Re: [gentoo-dev] The Gentoo Developer Handbook - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[Grant Goodyear]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote: [Mon Jul 19 2004, 02:20:24PM EDT]
> * The ability to arbitrarily suspend or remove developers (without
> providing notice or reason to the people who actually work with the
> developer in question).

I would agree that devrel has a responsibility to provide notice and/or
reason to the developer in question, but it's not clear to me that the
developer's team needs to be kept apprised of any details other than
"developer foo has been suspended / removed".  Removing or suspending a
dev is fairly rare, and generally due to some sort of egregious
behavior, so a notice saying "dev foo will be suspended / removed a week
from tuesday" seems unlikely.  

> * The ability to decide to change the mentor for a new developer without
> even bothering to tell the original mentor, let alone providing a reason
> to the people involved.

I don't see anything about mentoring in the policy guide, although I
agree that it would be nice to have something in there.  That said, if
this behavior has happened in the past, then I think something went
drastically awry.  Please, when something like this happens, either
e-mail devrel@g.o or ombudsman@g.o.  We can't fix problems
when we don't know about them.

> * The ability to impose arbitrary restrictions upon what developers are
> and are not allowed to say on IRC and the mailing lists.

To the best of my knowledge, these "arbitrary restrictions" are neither
new nor restrictions.  (The beginning of the etiquette portion of the
doc pretty clearly states that the poorly-termed "rules" are not
mandates but strong suggestions.)  Since at least the time that I joined
#gentoo-dev has been a clean-language channel, and we have always asked
people with voice or ops in that channel to be reasonably polite.
Surely we can also all agree that kicking / banning people just for the
fun of it is a bad idea?

> I'm sure devrel aren't actively out to set themselves up as the new
> spanish inquisition. However, it seems I'm not the only one that's
> noticed them moving from a "helping developers" role to "policing
> developers" instead, and I'd like to know what devrel's stance on this
> is. Come to think of it, I remember a certain former manager bringing
> this exact point up shortly before he left.

I think you'll find that, in general, devrel is lousy at policing devs.
My experience has been that devrel does not normally get involved until
somebody has gone to the effort of actually complaining to devrel about
something.  At that point devrel is obligated to investigate and try to
solve the problem, all with at least a modicum of privacy for any devs
involved.  It's an imperfect system, to say the least, which is why
there is also an ombudsman office.

The way I see it, anything mentioned in this doc is fair game for
discussion.  The policy guide is _not_ a constitution, it's a guide.  If
you don't agree with something in it, by all means provide an
alternative for discussion.

Best,
g2boojum
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@g.o
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76