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On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote: |
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> Hell no, but ... |
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> |
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> We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way. |
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> Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were |
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> users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead. |
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|
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So what are _you_ doing to make it better? |
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|
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> For example: |
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> - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental |
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> overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the |
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> hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist. |
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> Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just |
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> take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the |
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> hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported any |
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> longer. |
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With Zorry we just got a new recruit for working on hardened things, |
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especially toolchain. It's not as dead as you make it sound ... |
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|
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|
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> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained, |
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> but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but |
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> also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a |
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> documentation wiki, but ... |
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yeah, as long as no one just creates a wiki there won't be one. People |
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are waiting on other people, who are waiting for Godot. Just do it. |
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|
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I remember the long and whiny road to get a blog aggregator - what |
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killed the waiting deadlock was simply karltk setting up one (unofficial |
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etc.etc.) and suddenly people saw that it was good. |
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|
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> - Understaffed herds: For example net-mail, netmon and others - were |
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> missing lots of developers and their support in lots of areas. Sadly |
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> those areas are mostly those ones, one might need packages for their |
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> business servers from. |
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And still, when someone tries to fix things in such an understaffed herd |
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people go all territorial and are like "omg u touched my package". |
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Right now I'm quite confused what our project strategy seems to be, as |
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far as I can tell there's one group aiming for an aesthetical optimum |
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and the other group just wants to get things fixed. And they are not |
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cooperating well ... |
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|
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> So - what to do now? |
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For me it's simple. I try to |
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- dedicate time to fixing things. Takes lots of time, can be demotivating |
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- try to motivate and recruit new users - hard to motivate them, and |
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with our current recruiting setup it's hard to keep them motivated |
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- not get demotivated by the "OMG it's all bad" attitude some people radiate |
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|
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And don't just start discussing how to discuss things. That's not going |
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to work. You'll end up with a pretty specific plan how to discuss the |
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whole thing, then get bored and not discuss it at all. |
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|
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Just start fixing things. Set yourself some personal goals (do on |
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average one commit a day? fix one bug a day?) and try to reach them. If |
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you do, set yourself some new goals. |
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|
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I have found some pretty amazing proxy-maintainers in the last weeks, |
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there's quite a lot of progress happening. There's still lots of |
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potential, but most people only start interacting with us once we have |
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started to show some activity. |
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|
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Right now we might be in a not-that-excellent position, but it won't |
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just go away. It needs all of us to _do_ something. |
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|
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wkr, |
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|
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Patrick |