Ok, most of the people who read Kernel Traffic, have already seen this,
but I think this comment of Zack Brown in Issue #100 is worth repeating
here:
=========================
(Zack Brown [*]:
Personally, I think Red Hat is not vocal enough about encouraging
people to participate in development of their distribution. They've
hired some truly amazing people to work on it, but the Red Hat
distro still seems to suffer from a more closed nature than
something like Debian, or the kernel itself.
The only public developer mailing list suitable for actual Red Hat
development, for example, tends to stay fairly low traffic and
off-topic. I count 133 posts for almost the entire month of
December, or 4 to 5 posts a day on average. During the same period,
debian-devel got over 2600 posts, or over 80 per day; while
linux-kernel got over 4300, or over 140 per day -- more per day
than the Red Hat list traffic during the entire month. And of the
Red Hat list traffic, the vast majority were user questions. Only
three posters had redhat.com email addresses, and their
contribution totalled 16 posts. No effort was made to let other
folks know that their posts were off-topic, or to explain what the
true subject of the list actually was. The only reason I found out
is because I asked on the list back in October.
[skipped the October discussion, we've all seen it - A.K.]
Apparently, not much has changed since October. I believe there are
several factors contributing to this. First, it's fairly difficult
even to find this list (took me awhile), and then to know what to
make of it once it's been found. As I saw, many of the list
subscribers didn't know they were on the one-and-only public Red
Hat distro developer list.
Second, even the Red Hat developers don't post much in the way of
ideas about the direction of the project, possible features or new
packages, new patches, etc.; they do respond to bug reports when
any turn up, but as far as any other real development of the Red
Hat distro, the list is empty.
And third -- or perhaps just a summation of the entire problem as I
see it -- there seems to be no real leadership, of the sort the
bazaar requires in order to thrive. No one is encouraged to work on
developing Red Hat. No one has a sense of what sort of work might
be accepted into the distro, and what sort of work would be
unwanted. There is simply a nebulous entity called "Rawhide", and
another nebulous entity called "The Developers". Who are these
developers? The mailing list subscriber list is private. The
developers themselves, with a few exceptions, are never heard from.
The mailing list drags on with no direction. And one day, Red Hat
8.0 comes out.
Some folks might see a hesitation in Red Hat corp. here, and accuse
them of trying to suffocate the developer list, so that all
development discussion could take place entirely in-house, away
from the prying eyes of their competitors. That fear may be the
cause of some of the bitterness against Red Hat found from time to
time on linux-kernel and elsewhere. I don't know what the truth is,
but their current developer list is far from being a pillar of
strength to the free software community.
)
=====================
--
Alexander
Homepage: http://www.sensi.org/~ak/
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