Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Improving Gentoo User Relations

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 15:19:35 +0100 Christel Dahlskjaer
<christel@g.o> wrote:
| So, from a developer pov Ciaran; if we could come up with some way of
| keeping up to date with what you guys do (without eating up any of
| your time or getting in your way) and then keep the masses informed,
| would that be more attractive? Obviously making sure that information
| is kept to a not exactly bare minimum, but presented in such a way
| that it doesn't in any way halt progress or potential change of
| direction? 

If it's information on things that are fine being public but aren't
simply because of lack of time to write them up, then that would be
great. If it's things that're being kept quiet purposefully, however,
then the last thing we want is to start telling people things.

| > Hence why some of us don't announce non-trivial projects on public
| > mailing lists, and instead keep any discussion on -core and sekrit
| > IRC channels. That's how what's now known as eselect was developed,
| > and it turned out far nicer than the XML-laden aborted gentoo-config
| > project precisely because of the lack of end user 'input'.
| 
| In more of a informative 'these are the exciting things we're doing'
| sort of way rather than a 'tell us why you disagree' sort of way
| maybe.

See, that doesn't work. There's this strange notion that because we're
open source, users somehow have a right to a) see the code, b) make
suggestions, c) demand new features, d) get support and e) annoy other
developers or upstream when they break something that has a knock-on
effect of breaking an unrelated package.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Wearer of the shiny hat)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm