Re: [gentoo-dev] more help needed with gcc-4.8 stabilization, chromium starts heavily using C++11

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 11:38 AM, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
>
> But there will be no improvement if we don't take such issues more
> seriously. I don't really see that happening. It's something the
> oldtimers have more power over than the council.
>

In a community project, the folks with power are those doing the work.
The newest member of Gentoo can have more power to direct the course
of the distro than every oldtimer or council member there is, if they
just contribute more than them.

If the maintainer of package A or provider of service B is a pain to
work with, all it takes is for somebody else who is easier to work
with to maintain package A or provide service B.

In the absence of this, the only thing the Council can do is ask infra
to revoke somebody's commit/bugzilla/whatever access, which basically
leaves us in the same place that we'd be if folks quit, but I suppose
with the emotional satisfaction of being the one pushing everybody
around.

So, I'm more than happy when somebody steps up like axs and volunteers
to start converting links to attachments, or when somebody steps up to
take care of some @system package that only has one maintainer.

Otherwise, the best the council can really hope to do is keep
everybody out of each other's way, and we do that reasonably well.
After the last flare-up like this the Council voted that anybody can
maintain games without making them a part of the games herd.  So,
there are no barriers, but that isn't going to magically make a bunch
of games show up in the tree.  A year ago the Council voted that
maintainers have to stay out of the way if the systemd team wants to
add units to packages, and while it wasn't an issue the same would be
true about anybody wanting to add an openrc init.d script to a
package.  That doesn't magically make units or init.d scripts show up,
but it clears away blockades.

At some point when behavior is egregious you have to say enough is
enough, but somebody simply being unwilling to fix a bug or perform a
free service for Gentoo isn't really an offense in and of itself - we
get far more noise from the quarterly systemd flamewar.  Personally,
I'd prefer less drama, but this is the distro which was among the
first to support systemd, and the only one (AFAIK) to make eudev an
option.  If we're going to be about choice, then to some extent we
need to deal with the natural conflict that leads to.  Hopefully we
can all see that we're better off giving an inch so that we can reap
the benefits of each other's contributions...

--
Rich