Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Grant Goodyear]

Lance Albertson wrote: [Tue Jan 03 2006, 02:09:43PM CST]
> Sure, we've made lots of great improvements, but I'm concerned that we
> have too many subprojects all working in their little world and no one
> really looking over the whole project making sure things flow together
> well. There's no one out there who's responsibility is to track all
> these subprojects and make sure things are flowing right.

That's quite true.  Of course, I would argue that it's true because
nobody has volunteered to do that job.  Of course, there'd be no real
authority with that sort of position, since if devs don't want to work
on a project they probably will not do so, so all that could really be done
would be to have a group of people tracking the various projects and
encouraging or cajoling progress.  That said, having either an informal
or formal group in that role could still be quite useful.

> Sigh, I get the impression that you think I wrote this email just to
> start another long drawn out debate.

No, I actually think you wrote this e-mail to voice your concerns, and
that your motives are pure.  *Shrug*  

> I have no worries about people actually getting things done. What I'm
> concerned about is that there's no true direction of where things will
> go. Everyone has their own way of doing something, without any kind of
> proper overall plan. I know the GLEP system is designed to help with
> that (which is it). I'm looking at more of overall direction in Gentoo,
> not specific things. We all have different opinions on how things should
> be done and nothing ever seems to be totally decided on. Sure we have
> the council, but I really haven't seen any direction from them on where
> Gentoo should go. We have debates on the mailing lists that seem to
> never go anywhere. Is everything that's debated on there needing to go
> through a GLEP, or how do such things get decided with a final say?

I agree with many of these statements, but I disagree to what extent
there's an actual problem here.  Yes, there is little real "direction"
to Gentoo.  I think that's a reality of having a mid-life volunteer
distribution.  Our devs choose the parts of the distro that are fun for
them to work on, and consequently it is difficult to motivate people to
work towards any particular plan if that plan involves "not-fun" things.
As such, the best way to get something decided with a final say is to 
provide not just an idea, but a working implementation.  Then it's easy,
since either the implementation is good enough, or it is not.  That sets
the bar rather high, though, so the second best method is to have a
strong advocate who's willing to keep slogging away at an idea.

> I dunno, I just get the impression that people fear having a goal to
> work on and would rather just let things work out in a random way (like
> they have been for a while now). I'm not wanting to take the fun out of
> this, but I feel more structure and less redtape would help make us move
> forward faster and better.

I really don't believe that fear of goals is much of a problem.  I think
the problem, instead, is a lack of sufficiently exciting goals, and a
concomitant lack of people sufficiently motivated to shepherd those
goals to a successful conclusion.

I think I'll stop here, since I'm not expressing my thoughts all that
well.  *Sigh*

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@g.o
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76