Re: [gentoo-dev] PR Project Activity Issues

[Alec Warner]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:17 PM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@g.o> wrote:
> Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> On 21:30 Mon 26 Jan     , AllenJB wrote:
>>> The Gentoo PR Project currently appears to be having difficulties with
>>> keeping up, both with the newsletters and announcements, and I believe
>>> this is currently reflecting badly on the project as a whole.
>>
>> It's easy to complain and harder to take action to actually improve
>> things. From my point of view, it seems like you've got an awful lot of
>> time for the former and none for the latter.
>>
>> Regarding the parts of PR besides the newsletter and events, let me know
>> once you've done something useful like do the work to close a few PR
>> bugs, and we'll talk then.
>>
> Allen has real heart for Gentoo and is very active on the forums. He
> doesn't deserve to be brushed of like this. He is willing to help, he is
> thinking with us and coming up with ideas about how to improve the
> distro we all love to use. It is this kind of dismissive behavior that
> gives us the name of being arrogant and difficult to work with, at which
> point we loose a lot of goodwill from users who are (were) willing to
> help. I know you better than that, Donnie. So I'll write it off as a
> temporary lapse of judgement.
>
> There is valid critique on the slow functioning of PR, and we should try
> to work this out in our mutual benefit. There is room for improvement,
> and I'm happy steps are already being taken into that direction (index2
> especially). Let's see how we can speed things up and spread the load.
> Having more people join the PR team would be a logical step, in my opinion.

Knowing something is broken is one thing (I think we all agree PR
could be better).

Knowing why it is broken is another.  Trying to come up with a
solution when you don't even know the scope of the problem is
generally a bad idea.  I would be more willing to accept advice and
criticism from someone who was on PR for 30 days and then could
provide some specific feedback on what works and what doesn't.  I
think that is partially what Donnie is trying to communicate with his
comment.

So I say again:

Lack of content?
GuideXML makes it hard to post?
Too few people with posting privs?
Other perceived problems?

A long time ago I suggested some sort of pr-onduty role where
basically for a set period you are the prime pr contact and if someone
has news it is your job to review and post it or reject it.  This was
never implemented; but may be a good idea if we are limited by commit
access.  One of the main problems with posting to an alias is that you
can always not reply and it will become someone else's problem(TM)
until no one replies and the message is ignored.

I for one almost never read pr@ because it is mostly spam and it is
difficult to locate useful requests from crap.  It may be useful to
tag important items with NEWS ITEM or UPDATE or something.

If GuideXML makes it hard to post we can perhaps develop a technical solution.

If there is not enough content I'm sure we can brainstorm ideas on
what we could do (index2 covers this area pretty well IMHO).

But mostly I want to address concrete problems.

-Alec

>
> Cheers,
> --
> Ben de Groot
> Gentoo Linux developer (lxde, media, qt, desktop-misc)
> Gentoo Linux Release Engineering PR liaison
> ______________________________________________________
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> http://ben.liveforge.org/
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> irc://irc.oftc.net/#lxde
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