Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Council 2016 / 2017 election

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:44 AM, Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o> wrote:
>
> So I guess maybe our protracted discussions and "slowness" is a good thing.
>

Do we REALLY have protracted discussions?  I guess it is all relative,
but a typical Gentoo debate over some big change seems to last a week
if whoever is pushing the proposal is actually moving forward
actively.  Either a consensus forms or it doesn't.  If there is
consensus they actually can move forward without Council approval,
though some choose to wait for the next Council meeting anyway.  If
there isn't consensus then we usually make a decision at the next
meeting, unless the proposal just isn't quite ready yet.  Usually if
it isn't ready it is fairly obvious in the discussion.  Hint: if you
are sitting on this really great idea, waiting until a week before the
Council meeting to broach the topic isn't ideal.

Now, when somebody just throws an idea out there and maybe asks the
Council if it is a good idea, but nobody is all that interested in
implementing it, then obviously it will sit around forever.  We all
probably have lots of good ideas.  There is no harm in bouncing them
off the lists; maybe somebody will be inspired and implement it, or
we'll come up with an even better idea.  However, in the end we have
to recognize that a volunteer distro is the result of the stuff people
have bothered to actually implement.

Then there are the discussions that just keep coming up, but they're
usually just discussions.  We can argue about whether A is better than
B, but typically these discussions don't actually have any practical
impact on how Gentoo is governed.  9/10 times we have some way to let
A and B co-exist in the distro if anybody cares to put the work in,
and whether one is better than the other certainly inspires passions
but doesn't really impact repo policy.

Now, if you want every idea to hit the ~arch tree two days after it is
proposed, you're going to struggle to find any distro that can
accommodate you.  Reasonable QA depends on all the developers
following the same set of rules, and good luck with that if the rules
are changing faster than anybody can stay on top of, likely including
the QA team.  As annoying as talking about changes are, we talk about
them because dealing with the aftermath of slowly working them out in
production is far worse.

Maybe I'm just out of touch (in which case somebody should cluebat me
with some examples), but I feel like protracted discussions are
something that we haven't really had in a while, at least not on
technical matters.

-- 
Rich