Introduction

Greetings,

I subscribed to the list a while back, but I don't believe I ever got
around to introducing myself.

My name is Chris Larson, but am most well known as Kergoth.  I work in
the embedded Linux field.  I've done work on bootloaders, kernel,
userland, distro, build tools, etc.  I founded the OpenZaurus Linux
distro for the Sharp Zaurus line of PDAs, and created the OpenEmbedded
project, which was originally a portage fork.  It exists because I got
tired of gmake's limitations, and all of the existing distribution
tools were limited, either lacking crosscompilation support, or
expected to run the tools only -on- that distribution.  I wanted a
tool that would run anywhere, and could target any platform, and
support multiple target packaging formats and distributions.  The
metadata repository is shared by multiple embedded distributions and
projects, so in that aspect, the goal was quite similar to that of
vcs-pkg.. collaboration.

I've hacked on debian packages and tools, redhat packages and tools,
and gentoo packages and tools, but never got around to pursuing
actually becoming a developer for any (I know just how much time a
distro can suck up..).

Most of the OE target distros are debian based, as I found most debian
distributionisms (I say that's a word, dangit) to be superior to
redhat ones, and more stable than gentoo ones (i.e. interfaces(5)),
though there are obvious exceptions.  OE can output ipk, deb, or rpm
files.  Originally it could take either our metadata format or a
source rpm as input (with a metadata conversion layer), but I doubt