Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Kurt Lieber]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 12:39:05AM -0500 or thereabouts, Alec Warner wrote:
>  I think some people have attempted things that are interesting or
> innovative, although they may not have gotten off of the ground quite
> yet.

That's the problem.  Lots of folks have great ideas.  Our execution sucks,
though.  We also have projects working against each other (or, at least,
not in step with each other) 

> The Gentoo Installer is an interesting project, not only for the
> graphical frontend, but for the Distro-sponsored Network installer that
> is being worked on.

I agree, but it's been "in development" for...I dunno..almost two years now
I think and it's still not released.  I'm not slamming the -installer team
-- I think they're a great bunch of guys, but it does point to our
inability to execute.

> The Portage project has some cool stuff coming up.  I realize that the
> 2.X codebase scares a lot of people away due to it's nature but recently
> there has been a lot more active development in features and planning.

Again, lots of talk, some code, but nothing we can point to and say, "look!
see that?  We did that!!" and be proud of it.

> Plus there is code in the savior branch to do some "interesting" things :)

> > adhere to the decisions and, if they don't, invite them to find other
> > opportunities for their creative outlet.
> This sounds to me like "if they don't like it then send them on their
> merry way"  which is kind of a bad attitude IMHO.

This is a harsher way of saying it, but yes, it's exactly what I mean.  I
couldn't disagree more strongly that it's a bad attitude, however.

> You can't really say "well your interest is useless so work on something
> else instead" and expect them to comply.

No, but you can say, "this is the direction we've decided to go in.  We'd
love to have you as part of the team, but if you want to go a different
direction, please take a copy of the source code, along with our blessings
and we wish you the best of luck."

It's great to tinker and experiment with new things, but at some point,
those tinkerings will have interdependencies on other parts of the project.
People will need/want features added to <foo> in order for them to be able
to continue.  If those features don't adhere to the overall direction that
has been chosen for the project, then they're taking time and resources
away from that direction, regardless of who does the actual coding.

--kurt