Re: [gentoo-dev] tentative x86 arch team glep

[Stuart Herbert]

On Sun, 2005-09-04 at 14:16 -0500, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> *  Having bodies on x86@g.o is just the starting point.  The
>    more difficult part will be convincing people that it is in their
>    best interests to do things this way.  Similarly, what do we do with
>    devs who refuse?  All of those issues still remain to be worked out.

Depends on how many refuse I guess ;-)  There doesn't seem to be much
sign of any opposition to the concept so far.  We have an elected
council now; if the council approves the plan, and devs refuse to follow
it, the devs should resign or be ejected.  Otherwise, what's the
point? :)

I'd be more worried about the impact on users.  From a user's point of
view, x86 is a fast-moving arch, where you can normally find an up to
date package, and where most of the major packages are actively and well
maintained by the package maintainers.  The introduction of the x86 arch
team will, at some point, turn the x86 arch team into a bottleneck (just
like all the other arch teams already are), and the experience for our
users will change.  Our challenge as a project is make sure that the
benefits of the x86 team outweigh the negatives in the right places, so
that we don't lose our users in the process.

If the introduction of an x86 arch team results in a lot of pain for our
users, it's going to hurt us as a project, and reduce our standing in
the wider community.

Your GLEP currently doesn't cover this risk, or provide a robust plan
for mitigating it :(

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                         stuart@g.o
Gentoo Developer                                  http://www.gentoo.org/
                                              http://stu.gnqs.org/diary/

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