Re: [gentoo-dev] Spider's Resignation from the Project

[Damian Florczyk]

Seemant Kulleen napisał(a):
> Dear All,
>
> I'm forwarding this on behalf of Spider.  If anyone would like to send a
> message to him, please respond to me privately and I'll forward your
> wishes along.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Seemant
>
> ------- BEGIN
>
> Well, I guess the time has come to say farewell.
>
> Not without a slight taste of bitterness in my mouth as I write this.
> Sadness to see an old bunch of friends in the distance,  reminiscent
> of Samwise standing behind and watching Bilbo, Frodo and his friends
> depart for other shores.
>
> Still, I think its time to tell some history of where we came from.
>
> The project I joined was small, we were... Twelve, I believe.  My
> first additions were some clumsy additions for stuff I was missing
> when transitioning into Gentoo.  Some small tools, backgrounds.
> Nothing fancy, just getting the compiler to work,  some hacks on the
> kernel,  a few tweaks to things here and there.  Work was basically
> down to the "don't screw up" principle,  and if you did , it wasn't
> the end of the world, because all the users were "hackers" and
> developers themselves.   When portage died ( happened about every sync
> or so...)  you fell back and did things manually. Was easier that way
> anyhow.
>
> QA, what was that?
>
> Devrel?  Well, we had IRC, does that count? Later on it was Seemant.
> Seemant doesn't scale very well so he sorta burned out.  Found out
> that drobbins didn't scale very well either, it got hard to keep track
> of things.  At one point I think I was listed as maintainer of about
> 20% of the tree. We were also cause of some of the first really rough
> breakages. libpng incident and others caused us to think some more
> about ABI stability.
>
> People came and started to muck around more, without really knowing
> what they were doing, so we realised we needed another check for it.
> in came the ~x86 nomenclature.  Tagging, Keywords.  Starting to clean
> up the mess that our "one size fits all" USE flags were.
>
> The project grew and we started to get a lot more developers,  far too
> many to know them all even by handle. Things got more organized into
> "teams" "herds" and so on.  It also became a lot more demanding, you
> don't screw up. Fin.   The QA watchdogs were there. I know, I was one
> of them, chasing about stability and quality.
>
> Things also started to take on a more "professional" attitude.   yes,
> in quotations, because we still lacked a clear path, road map, reason
> and function. However, we had "deadlines" that never held, (deadlines
> with volunteers?)  teams started to bicker in between each other,
> "you touched mine"    started to remind you more and more about the
> twins in a long car-ride, bickering about who's fingers were on what
> seat.
>
> Suddenly the apple wasn't just a bit sour when you bit on it, its
> started to take on that sweet tone of rot.
>
> People weren't joking around and doing what was fun, but holding in
> mind some arbitrary product quality that wasn't specified. Different
> groups had different goals and agendas. All from a working system on
> an alpha, to embedded systems and network-wide installations.  We were
> going to fit it all, without much overview.
>
> Through that, people started to lose touch on who does what.  When
> things went strange in glibc you didn't log on and ask Az or me, you
> filed a bug report or contacted the herd.   When mozilla was screwing
> around in the initscripts you didn't commit a fix (no no) but you
> filed a patch and a bug. vs one of the clunkiest implementations in
> history, "bugzilla".
>
> When you had an argument it was more dirt piles and backstabbing than
> work going on, and you ended up with a politicized system of councils
> and committee's to handle the insurgence.
>
> There was the cabal.
>
> And throughout this,  we were still hacking around doing things for fun.
>
> Well,  fun?  I know for me it changed from that. Stopped being hacking
> around for fun to get things to work, turned towards "you must reply
> to these mails.."  "you must fix bugs within <n>days"   and more
> hassling with infrastructure and administration than doing work.
>
> Somewhere along the line it changed too much. Got too complex and
> complicated.  We're still in that mess.
>
> A typical example of the institutionalisation of the project is myself.
>
> Had anyone just bothered to send me an email I would have replied.
> "no, he's gone, terminate the account."    that part works.
>
> But.
>
> You could have told me.
>
> Since we're now so fond of bureaucracy, I'll add the following:
>
> I retain copyright of all works committed to the Gentoo foundations
> CVS repository,  the license remains as GPL v2, and you have my full
> permission to continue to use it.   Texts and guides written and/or
> co-authored by me will be treated the same way.  (No, I never signed a
> copyright transfer to the project)
>
>
> So long, thanks for all the fish.
>
> And, remember. Give the kids in the back something to do and they will
> stop bickering.
>
>
Damn, he hit a point. Everything has changed since there was just few
developers and just a bit more users around. But I think that is the way
of growning projects from fun to responsiblity. Is it good? Well it's
hard to say. I hope that discussion will be best to resolv this problem.

-- 
Damian Florczyk
Gentoo/NetBSD Development Lead
-- 
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