Re: [gentoo-dev] Usefulness of HOMEPAGE=https://www.gentoo.org

[Alec Warner]

On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 9:26 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:

> On Wed, 2019-12-04 at 17:24 +0200, Joonas Niilola wrote:
> > On 12/4/19 5:21 PM, Kent Fredric wrote:
> > > On Wed, 04 Dec 2019 13:36:07 +0100
> > > Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:
> > >
> > > > My point is: gentoo.org as a HOMEPAGE sucks.  Please use something
> more
> > > > specific instead.  Even link to gitweb would be more helpful because
> it
> > > > would at least be relevant to the package in question.
> > > I agree so much I would support the addition of a QA check for this.
> > >
> > I take it you haven't checked the CI results lately? Reaction to that
> > probably spawned this ML thread.
> >
> > https://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/gentoo-ci/output.html
>
> Actually, I've requested that check.  However, I didn't expect that many
> packages to be affected.
>
> Given that it's open season on me lately, and apparently people feel
> offended when bugs are reported for their packages, I've decided to
> start by trying to make people realize the problem globally first.
>

When QA was run by Diego, he suffered some of the same problems. A lot of
this comes down to three factors (IMHO.)

 - Lack of buy-in from developers. When you add a QA thing, you are asking
people to do more work. If they don't agree with the work, they have no
real incentive to do it. I don't see a lot of incentive building here and
so for some efforts adoption of fixes is slow / low. In addition,
expectations are often not set (at all[1]) or not shared with the group
(e.g. QA and the community disagree on the expectation; often in relation
to timelines or end goals.)
 - The above leads to the stick instead of the carrot. Instead of helping
people adhere to the policy and recruiting the community to do the work, QA
takes an adversarial approach where the policy is wielded as a cudgel to
'force' people to do the work. This then leads to the comments like the
above (e.g. "its open season on mgorny") because often forcing people to do
work on a tight timetable does not generate trust or goodwill and
encourages the adversarial relationship between the community and QA.
 - This perception that perfection is required and imperfect packages are
ripe for removal. This again creates this air of anxiety between a package
maintainer and QA where QA can basically invent new reasons to mask
arbitrary[0] packages.

-A

[0] I'm not suggesting this is the intent of the QA team, but it's one
narrative that a non-QA member might have and the QA team is fairly
adversarial and often takes little action to dissuade this narrative from
taking hold.
[1] Some good examples are things like EAPI deprecation
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/aef37db23c862865fffdd24071fce1ec.
You notice that Andreas has articulated some goal (no more EAPI2), has
clearly specified the packages that need work, and has encouraged people to
help achieve the goal. Even the tone is positive. I want to help! This is
different from messaging like "Hey you have 7 days to fix your
EAPI2 packages or I will mask them!". This may encourage me to save my
packages (from the evil QA team) but it doesn't make me love the QA team at
all; it makes me feel negative feelings.


> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>
>