Re: [gentoo-dev] Help offered - Portage tree

[Denis Dupeyron]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Fabio Erculiani <lxnay@××××××××××××.org> wrote:
> [02:31] <Halcy0n> lxnay: we offer all of our work that you base your
>  distribution off, and you don't contribute back at all, in any way.
>
>  ^^ This is a really stupid sentence.

While I would agree Halcy0n's statement is slightly exaggerated, it's
somewhat true. There are exactly 26 non-duplicates in our bugzilla
that you either filed or commented on. You have to admit that for
somebody who's been a user for 7 years and who's been "architecting"
(your word) a distribution based on Gentoo for 3 years (or more ?
can't remember) this is a ridiculously low number. How do you want us
to help you if you don't give us any feedback on what you need ? We're
not very good at communicating but we have at least set up some tools
for you to use, and the most important of them in your particular case
is I believe bugzilla. And don't ask us to read you blog, we can't
possibly read everybody's blog. Feedback is part of the game in the
open source world. Gentoo itself gives a lot of feedback to upstream
projects using upstream's communications tools. If you don't play the
game, one thing is sure is that you'll never win.

> It seems some of you don't even
>  realize how many users we brought to Gentoo, and this is really sad.

I'm not sure we should thank you for this. Not that we don't care, but
our aim isn't really to compete against say Ubuntu in the users
department. Some of us are really happy of the success of Sabayon,
there's a place for everybody. We don't make any money out of Gentoo,
and do not intend to. We're only a bunch of volunteers who waste their
free time doing something they think may be needed. It seems you don't
even realize how many users we brought to Sabayon, and this is really
sad.

>  You see, people like Halcy0n, agaffney, zlin keep us away from
>  interacting with you.

I wouldn't agree with you here. But even if you were right, we live in
stupid world and Gentoo doesn't claim to be better than what it's made
of. Note that we're trying to though. But in the end there are always
going to be obnoxious people everywhere. If you give up on the nice
guys because of the bad guys, you lose and the bad guys win. That's
life.

>  If you want to stop bad press, you (all) should firstly become more
>  gentle with users and external contributors.

I'm trying to believe you are not threatening here because *that*
would be stupid. We'd love to be gentle with you. You've just got to
make it happen.

Denis.
-- 
gentoo-dev@l.g.o mailing list