Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: zlib breakage

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 3:10 AM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 02:49, Duncan wrote:
>> Unfortunately, locking a bug to kill the whining is likely to have rather
>> more negative effects than one might have anticipated.  One would think
>> comment locking would be a logical enough extension to have been
>> implemented by now; perhaps this is why it hasn't been.  (Full visibility
>> locking is of course different, security bugs and all.)
>
> i don't see any negative effects so far.

Well, you can probably count the 22 emails preceding this one, and the
22 that are sure to follow...

User-rel is definitely the appropriate way to handle things like this.
 There are legitimate technical disagreements over the best way to
handle this situation, and I can't approve of Nikos's tendency to
personalize things in the bug.  On the other hand, simply telling him
to get lost is likely to just lead to more flames/etc.

This seems like a bit of a tempest in a teapot - we're not talking
about a glibc ABI change hitting the tree without planning.  A few
obscure packages with questionable practices have broken, and are
being fixed.  We can move on.

The fact is that Mike's attitude does not truly reflect the attitudes
of all developers, and Nikos's attitude does not reflect the attitudes
of all users.  So, going into generalities that amount to devs vs
users is just going to rile a lot of people up.  Gentoo is a
community, and devs benefit from a user pool from which new devs
emerge (and other random contributions), and users obviously benefit
from devs typically at no cost to themselves.  Being on the trustee
list I get to see the countless donations (often small, sometimes not)
coming from the community (no doubt from both devs and users) that let
us have things like rsync servers and the mailing list we're posting
on.  It is really in all of our interests to work together.  Devs on
the infra team spend no small number of hours making it all work, but
it is nice when they need new hardware to just be able to ask and get
a check cut, often due to no small number of users.

Communities also have to have rules, and when users are dissatisfied
with how a developer is handling something there are better and worse
ways to handle it.  Obviously working it out is the best way.  If you
need help with that there is always devrel.  Simply posting flames on
a bug is not the right way to handle it.

But, again, this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot, and hopefully
something we can all think about.

Rich