Re: [gentoo-dev] gentoo-dev vs lkml?

[Daniel Barkalow]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Grant Goodyear wrote:

> Underlying the draft code of conduct is an assumption that aggressive
> and less-than-nice behavior on gentoo-dev is seriously harming Gentoo.
> On the other hand, LKML is famous for its flamewars, and nobody claims
> that Linux is in serious trouble.  Does anybody have a good feeling for
> where the difference lies?  Are we sure that we're solving the right
> problem?  (That's not a rhetorical question; I really don't know the
> answer.)

One thing that matters a lot is that development mostly goes through the 
list, or is at least reported on it. Even if there's a huge flamewar going 
on, the infiniband patch dump is still more messages. Sure, most people 
don't actually read the infiniband patch sets, but there's this constant 
sense that work is getting done.

Tied into that is the sense that you can win flamewars by posting code 
that's just so good that people can't help but accept it. Or benchmarks 
showing that your version is significantly faster on important things. Or 
that you can eliminate a common class of bugs. Or that you can make a lot 
of code simpler. But, in any case, that flamewars are ultimately decided 
on the technical merit of the code, as judged sort of objectively by 
people widely accepted to have good taste.

Conversely, if somebody's getting work done and posting the results, and 
lots of people are flaming that person, it ultimately doesn't matter, if 
nobody else produces an alternative. If nobody can say how the code should 
be instead of how it's been written, it eventually wins. And people are 
therefore forced to be productive instead of just flaming.

With all the development, it's so high traffic that someone being really 
annoying can be ignored with no more difficulty than the piles of messages 
that just aren't interesting to a particular subscriber. People fight 
about the issues as long as the conversation stays on the issues, but 
personal attacks are generally mostly ignored, because they're low-value 
in how flamewars are scored.

People are willing to be at odds on one issue while working together on 
another issue. Adrian Bunk is maintaining 2.6.16.x, and there have been 
ongoing flamewars over his patch acceptance policy for that series; at the 
same time, he maintains the list of regressions in the latest development 
kernel, and the same people are really grateful for his work in following 
up on bug reports and getting the right issues to the right people's 
attention.

It comes down to this: everybody sees what you post. If you post mostly 
useful stuff, you're taken seriously. If you post mostly flames, you're 
not. If you're taken seriously, your critiques of other people's code 
matter more. If you want to be taken really seriously, you have to make 
constructive comments on other people's code. If your comments are 
sufficiently technically correct, you can flame people and not be ignored.

	-Daniel
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