Re: [gentoo-dev] The Gentoo Developer Handbook - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Thus spake Corey Shields on Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 03:22:58PM CDT
> On Monday 19 July 2004 01:20 pm, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > I'm sure devrel aren't actively out to set themselves up as the new
> > spanish inquisition. However, it seems I'm not the only one that's
> > noticed them moving from a "helping developers" role to "policing
> > developers" instead, and I'd like to know what devrel's stance on this
> > is. Come to think of it, I remember a certain former manager bringing
> > this exact point up shortly before he left.
>
> Nobody on the devrel team is getting their jollies from "policing developers",
> and if there wasn't a need for it then you wouldn't see it.  The problem is
> that some people have acted or said some pretty offensive things while acting
> on behalf of Gentoo in the eyes of the victim.  That can't be put up with,
> and personally I'm not open to be persuaded otherwise.  Whether developers
> realize it or not, there are corporations and large organizations watching,
> and some of them migrating to Gentoo.  As a distribution, we can't tolerate
> developers being jerks to other people, especially our users.  I know this
> first hand, because my place of employment was about to pack up and walk away
> from Gentoo altogether after one such altercation between one of our
> employees and a dev.

For what it's worth, from a lurker and Gentoo user who also uses Debian,
I've been _very_ favorably impressed with the thoughtfullness and
responsiveness of the Gentoo development community.  I file a fair number of
bugs on Gentoo, and usually have a protracted exchange with one or more of
the devs.  The people with whom I've interacted on Gentoo bugzilla have been
really great! - as have been the developers with whom I've had conversations
on one or more of the Gentoo user mailing lists.

IMHO, this is part of what FOSS is all about and what makes it work :-)
It's one of the reasons I cite when I recommend Gentoo to others, both
private and corporate.

I contrast this some of the interactions I've had with the Mozilla
development people and the Gnome development people, some of whom have
rather an attitude issue, or one Debian QA person with whom I corresponded
about a Debian bug a few years ago who was downright rude and insulting to
the point where Joey Hess had to step in and address the issue.  In that
case, ironically, the package maintainer for the package in question, with
whom I finally corresponded directly, acknowledged the problem right away
and had it fixed and online in a few hours.

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