Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo: growing pains & the future.

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:21:24 +0000
"Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@g.o> wrote:
> - Would EVERY developer please start acting professionally in all
> fora?

The word "professionally" is a dangerous one due to its many
interpretations. Would you say that concealing problems, downplaying
bugs, not admitting to large-scale problems and attempting to keep
issues private is professional? Transparency and honesty aren't exactly
hallmarks of professional development, since good PR and lawyers are
usually cheaper than delivering a good product.

Looking at it another way, do you believe Gentoo should be aiming to
deliver a good product to gain a good public image, or should it be
looking at getting a good public image?

<repositioning for convenience>
> "If I said $X to my boss or underlings at work, would I get fired or
> sued for abuse or harassment?"

If you publicly admitted to a horrible data loss bug at work that your
boss thought could be covered up, blamed on user error etc, would you
get fired or sued?

> We "solve" this, we tried to add the Ombudsman, CoC, Proctors,
> Developer Relations, User Relations (later also Community Relations),
> but they were primarily punitive measures. Many of these were
> founded/developed by the Council, as extensions beyond the
> pre-existing devrel role (yes, it predates council).
>
> NONE of those measures really worked, many of them caused more dissent

The failure is because ultimately, Gentoo was focusing upon the wrong
thing. At the time, Gentoo had an awful lot of middle management, PR
and HR, and practically nothing in the way of technical innovation. The
result was a large focus upon "building a community" (mostly comprised
of vocal forums users who did not use Gentoo). Again, the community is
something that should come about as a result of a good product, not
something that should be built at the expense of a product.

This hasn't improved, either. Gentoo still can't deliver non-trivial
technical changes. There's no tree signing. There's no Git migration.
There's no proper overlay support. There are no major fixes to the
ebuild format. There's no proper cross compiling or multilib. There are
no "optional" dependencies. There's no proper SCM package support.
There's no VDB replacement.

Gentoo doesn't have growing pains. It stopped growing a long time ago.
What it has is a crippling inability to make improvements. Trying to
build a community on top of that is only making the problem worse. The
focus should be upon reversing the stagnation, and using a better
distribution as a way of getting healthier interactions.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh