Re: [gentoo-dev] Policy regarding the inactive members

[Zeerak Mustafa Waseem]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 04:04:57PM +0200, Matti Bickel wrote:
> /me puts on his asbestos underwear
>
> Markos Chandras wrote:
> > So the attendance to council meetings  is enough to prove that a member is
> > active? 0_o
>
> Yes. Anything else is just too hard to measure, imo. If you notice a
> council member acting w/o knowing what the heck is going on, then vote
> him down next election.
>
> > place on the mailing list. Because I really doubt that *all* council members
> > are reading the mailing list in daily basis so they get to know everything
> > that is going on to Gentoo.
>
> This is impossible. Council should follow -council and debate points
> pushed onto their agenda via -dev. At least that's my understanding.

But isn't it the councils purpose to lead gentoo? I agree it's damn hard to measure. A thing that could be done is to appoint one person to speak on behalf of the council and to follow -dev. The entire Python-3 stabilization could have used a figure to say that it was to be stabilized or not and state why and what should (and would) be done to prevent the same situation in the future. Imo Gentoo sorely needs a leader. Someone to bring all of these various bodies of gentoo to work together.

> > 2) Fails to accomplish his role by supervising the Gentoo projects.
>
> This isn't even in their domain. I would complain *loud* about any
> council member interfering with projects unless it's an inter-project
> issue. The council is meant for arbitration and vision, not for
> commanding devs.
>

Well, the way I understand it, the council is elected to lead Gentoo. By leading they have to either delegate to someone to supervise Gentoo projects or do it themselves.
It isn't supervision in a "Why is developer X not doing anything" but rather as "This project hasn't moved forward for X months, let's get in touch and hear what's going on and what can be done about and whether or not anything should be done".
Gentoo consists of the projects it works on (and has worked on), leading Gentoo must also mean leading the projects.
 
> Rather than relying on the council for whatever "leadership" you want,
> please just DO something that scratches YOUR itch. I'm aware our current
> technical/social infrastructure is not up to par on handling large scale
> contributions by hundreds of users/non-devs. I realize there's this
> impression that every time you have an idea there's a mob of people
> stoning your idea to death. I have however observed that the more mature
> (read: the more implemented code) your idea is, the smaller the stones.
> And if your idea is good enough, others might use their stones for
> building instead of mud-slinging.
>

But if the council is elected to lead Gentoo, then they are the ones to look at when there is a seeming lack of leadership. I do agree that doing something yourself will always be the first step, but there is no way every developer can keep track of everything that's going on. It seems to me that the need for Gentoo at the moment is, someone who can keep track of the ongoings of Gentoo and make the necessary decisions to further this distribution. A council is a very good idea, but it is a slowly moving process and there needs to be an intermediate person that can do the day to day decisions, and this person would of course take the most important issues (along with anything the individual developers think should be taken care of) to the council for the council to vote on.

I utterly fail to see why there should be any rock throwing. It should not be hard to voice your concerns about an idea without coming off as hostile. Rather than seeing a problem with the idea, one should look for solutions. And on that note I fail to see why flaming occurs, this is a workplace and you don't get into arguments (heated debates yes but not arguments) with your other employers, do you? And even if it is a volountary workplace and it's on the internet, the same courtesy should be shown. I know all of you already know this, but if there's something you think might not be understood in the manner you intend in real life, then it definately won't be understood in the manner you intend on the internet.
And there's something good about that this is on the internet. If you feel like you're starting to get agitated, take a breather, no one will know any better, other than (hopefully) your responce will be that much more relaxed.

As an endnote I should say that I know you're all doing your best here, so keep it up!

-- 
Zeerak Waseem