[gentoo-dev] Re: Cross Post due to technical component - Thanks for all the fish

[Duncan]

james posted on Tue, 06 Dec 2016 22:10:16 -0500 as excerpted:

> Really, for someone like me, it is just best to avoid irc.

FWIW, some 12 years ago now, in 2004, I started using gentoo, with the 
intent of contributing and potentially eventually becoming a dev.

Somewhere along the line but rather early in the process, I read that IRC 
was absolutely required at least for the final interview, and given that 
I too strongly prefer email (or for group communications better yet 
newsgroups, with gmane being that bridge for most mailing lists), I 
decided my contributions, such as they are, can be better made either 
elsewhere, or to gentoo, but without becoming a dev.

Put it this way.  There's a lot of FLOSS projects out there hurting for 
devs, and if some of them throw up entirely artificial barriers that some 
have problems with to the direct repo contribution level when there are 
so many other options that don't, fine, it's their prerogative, but they 
obviously aren't hurting for devs as much as they might claim, if they 
have the luxury of throwing up such artificial barriers to filter some 
potential contributors out.

Much later, likely after some recruiters project changes, someone from 
recruiters clarified that IRC on the final interview isn't actually 
/required/, there might be ways around it in individual cases.  
Apparently it does need to be real-time synchronous for some reason, but 
he suggested that a (VoIP?) phone call or the like could be arranged as 
an alternative.  In theory I could do that.

But by then, while I continued then and continue now to use gentoo as it 
really does seem the best and most flexible scripted build-it-yourself 
distro out there, my enthusiasm for becoming a dev had burned off due to 
finding it simply wasn't an option for so long, and given all the work 
involved, I decided I could simply remain as I was and as I have for now 
over a decade, a gentoo user and contributor on various lists, bugzilla, 
etc, as well as a generally non-coder contributor to a few selected 
upstreams.

Now it seems to be IRC hard-required again.  <shrug>

I do find it a bit ironic, tho, since literally generations of devs have 
come and gone since I started, always with the intent to contribute to 
the best of my ability, back in 2004.  From my perspective, that's a lot 
of additional contributions missed in the decade-plus since then.  
Furthermore, I see little reason I'll not still be gentooing in another 
decade, even three, by which time I'd be turning 80 (I'm turning 50 in 
January), if both gentoo and I are still around by then.  That's a 
lifetime of additional contributions from my perspective needlessly 
missed, but I guess they must not be so desperately needed after all, 
apparently because the quality of contributions from people that don't 
IRC are of significantly enough lower quality that it's simply not worth 
bothering to recruit those folks.  <shrug>

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman