Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Re: Bugzilla handling for maintainer-wanted things
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 23:10:39
Message-Id: pan.2005.08.20.23.02.35.801713@cox.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Bugzilla handling for maintainer-wanted things by "Nathan L. Adams"
1 Nathan L. Adams posted <43074CD2.7080505@××××.org>, excerpted below, on
2 Sat, 20 Aug 2005 11:31:30 -0400:
3
4 > Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
5 >> On Sat, 20 Aug 2005 10:03:18 -0400 "Nathan L. Adams" <nadams@××××.org>
6 >> wrote:
7 >> | Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
8 >> | > No, I'm saying that having a 'team lead' throw some arbitrary stamp
9 >> | > of approval upon bug closures is worthless.
10 >> |
11 >> | So you're problem isn't with the peer review I'm proposing but instead
12 >> | quality of work of the team leads?
13 >>
14 >> Not at all. I'm saying that a) most 'team leads' will not do proper
15 >> checks because they don't have time to and b) the limited time that
16 >> 'team leads' have is better spent elsewhere.
17 >
18 > I really am curious here:
19 >
20 > a) What are the team leads spending most of their time on?
21 > b) What is more important than improving the code?
22
23 Not to sound harsh, but...
24
25 I think what many users lose sight of is the fact that 100% of the Gentoo
26 developer team, INCLUDING the team leads, are unpaid volunteers.
27
28 What most of the team leads, and what everyone else involved, spend most
29 of their time on, therefore, is *REAL* *LIFE*! A wife, a husband, kids,
30 THOSE are "more important" (or /should/ be) than "improving the code". A
31 job, good grades at the uni, THOSE are more important than "improving the
32 code".
33
34 Are you a Mark Shuttleworth? Do you have a few million dollars sitting
35 around to fund your little distribution? If so, go to it, but it's not
36 going to be Gentoo, because Gentoo is a community distribution. Part of
37 what makes it what it is, is the volunteer efforts of all that pitch in.
38 If you changed that by sponsoring it, paying for development, it would
39 cease to be the Gentoo most of us know and love. (Look up the Zynot fork
40 for more on that.) If you don't have that few million, then perhaps a bit
41 more understanding of the nature of volunteer efforts is in order. This
42 is /not/ to say there isn't room in the open source community for the
43 Ubuntus of the world, because obviously there is. However, Ubuntu is
44 /not/ Gentoo; Gentoo is /not/ Ubuntu. Again, that's been tried before.
45 Go take a look at Zynot.
46
47 So... we are left with a situation in which every contributor is a
48 volunteer, taking a bit of time here, a bit of time there, to pitch in and
49 make their little corner of Gentoo better. One characteristic of
50 working with volunteers is that the volunteers get to decide what they
51 spend time on. Most of the developers, it would seem, choose to spend
52 their time directly involved with the code, developing and doing primary
53 testing, sure, but the QA testing is left to the ~arch users such as
54 myself, and to the bug system, depending on users to file bugs, then check
55 them and reopen them if necessary.
56
57 Even if we were to find a number of volunteers that wanted to spend all or
58 most of their Gentoo time on QA peer reviewing the work of others, who's
59 to say the ones actually doing the work would find that situation
60 satisfactory? Keep in mind, once again, that it's volunteers doing the
61 work. They only do it as long as it remains satisfying for them to
62 continue doing it. Fortunately or unfortunately, the types of people that
63 would find constantly peer reviewing the work of others satisfying enough
64 to continue to do it on a volunteer basis, are not generally the types of
65 people that the volunteers actually doing the coding are likely to find it
66 pleasant enough working with to continue to volunteer their own time.
67 Pretty quickly, it would seem too much like a job -- one they aren't
68 getting paid to do -- and too little like the sort of fun that continues
69 to draw them into volunteering. Very likely, it wouldn't be long until
70 it'd all be peer reviewers, with nothing to do, because all the folks
71 doing the work to be peer reviewed had gotten tired of it, and found other
72 "more important" things to do with their time!
73
74 That would appear to me to be the dynamic that's the problem with your
75 solution, in addition to the fact that Gentoo is constantly
76 "understaffed", that is, there is always more work to be done than there
77 are folks with time to do it. That of course, pretty much by definition,
78 is the nature of a volunteer project. The closer it gets to stasis, the
79 closer it gets to having enough man-hours to match the work available, the
80 less important what is left becomes, so the more likely it becomes for
81 those that /would/ volunteer, to again, find other "more important" things
82 to do with their time. For that reason alone, in addition to the one
83 above, it's relatively unlikely such a QA/peer review system will ever be
84 set up. Why? Because by definition, that's less important than actually
85 having the code there to use or peer review in the first place, and by the
86 time there are enough folks actually doing the coding to make that less
87 urgent than the peer review process, we are down the relative importance
88 levels far enough that other things will by definition be more important
89 than that last little bit of coding OR the peer review stuff, so it'll
90 never get done.
91
92 My personal view, FWIW as a simple Gentoo user (NOT a dev). That said,
93 it's one way to explain the resistance to your argument, in any case,
94 regardless of whether it's the direct viewpoint of any dev, or not. The
95 devs are volunteers, resulting in a situation rather different than if
96 they were paid to do it. However, if they were paid to do it, it wouldn't
97 be Gentoo as we know it, but something far different, anyway. I
98 personally don't happen to believe that something different would be
99 anywhere close to as good, because, by definition, it would then lose that
100 unique community dynamic that is so much a part of what makes Gentoo what
101 it is today.
102
103 --
104 Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
105 "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
106 and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in
107 http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html
108
109
110 --
111 gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Bugzilla handling for maintainer-wanted things "Nathan L. Adams" <nadams@××××.org>