Re: [gentoo-dev] ML changes

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 08:13:53PM -0400, Seemant Kulleen wrote:
> My thought is this: everyone should try and evaluate their own behaviour
> on this list, and the method in which they treat others.  If each of us
> actually thought about the effects of our attitudes, this discussion
> might well be moot.
In the June meeting, I repeated my opinion that _every_ member of the
list (but esp.  the developers) should strive to hold themselves to
FreeNode's Catalyst (http://freenode.net/catalysts.shtml) ideal.

This was related to the original goals of the CoC in the first place.
The CoC lost sight of the aim to get Gentoo to function better.

Whatever the council has tried, it seems that general history is being
repeated in microcosm with Gentoo: You cannot enforce morality nor
ethics.

At the same time, you cannot remove any that disrupt the community.
This includes both 
- Forcibly: There are plenty that believe dropping Mr McCreesh and Mr
  Long would improve the perceived health of the list. The opponents of
  such call this censorship.
- and 'not feeding the trolls' because as long as they have an interest
  in Gentoo itself, they will remain (for the same reason that
  developers stay).

Thus the council (both the present one, as well as the incoming council)
stand between a rock and a very hard place. They stand charged with
improving the perception of Gentoo, improving communication on the lists
AND not alienating any part of the community.

Gentoo's principles are that of an open community. Many of us developers
joined (esp. the older ones) because we had an itch of our own to
scratch, and as that itch moved around within Gentoo, so did we.

I was invited to join Gentoo for working on ufed and the QA level of
use.desc. After those, I picked up maintaining MySQL and PHP, because
the previous maintainers (woodchip and rphillips respectively) had gone.
From thence, I created the first PHP team (with coredumb and stuart),
and started drifted around. I've been drifting since, as my own needs
and itches take me to various realms of Gentoo. The only major areas
that I haven't made some impact in have been games, GNOME, KDE, and GUI
apps (reflecting that I spend most of my time on a terminal).

It used to be a rite of passage that a new developer would break
something because they didn't realize one of the side-effects of their
actions (seemant has experience there, which lead to revdep-rebuild),
and then helped to fix it up, better than it was before. One step
backwards, two steps forward. 

Compare it to now, and I read things like bug #184597, and I am ashamed
to see that 3 teams rebuffed a potential new developer. That degree of
elitism just hurts. I understand Gentoo has always been a meritocracy,
but it is an open one, that lets folk get started regardless.

How do we get Gentoo back to where it was? That I cannot answer. 

But I will state, that while I am not running for a council position
next year, I would like to remain with Gentoo a long time, even if it's
just an lone developer, with no work in Infrastructure or any other
leadership group (I'm in Infrastructure because my skills are helpful to
them).

I won't leave just because I disagree with some management decision that
Council makes. I might be stubborn and disenchanted for some time
(witness the many murmurs of discontent), but it's against my own best
interests to leave Gentoo. As it was put before, if you leave, the Fungi
will win.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux Developer & Council Member
E-Mail     : robbat2@g.o
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85