1 |
On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Peter Stuge <peter@×××××.se> wrote: |
2 |
> less idiotic |
3 |
> idiots such as perhaps myself need years because we're doing |
4 |
> whatever work as opposed to learning foundation bylaws by heart. |
5 |
|
6 |
Well, I don't think the bylaws are a terribly important topic for the |
7 |
quizzes, and unless something has changed I don't think they were a |
8 |
topic in the past. Sure, developers should understand the role of the |
9 |
council and the trustees, but that doesn't mean that they need to be |
10 |
qualified to BE a trustee. |
11 |
|
12 |
However, I think that it is important to include a fair bit of "meta" |
13 |
in the quizzes. In fact, I'd consider this almost more important than |
14 |
the technical content. A developer who doesn't understand some nuance |
15 |
of ebuild development, and recognizes this, and therefore acts with |
16 |
maturity in asking for help and review before doing commits isn't much |
17 |
of a danger to the distro. A developer who is a technical wizard and |
18 |
creates bots that do massive tree-wide commits to correct some |
19 |
perceived problem without gaining consensus from the community is a |
20 |
danger to the distro, even if most of the time they are completely |
21 |
right. I think it is more important that a developer be able to work |
22 |
with others and recognize their own limitations, than to worry about |
23 |
what those limitations are exactly. |
24 |
|
25 |
When I look at most of the issues impacting Gentoo over the years, |
26 |
rarely are they caused by some bug in an ebuild. They happen, and |
27 |
they get fixed, and usually the impact is very minor. |
28 |
|
29 |
What really causes havoc around here is when people change ebuilds |
30 |
without consulting with the maintainer, or when they go tweaking |
31 |
system packages without a great deal of care and being part of the |
32 |
appropriate team, and so on. Lack of respect on mailing lists has |
33 |
caused no small number of problems either. Many of these issues have |
34 |
dwindled in recent years, and I think it is precisely because teams |
35 |
like the recruiters have been paying more careful attention to them. |
36 |
|
37 |
Anybody can write good code. You don't need to be a Gentoo developer |
38 |
to do that, and if somebody lacks maturity and social skills they're |
39 |
probably better off doing their work on the side with a proxy |
40 |
maintainer pulling it in. Calchan had both, and he still ended up |
41 |
being more successful with OpenRC from the outside. The KDE team has |
42 |
in the past made use of bleeding-edge portage (or even non-portage) |
43 |
features in overlays for development purposes, driving PM development |
44 |
in the distro to yield an improved result when everything got merged |
45 |
back in. The bottom line is that you don't need commit access to do |
46 |
great things with and for Gentoo. |
47 |
|
48 |
What the Gentoo devs really need to be about is making all that great |
49 |
code work nicely together. That requires coordination and an eye to |
50 |
quality. That requires working well with those who differ in opinion. |
51 |
|
52 |
That said, I don't want to diminish the importance of technical skills |
53 |
too much. I think Gentoo has created some really good infrastructure |
54 |
that rivals what has been done with much larger distros. |
55 |
|
56 |
Rich |