Re: [gentoo-project] Council discuss: overlapping council terms of two years

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
> Right, exactly what I am saying. A single developer has to put his
> effort to push things forward. Last time I remember something similar
> was when Ben (yngwin) tried to introduce changes and he was "forced" to
> retirement. Awesome. You know very well that if a single person tries on
> his own to change things, he will lose motivation sooner or later.

So, here's the thing.  If a huge number of devs are against an idea,
then it is probably best NOT to approve it unless it is just a matter
of bikeshedding.

What is the alternative?  One guy wants to make a huge change to
Gentoo.  Most don't agree.  Democratically elected council is thus
unlikely to back it.  Instead suppose we have a dictator for the year
or whatever and he happens to support it, so he issues an edict that
the one guy is the prophet for this year.

The result is that most people either end up ignoring the prophet and
the dictator and doing their own thing.  Or, maybe the prophet and
dictator manage to kick out half the devs who then just fork the
project.  Either way the initiative fails.

The only way you're going to succeed in an initiative like this with
everybody in opposition is to show true leadership and win people
over.  You don't need to be elected to do that.  If we're just talking
about a few hold-outs than I doubt that the current system would
prevent progress.

Let's look at the whole /usr thread.  It started out with lots of
shock and general opposition with one or two guys pushing for a
change.  They than brought forward arguments and I'd judge from recent
comments that they won over a good chunk of the dev population - now
we're just haggling about the how and not arguing so much over to-FHS
or not to-FHS.  By the time the council is asked to do anything (if
they even need to get involved) there will probably be a clear
majority consensus.  That's how you drive change.

If you can't win over a lot of devs then trying to force change is
likely to end you in X11R6 land.

Rich