Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Future of gentoo's stable and unstable trees: what are your thoughts?
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2017 11:26:53
Message-Id: CAGfcS_k1LOk0Vh=p8OZ+9U5RR2zMToYyH6NBN20dWJbLnFfR6g@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Future of gentoo's stable and unstable trees: what are your thoughts? by Hans de Graaff
1 On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 2:18 AM, Hans de Graaff <graaff@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > On Mon, 2017-07-24 at 23:22 +0000, Peter Stuge wrote:
4 >
5 > > More troubleshooting and fixing "hard" problems, less routine work.
6 >
7 > Except that some of that routine work is actually what I enjoy doing in
8 > Gentoo. I already get plenty of the other two in my day job.
9 >
10
11 This goes to a principle of volunteer work - you can't really direct
12 the work of volunteers (at least not with anything close to 100%
13 efficiency). If you tell a volunteer they aren't allowed to work on
14 x, that doesn't mean that the time they used to spend on x is now
15 available to the organization to work on higher priority projects. It
16 just means that they won't work on x any longer.
17
18 If a volunteer wanted to be working on something they considered
19 higher priority, they would probably already be doing it, or they
20 would be the ones looking for somebody to take over the lower priority
21 jobs.
22
23 Paid work is an entirely different matter, because the project most
24 employees are really working on is the "collect a paycheck" project
25 and what they do to collect it tends to be secondary. That obviously
26 isn't 100% the case and if you're trying to retain the next Elon Musk
27 the rules are different, but it holds for most normal work.
28
29 So, don't assume you can fix manpower problems by delivering less.
30 You might be able to fix them by relaxing rules so that you can
31 deliver the same with less effort, but keep in mind whether those
32 rules added some kind of value to the final product.
33
34 --
35 Rich