[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo World Domination. a 10 step guide

[Duncan]

"Thomas Cort" <linuxgeek@×××××.com> posted
3b09e8e90610040844y400d744bpb3c4e4b41b56fdeb@××××××××××.com, excerpted
below, on  Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:44:07 -0400:

> My view is that currently we cannot offer the same level of support
> for the minority arches as the majority arches because we don't have
> enough people involved. I think that spreading the developers too thin
> leads to conflict and burnout. Look at NetBSD and debian. They are
> trying to be everything for everyone. How is that working for them,
> how is it working for us? I think we should be more focused, but
> that's just my opinion.

There are two separate problems with simply removing them, however.

One, it has already been mentioned that the minority archs don't tend to
be the bottleneck, so removing them isn't likely to help.  In addition,
the minority archs don't bother anyone not on them, except for maintainers
looking to dump old versions, and that could arguably be better and more
directly addressed with a policy of time-limitting the holdup effect -- if
there has been no updates on a keyword bug in (say) 90 days, dropping the
last arch or ~arch keyworded version is allowed.

As it's related, it should be pointed out that simply forcing every dev
onto at least one arch team isn't going to help much either -- as long as
Gentoo is staffed by volunteers, you aren't going to be able to force them
to do anything substancial on a team they aren't voluntarily on anyway,
and all the inactive arch-team devs will only hide the problem. 
Additionally, that was the de facto situation with x86 previously, and it
simply didn't work.

Two and potentially far worse, you have the demotivation problem.  Picking
on a rather active dev as a prime example, Flameeyes' Gentoo/alt-freebsd
is certainly a minority arch, one that he spends a decent amount of time
on that could arguably be spent on more mainline projects.  Yet he remains
very active in other areas as well, and simply telling him to packup his
Gentoo/fbsd project as it's not wanted would be incredibly demotivating,
and could eventually cause us to lose him and all the stuff he does for
the /rest/ of the tree (a quite a lot, from where I sit as a user, and
I'm very likely missing the largest share of it).  That's not even
counting how his work on Gentoo/FBSD has improved the quality of the tree
for everyone, including those like me who have no direct interest in FBSD
at all.  Flameeyes isn't the only one.  If you shut down all the minority
archs and projects, you demotivate some of our best and brightest, and
will very likely eventually lose them.

-- 
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

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