[CentOS-devel] Please allow me to introduce myself...

Howdy.

I've recently had the desire to get more involved in the CentOS community --
both from professional and personal interests.  So, please allow me to introduce
myself to both CentOS folks, and to storage folks in particular.

I have two goals, really: (1) make sure that Ceph upstream builds from scratch
on aarch64 and ppc64le; that also means making sure that initial tests (i.e.,
make check) pass and that ultimately the full test suite passes; (2) make sure
that the CentOS packages are as close to upstream as possible.

For the first goal, the idea would be to work with upstream or anyone else to
fully support more than just x86, even for development work.  That's going to
take a while since I'm new to the Ceph community but eager to join in; I've
spent several years working with file systems and look forward to growing that
knowledge.

For the second goal, I would hope to be able to assist the current maintainer
for Ceph packages and broaden the availability of Ceph.  Since I'm really just
getting started on the upstream work, I haven't jumped into this part yet.  By
the same token, though, I do have some experience as a Debian Developer and as
a Fedora Packager that could be of use.

I've also got the same goals for Fedora (eventually), and I am approaching it
the same way -- make sure upstream is solid and stable on all architectures, and
then make sure the packages are as up-to-date as they can be.

As far as my personal background goes, I was literally a rocket scientist for a
while, working on guidance algorithms for the flight systems.  I've also been
involved with Linux on some level for about two decades.  The last few years
have seen a lot of kernel work on ARMv8 (I drove the implementation of the ACPI
subsystem for servers), and before that a port of the BSD file system to a
proprietary OS that had to support asynchronous operations but had no real
concept of processes or even tasks.  Before that was a smattering of all sorts
of things -- compiler work, tech support, technical consulting, the Andrew file
system, the NCS (Network Computing System -- that probably dates me some :), and
even some management (I swear I have fully recovered from that).

Thanks for your time and patience in getting this far; I look forward to working
with the community and helping to build a better CentOS.

-- 
ciao,
al
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Al Stone
Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.
ahs3 at redhat.com
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