I just want to prefix this by saying that I was simply going to ignore your posts in this thread completely due to your obviously inflammatory nature at the beginning. Now that you're posting actual constructive criticisms, I'd like to respond. By the way, thank you for changing your tone to something more productive.
On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 13:26 +0000, Peter wrote: > Having a democratic organization is great. Having a community-run distro > is great. However, it's a little utopian and unrealistic when situations > like this arise. You need a group to lay down the law and establish > control. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a situation where good people > with differing points of view just get fed up and leave the fold. That > would be a loss for everyone. This is something that most of the new council feels needs to be done. Gentoo has been run as an anarchy for far too long. The "leadership" has been pretty far removed from the day-to-day activities for some time. This isn't necessarily the fault of the people in power so much as the failing of all of us. Every single developer is responsible for the situation we now find ourselves in through our inaction and apathy. Let's stop this now and work towards cleaning up our house. > Similarly, you cannot allow certain individuals with little or no standing > to try and dictate what policy vis a vis a proposed project should be. > Otherwise, you end up in a real mess. Dictate, no. Suggest, absolutely. > When new ideas are proposed and developed, gentoo's leadership must be > involved from the beginning. This will head off these 100 thread > flamefests, allow project originators to know where they stand, and allow > those who disagree to know that there is authority. I agree, wholeheartedly. I think that some of the principles under which we are currently running are simply flawed. While putting unnecessary restrictions on projects is definitely not a way to innovate, having no controls, whatsoever, leads to complete anarchy. There are many contributing factors to these problems. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list, but a simple one from the top of my head. - The council is not involved in new projects. - New projects do not undergo a design phase to attempt to add sanity to them prior to their announcement/official status. - Projects do not communicate with each other. - Existing projects are not informed of possible parallels with new projects, resulting in duplication of work, hard feelings, and a lack of good resource utilization. - There are no ramifications against developers who do not follow the decisions made by the council. - The council, even after the recent change to allow meetings outside of the monthly schedule, is limited in its ability to make decisions in q quick and decisive manner. > You cannot allow things to get out of hand like they do. Everyone here > obviously wants to make gentoo better. However, NOT everyone has the right > to do so. NOT everyone has veto power or authority to approve. Correct. The council is nominated and voted on by the developers to represent them. This should give the council the power to do what is necessary to promote Gentoo and to improve Gentoo. > That's what's missing from this process. I think the council has been far > too quiet and policy far too vague which makes new ideas so difficult and > controversial. Agreed. However, the new council has only been official for 11 days, now. Some of us are just now getting the feel of what is involved, and we are discussing possible changes that need to take place. I propose that we start discussing more on #gentoo-council and come forth with some ideas for improvement by the 29th of September (1 week from now) to be brought up at the next meeting and voted upon. > You can't have a socialist model for a business. It simply does not work. > A union cannot run an auto company. You need leadership. Gentoo cannot be > run by 100 developers concurrently (yes, I know there are 300, but how > many of those are actually contributing?). There has to be a chain of > command. Otherwise, you are rudderless. This has been the problem with Gentoo since Daniel left, quite honestly. While things were far from perfect back then, the chain of command was much more defined. Currently, there is no chain, at all. Again, I thank you for the constructive ideas and hope that this spurs some discussion on how the council can act to improve Gentoo. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering Strategic Lead Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee Gentoo Foundation
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