Re: [gentoo-dev] What's it about, anyway?

[Jan Kundrát]

Tobias Klausmann wrote:
> But seeing how things have been deteriorating in the last few
> months, I begin to doubt that that's a good idea.
>
> I'm not pulling the "leave in a huff" card. Gentoo can survive
> without me just fine. But I think it might be illustrative that
> I, as a user seek alternatives due to this completely irrational,
> childish and downright stupid behaviour.
>
> Sure, I'm probably one of the more involved users, but if things
> keep degrading at this pace, the average user will soon notice,
> too. And then they'll run flocks, I guess.
>
> This is not necessarily a "Think of the users!" type of mail.
> More of a "Geez, are you anywhere near realizing what childish
> behaviour your showing to the world?" affair.

Well, you're definitely right. It certainly sucks from the PR point of
view, it could demotivate potential contributors, it's a disaster for
developers. Problem is that neither you nor me can do anything against
it. Nobody can, I'm afraid.

There were some attempts to stop this behavior, Proctors were
established, yet -- as you can see -- this approach simply doesn't work
reliably.

I'm afraid this is just how such a big and heterogenous community (see,
we're a "community", we aren't a company that could fire people when
they turn out to be idiots) works. There's a lot of people out there,
some of them are compensating their social connections over Internet,
others might have just had a bad day at work and jump the gun. They were
raised in different environment, they have different attitude on how to
solve problems, they use different ways to express their feelings. Some
of them are probably considered a bit weird by "normal" people who don't
run free software :).

There's also a lot of people that are more "normal". They usually don't
feel the need to flame on every occasion, they are busy in their real
life, be it at work, at school or with emptying beer bottles. They do
their job in Gentoo in such a way that it is fun for them. And when
there's a flamewar, they ignore the thread/irc/whatever, simply because
they have better stuff to do. Some of them are so busy that they manage
to ignore every flamewar, others have more free time and sometimes
decide they could try to prevent further flaming by asking others to
stop. It's also true that from time to time, some of them got fed up
with all the crap and realize that they've been in Gentoo for too much
time. It's normal, that's just how things happen.

Anyway, I'm not sure whether I managed to express my point in such a way
I originally wanted to when I started typing. I know this could sound a
bit disrespectful to your feelings, but if you feel bad because of "all
this crap", well, try to do something else for some time. Have a beer,
go watch a movie, anything. Perhaps this won't help, well, in that case,
you've probably been around for time that's too long for you. There's
nothing wrong with it, just leave. If you come back after some time
(months, years?), I'm sure you'll find it a pleasure to work on Gentoo
again. Just remember that there are folks who are upset about this crap,
but don't worry too much, and do their job done.

Cheers,
-jkt

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth