> The newest member of Gentoo can have more power to direct the course > of the distro than every oldtimer or council member there is, if they > just contribute more than them.
> If the maintainer of package A or provider of service B is a pain to > work with, all it takes is for somebody else who is easier to work > with to maintain package A or provide service B. Rich, I fully agree with the overall sentiment of the rest of your e-mail, but I think above statements are just not true. For both appropriate and inappropriate reasons. On one hand, if you are new to the project, nobody knows (and trusts) you yet. So, it's definitely not the best idea to immediately propose big plans to reform everything. You talk to people, show that you can handle things, earn trust, and one day some time later noone will complain if you alone properly and carefully handle restructuring the profile tree. On the other hand, except for peaceful and cooperative places (kde team comes to my mind since that's where I "grew up" as a Gentoo dev, but I'm sure there are more examples), if as a newbie you pick the wrong things to work on you might as well immediately retire again- you'll get blocked out by territoriality. If you try to push things, well there's always someone who has the idea to invoke QA or comrel. ["Let's retire him, (he might be making sense but) he's making way too much noise." Luckily, that usually just does't happen.] This has become much better in the recent past, but it's not ideal yet. I would be very glad if all our technical geniuses working deep on the insides of Gentoo were to adopt new devs and teach them the intricacies. I would also be very glad if all our technical geniuses were to participate in IRC and mailing list discussions, so we can learn from them and understand why they do things. Yes I know it is occasionally a waste of time and I can well understand that after X years in Gentoo your enthusiasm for it disappears. No, that does not make it unnecessary. Yes, in my opinion we are scaring off people. No, adapting to all misbehaviour of current contributors is not an option. Noone is irreplaceable. -- Andreas K. Huettel Gentoo Linux developer dilfri...@gentoo.org http://www.akhuettel.de/
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