Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 42 "Critical News Reporting" Round Two

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi Chris,

Sorry for the delay in replying.  Having a few reliability problems with
my broadband atm.

On Mon, 2005-11-14 at 08:59 -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> I thought your proposal was to get critical information to our users,
> not force every user to read that $dev is going to be in $country from
> $date1 to $date2.

This seems to be a misunderstanding somewhere along the line.  I've just
gone back and checked my original blog posting, and I definitely didn't
say anything about limiting news delivered via Portage in any way.

> this, then I change my opinion on supporting this proposal, as I surely
> don't give a damn about some dev meet in the UK that I would never be
> able to attend and *definitely* don't want that *shoved* down my throat
> by the tree.

That's twice now you've had a pop at the UK meetings in this thread.  If
there's some problem with the meetings that you'd like to get off your
chest, you could take it up with me on IRC or any of the other UK devs.

The events I've been involved in organising have been events for users,
and they've always been put together by both developers and users.  I
believe that some of our users *are* interested in exactly this type of
news - and, from the enquiries I've had in the past, not just UK-based
people.

Maybe we should add the ability to filter news based on some sort of
geographical setting too?  That'd be a reasonable thing to add to the
GLEP I think.

>   I also noticed how you lost context in my quote by the way
> you quoted it.  Thanks.

FFS, chill out, or even better come and talk to me on IRC about this
chip you seem to have on your shoulder in our recent dealings.  I've no
idea what it is that I've done to upset you atm, but I don't think that
here and bugzilla are the places for it.

> > I think that's a worthy goal, but looking around, it looks to me that
> > software design just doesn't work like that in real life.  Designs have
> > to adapt and change as time passes, not just implementations.
>
> Really?  I work with quite a few developers where I work.  We have
> meetings.  During these meetings, requirements are hashed out to cover
> the scope of the project.  The code is then written to the
> specifications.  If a later change is made into the requirements, then
> another meeting takes place, and a change request is agreed upon and
> scheduled.  They sure as hell don't let the requirements slip otherwise,
> or they would end up in the ever-developing and never-completing world.

And, equally, the Portage tree is full of examples of software that has
not been developed this way.  I'm not saying that it's not a valid
engineering practice; but it's not the only way in the world that
software gets developed.

But anyway - we were talking about design, not requirements.  Although
obviously related, I've always seen them as being different things.

> We're talking about a *very* simple set of things that need to be
> developed here.  Why *would* we even consider not laying out the
> requirements up front?

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here.  You're talking about
requirements now, but my comment that you're responding to was about the
design, which I would normally treat as being different to requirements.

I agree that it's simple.  But I also think that, once we're using it,
we'll learn from that experience and want to make changes.  I may not be
the best practitioner of it, but I am a great believer in the F/OSS way
of release early, release often.  As a community, we don't seem to have
done too badly out of that approach.

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                         stuart@g.o
Gentoo Developer                                  http://www.gentoo.org/
                                              http://stu.gnqs.org/diary/

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