Re: [gentoo-nfp] Re: How to improve the trustees

[Marius Mauch]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2008 16:32:13 +0100
"Jan Bilek" <clonolu@×××××.com> wrote:

> I am not saying it's necessarily bad thing to be a bit slower than the
> most bleeding-edge distros. Maybe it's because Gentoo has better QA
> than for example Arch. Maybe this is just one of these things that
> need to be explained to users - a communication issue again. But some
> people claim it is because of a lack of manpower in Gentoo - in that
> case we might want to re-think recruitment process.

There are several aspects here:
- if people really want to be on the bleeding edge side they should use
~arch versions, but then they can't complain if things break from time
to time as you can't have both bleeding edge and super stable at the
same time. Many complaints that I've seen about Gentoo being "stale"
were regarding the time it takes for a package to move from ~arch to
stable.
- the repository has grown quite a bit over the last years, and I don't
think our human resources for ebuild maintenance have increased on the
same scale (I'm not strictly talking about number of devs here) for
various reasons.
- over the last two years there has been a cultural shift that new
packages/versions get first released in overlays rather than being
added directly to the main repository
- most other distros have probably improved wrt providing up2date
packages, so the preceived difference is smaller than some years ago,
and most complainers see that as Gentoos fault.

> > Arrogant?  I'd imagine some are; I personally try not to be and I'm
> > sure I fail at it quite often.
> >
> > I don't think Gentoo is a club for elitests
>
> I don't think that either. I just wanted to say that I had observed
> many users who think so and many of them claim to have left Gentoo
> because of that - which means there is something wrong with
> communication again. Why are Gentoo developers perceived as arrogant?
> Does the arrogant minority get more attention than decent majority?
> Why?

This is probably related to our main bugwrangler, as he's often the
first dev users interact with when they file a bug, and his comments
can sometimes be a bit offending (I'd attribute that to the stress
caused by dealing with all the incoming bug reports that are often of
poor quality).

Marius
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