Re: [gentoo-dev] Help offered - Portage tree

[Jan Kundrát]

Fabio Erculiani wrote:
> ^^ This is a really stupid sentence. It seems some of you don't even
> realize how many users we brought to Gentoo, and this is really sad.

I'm not sure I understand how exactly you bring people to Gentoo. You 
bring people to your distribution which is a binary rebuilt of Gentoo, 
AFAIK. Or do you have a steady stream of users drifting away from 
Sabayon to Gentoo?

> You see, people like Halcy0n, agaffney, zlin keep us away from
> interacting with you.

"Us" being you or who exactly? Halcy0n was just trying to understand 
what exactly are you going to improve.

> If you want to stop bad press, you (all) should firstly become more
> gentle with users and external contributors.> I am not talking to you
> directly Robin, but to whom are quite annoying and provocative. I know
> that the majority of you have been always kind, but I will never hang
> on #gentoo-dev anymore just to be played around giving me voice until
> I annoy someone with my POV.

Well, I was trying pretty hard last night to hear interesting 
suggestions from you which could be actually implemented. I have even 
asked the same questions as Halcy0n did, yet you call him a "bad guy" 
and not me. That's strange. Anyway, please take your time to read the 
following and think about it. Perhaps you'll find out that we aren't a 
group of lazy and angry morons, but a group of people that respect each 
other and wants to get technical issues solved, but with limited time at 
hand.

All you said yesterday was "I don't have time to wait till my bugs are 
fixed, gimme access so that I can fix them myself". As we have been 
trying to tell you in more than two hours, this is not how things work. 
In Gentoo, we respect other developers' work, so if we see a flaw in 
their code, we speak to them about it and don't go blindly fixing stuff 
without prior chat with maintainers.

Having more than 13k packages in the three, no single person can be 
expected to know the whole tree well. That's why we are organized into 
groups and generally talk to each other before fixing bugs. A change you 
make might have huge impact on packages you haven't ever heard of.

During the chat, you proposed various things like "having a mailing 
lists where child distributions could send bugreports they find". This 
is not the way to go. We already have a support channel, the Bugzilla. 
There is really no way to speed up maintainers' reactions. That doesn't 
depend on how they get the reports, but entirely on their spare time and 
motivation.

If you don't like working with bugzilla's web interface, you've been 
already offered another access vectors to the bugzilla database.

But let me repeat it once again -- if you are worried about maintainers 
taking "long time" to respond (where "long time" is, by your definition, 
at about "more than two hours", if I understand you correctly), there's 
no way I'm aware of that this could be changed. We are just humans who 
have to sleep, eat, work, date beautiful girls and drink beer. We are 
not going to abandon any of these just to make the "child distributions" 
happy, sorry.

I have quite a mixed feelings about your offer, too -- you said you're 
willing to fix stuff, yet you refuse to file bugs, giving a reason that 
it "takes time". That doesn't make much sense to me, sorry. If you don't 
file the bug, the same error will stay in the package, it will propagate 
to each and every next release and you'll have to fix it over and over 
again in your code.

> This is not a democratic way, let's talk
> publicly here, without hiding in a development channel, we probably
> get more visibility, don't we?

I'm afraid I don't fully understand your point here -- Gentoo is not 
about democracy as in "what majority wants, that happens". If it was 
such kind of "democracy", we'd have reiser4 as a default filesystem for 
three years now. In Gentoo, things that happen are things that 
developers want. If you're bored with that, hey, become a developer and 
change stuff. Asking us to change the way we work, the process that has 
worked for many years and that we are happy with, just because it might 
give some benefits to your distribution, while also causing more work 
for us, that simply won't happen.

Please, try to think about our reasons.

Cheers,
-jkt

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth