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

[Seemant Kulleen]

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

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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.


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-- 
Seemant Kulleen
Developer, Gentoo Linux

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