On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > >> 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.
Well, I also get what you're saying, but I'm not sure that this is the best place to draw the line... > > 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. Well, nothing is ever ideal, but as issues come up they are being dealt with now. I can't think of any situations where somebody has been able to block out new contributors in the last year or two. Sure, there have been a few attempts, but we've squashed them. There is a lot we can do in the case of territoriality. In such a case we have somebody who is contributing, and all we need to do is declare that their contributions are to be accepted. There really is nothing anybody can do to stop somebody from contributing except reverts/etc, and doing that after the council establishes policy is going to lead to losing commit privs. Fortunately, it hasn't come to that in quite a while. I think that when push comes to shove people who are standing in the way come to appreciate the situation they're trying to promote. However, this is not really the same sort of situation. If somebody was trying to submit their own tinderbox bugs and Diego was telling them that he alone is allowed to run a tinderbox, then that would be territoriality. Such a move would really be silly though - people build stuff and submit logs in bugs all the time, and a tinderbox is just doing that on a larger scale. Likewise, if somebody was offering Mike patches to fix the bugs Diego is reporting and Mike was unjustifiably turning them away, or especially if he was combative with other devs willing to support those patches (and the patches were reasonable), then that too would be territoriality, and all we need to do is get Mike to stand aside. Neither of these hypotheticals really pertains here. Diego isn't stopping anybody else from submitting bugs in whatever format they wish, and Mike isn't preventing anybody from fixing bugs. Their actual technical contributions in these cases are net-positive, or near-zero at worst (a dev closing a bug that they aren't obligated to fix doesn't actually harm anybody unless somebody else was going to come along and fix it). Socially it would be nice if we could all compromise, but that is harder to deal with. It looks like axs has a workaround nearly ready which is likely to make this issue somewhat moot. I do agree that nobody is indispensable. If there are specific situations that really stress people to the point of quitting I would like to hear about them BEFORE people throw in the towel. In the end, though, we do want to have a distro and not just a polite mailing list, and that means that we need to appreciate everybody's (often-silent) positive contributions, and not just focus on their role in some recent conflict. -- Rich
