Fabio Erculiani wrote:
^^ This is a really stupid sentence. It seems some of you don't even realize how many users we brought to Gentoo, and this is really sad.
I'm not sure I understand how exactly you bring people to Gentoo. You bring people to your distribution which is a binary rebuilt of Gentoo, AFAIK. Or do you have a steady stream of users drifting away from Sabayon to Gentoo?
You see, people like Halcy0n, agaffney, zlin keep us away frominteracting with you.
"Us" being you or who exactly? Halcy0n was just trying to understand what exactly are you going to improve.
If you want to stop bad press, you (all) should firstly become more gentle with users and external contributors.> I am not talking to you directly Robin, but to whom are quite annoying and provocative. I know that the majority of you have been always kind, but I will never hang on #gentoo-dev anymore just to be played around giving me voice until I annoy someone with my POV.
Well, I was trying pretty hard last night to hear interesting suggestions from you which could be actually implemented. I have even asked the same questions as Halcy0n did, yet you call him a "bad guy" and not me. That's strange. Anyway, please take your time to read the following and think about it. Perhaps you'll find out that we aren't a group of lazy and angry morons, but a group of people that respect each other and wants to get technical issues solved, but with limited time at hand.
All you said yesterday was "I don't have time to wait till my bugs are fixed, gimme access so that I can fix them myself". As we have been trying to tell you in more than two hours, this is not how things work. In Gentoo, we respect other developers' work, so if we see a flaw in their code, we speak to them about it and don't go blindly fixing stuff without prior chat with maintainers.
Having more than 13k packages in the three, no single person can be expected to know the whole tree well. That's why we are organized into groups and generally talk to each other before fixing bugs. A change you make might have huge impact on packages you haven't ever heard of.
During the chat, you proposed various things like "having a mailing lists where child distributions could send bugreports they find". This is not the way to go. We already have a support channel, the Bugzilla. There is really no way to speed up maintainers' reactions. That doesn't depend on how they get the reports, but entirely on their spare time and motivation.
If you don't like working with bugzilla's web interface, you've been already offered another access vectors to the bugzilla database.
But let me repeat it once again -- if you are worried about maintainers taking "long time" to respond (where "long time" is, by your definition, at about "more than two hours", if I understand you correctly), there's no way I'm aware of that this could be changed. We are just humans who have to sleep, eat, work, date beautiful girls and drink beer. We are not going to abandon any of these just to make the "child distributions" happy, sorry.
I have quite a mixed feelings about your offer, too -- you said you're willing to fix stuff, yet you refuse to file bugs, giving a reason that it "takes time". That doesn't make much sense to me, sorry. If you don't file the bug, the same error will stay in the package, it will propagate to each and every next release and you'll have to fix it over and over again in your code.
This is not a democratic way, let's talk publicly here, without hiding in a development channel, we probably get more visibility, don't we?
I'm afraid I don't fully understand your point here -- Gentoo is not about democracy as in "what majority wants, that happens". If it was such kind of "democracy", we'd have reiser4 as a default filesystem for three years now. In Gentoo, things that happen are things that developers want. If you're bored with that, hey, become a developer and change stuff. Asking us to change the way we work, the process that has worked for many years and that we are happy with, just because it might give some benefits to your distribution, while also causing more work for us, that simply won't happen.
Please, try to think about our reasons. Cheers, -jkt -- cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth
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