Re: [gentoo-dev] more help needed with gcc-4.8 stabilization, chromium starts heavily using C++11

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfridge@g.o> wrote:
>
>> The newest member of Gentoo can have more power to direct the course
>> of the distro than every oldtimer or council member there is, if they
>> just contribute more than them.
>
>> If the maintainer of package A or provider of service B is a pain to
>> work with, all it takes is for somebody else who is easier to work
>> with to maintain package A or provide service B.
>
> Rich, I fully agree with the overall sentiment of the rest of your e-mail, but
> I think above statements are just not true. For both appropriate and
> inappropriate reasons.

Well, I also get what you're saying, but I'm not sure that this is the
best place to draw the line...

>
> On the other hand, except for peaceful and cooperative places (kde team comes
> to my mind since that's where I "grew up" as a Gentoo dev, but I'm sure there
> are more examples), if as a newbie you pick the wrong things to work on you
> might as well immediately retire again- you'll get blocked out by
> territoriality. If you try to push things, well there's always someone who has
> the idea to invoke QA or comrel. ["Let's retire him, (he might be making sense
> but) he's making way too much noise." Luckily, that usually just does't
> happen.]
>
> This has become much better in the recent past, but it's not ideal yet.

Well, nothing is ever ideal, but as issues come up they are being
dealt with now.  I can't think of any situations where somebody has
been able to block out new contributors in the last year or two.
Sure, there have been a few attempts, but we've squashed them.

There is a lot we can do in the case of territoriality.  In such a
case we have somebody who is contributing, and all we need to do is
declare that their contributions are to be accepted.  There really is
nothing anybody can do to stop somebody from contributing except
reverts/etc, and doing that after the council establishes policy is
going to lead to losing commit privs.  Fortunately, it hasn't come to
that in quite a while.  I think that when push comes to shove people
who are standing in the way come to appreciate the situation they're
trying to promote.

However, this is not really the same sort of situation.  If somebody
was trying to submit their own tinderbox bugs and Diego was telling
them that he alone is allowed to run a tinderbox, then that would be
territoriality.  Such a move would really be silly though - people
build stuff and submit logs in bugs all the time, and a tinderbox is
just doing that on a larger scale.  Likewise, if somebody was offering
Mike patches to fix the bugs Diego is reporting and Mike was
unjustifiably turning them away, or especially if he was combative
with other devs willing to support those patches (and the patches were
reasonable), then that too would be territoriality, and all we need to
do is get Mike to stand aside.  Neither of these hypotheticals really
pertains here.  Diego isn't stopping anybody else from submitting bugs
in whatever format they wish, and Mike isn't preventing anybody from
fixing bugs.  Their actual technical contributions in these cases are
net-positive, or near-zero at worst (a dev closing a bug that they
aren't obligated to fix doesn't actually harm anybody unless somebody
else was going to come along and fix it).  Socially it would be nice
if we could all compromise, but that is harder to deal with.

It looks like axs has a workaround nearly ready which is likely to
make this issue somewhat moot.

I do agree that nobody is indispensable.  If there are specific
situations that really stress people to the point of quitting I would
like to hear about them BEFORE people throw in the towel.  In the end,
though, we do want to have a distro and not just a polite mailing
list, and that means that we need to appreciate everybody's
(often-silent) positive contributions, and not just focus on their
role in some recent conflict.

--
Rich