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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Fri, 7 Apr 2006 09:51:58 +0100 "Christopher O'Neill"
<chris.oneill@×××××.com> wrote:
| Ideally, what I'd like is for the various dev teams to compile a
| weekly status report, which could then be compiled into the weekly
| newsletter (which currently seems to be lacking much useful
| information).  It would be great if we (the users) could find out
| what's going on behind the scenes of our favourite distribution.

The problem with this is... Once someone says "we're working on $x",
they're continuously pestered about it by users asking when it will be
ready. Given how few of us are paid to work specific hours on Gentoo
things, it's very easy for provisional release dates to be missed --
and when half of a developer's time is spent responding to questions
about where $x is and why an early test of $x pulled out of a
supposedly "not for end users" repo broke their system and the other
half is spent writing status updates it's pretty much impossible to get
anything out consistently.

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'.

I mean, as a purely hypothetical example... Could you imagine just how
many dumb feature requests, questions and requests for code from the
unwashed masses someone would get if they admitted to having an early
alpha of an alternative to Portage that didn't require Python? Having
to deal with the noise would be more than enough to ensure that no more
development would ever get done...

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