we are. Just kidding. We showed-off Arch to quite a few people who were interested, though. We met quite a few unrelated Archers on the fair as well but they didn't seem to have as much Arch-esteem as we did.

Is it true that the secret TU tower is where all the girls are kept?

-- Sven-Hendrik

I just re-read this entire thread (mostly for laughs) and noticed apart from the tower-girls split there has been almost no real discussion of this. Time for a discussion period? Just a suggestion.