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

[Christian Faulhammer]

Hi,

"Jan Bilek" <clonolu-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@××××××××××××.org>:
> It might be useful to know about this issue - seeing this
> (http://www.google.com/trends?q=gentoo) I would guess great deal of
> people interested in Gentoo are from eastern Europe.

 Actually I did not know that...I knew that Gentoo was strong in Europe
but not that much shifted to the east.
 
> - Gentoo used to be 'bleeding edge' - it's not anymore.

 That may be true for some areas, but not for others (at least the
areas I work on).

> - I remember the last big crisis 'Robbins vs. McCreesh', valuable
> developers leaving Gentoo as a result... and in my opinion
> Council/devrel were not able to handle it, the only outcome I noticed
> was toothless CoC - that didn't seem like viable management to me.

 That's the outcome of being structured in loose projects...it has
advantages and disadvantages.

> - complaining users - I have read so many complaints, many of them are
> very similar and frequent (let me paraphrase): 'Gendoo developers are
> arrogant'. 'Gentoo is a club for elitists'. 'They do Gentoo just for
> yourselves, they don't care about users'. 'I wanted to help Gentoo but
> it's too difficult to get in'. 'It takes too long for ebuilds to get
> to the official tree and I miss important apps'. 'Gentoo's structure
> is not flexible enough - Arch is also great and it's much easier to
> contibute', 'I sent patch but no one carred', 'dev told me in response
> to a bug report I filed 'get over it and move on'.

 Yes, sometimes don't want to fix a thing, maybe because it is hours of
work without a benefit for me.  But I try to explain that to users and
maybe they start the work and provide the fix.
 
> - developers claiming that technically Gentoo works better then ever.
> And as for me Gentoo really works well.

 When I started with Gentoo I often had broken packages and a emerge
spree run overnight did seldom succeed.  Now I rebuilt world
completely...without one failure.  That's my observation.

> - my personal experience with Gentoo developers is great - you have
> been very nice to me. And I have read many posts from people like
> Grant Goodyear and the others - to me they seem to be very smart,
> communicative and constructive people.

 Some aren't, maybe because they had a bad day or want work be done
quickly.  In the latter case they have no time for long explanations,
which is sometimes mistaken (online) as rudeness.

> Generally... I think that it's better to suppose that the complainers
> might be right and look into it (and maybe find out that they are
> not). If they are right you can fix things. If they are not you can
> explain it to them and you are not going to lose them. That's why I
> have written those posts - trying to express my actual thoughts and
> see if they can be helpful or they will be just put right.

 Problem is that people come to me and tell "Shit is not working, you
broke it you bastard.  Fix it."  Does not make me move faster.  I don't
break something on purpose and try to fix it as fast as I can, swearing
does not help.  But most users are kindly and try to help by doing
good bug reports or even offering a patch to fix it.
 Anyway pointing out problems is not that hard, but fixing it.  The
staff quiz is really easy and you can work on things like
documentation, PR, GMN without much bureacracy.  And most importantly,
you help.
 As Andrew already pointed out, information gathering is the problem.
 
V-Li

-- 
Christian Faulhammer, Gentoo Lisp project
<URL:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode

<URL:http://www.faulhammer.org/>