Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Matt Turner <mattst88@g.o>
To: Gentoo project list <gentoo-project@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2021 02:12:14
Message-Id: CAEdQ38FEwB-S7uB1fgDb74CV5n_-CsxDaJ8Tq_phkNdhsJ7Fzg@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees by David Seifert
1 On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 2:40 PM David Seifert <soap@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > Nominees,
4 > congratulations on your nominations! As part of this year's elections,
5 > I'd like to pose five questions to the nominees, that I believe are
6 > important factors in considering someone a good candidate for the
7 > council:
8 >
9 > 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
10 > council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
11 > this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
12 > and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
13 > a council member)?
14
15 Yes.
16
17 I have some concerns about the sustainability of my contribution level
18 now that I'm also maintaining GNOME, but yes, if I'm elected to
19 Council I will make it a priority. Council's not just a personal
20 responsibility that, if neglected, only affects you. Truthfully,
21 Council is a much smaller time commitment than some of my other
22 responsibilities in Gentoo, and I don't have any concerns about my
23 ability or capacity to handle Council responsibilities.
24
25 I don't have any unfinished Council business from my first year on Council.
26
27 > 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
28 > aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
29 > needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer? Do you consider
30 > abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
31 > last resort?
32
33 It can seem there are irreconcilable differences even when there's
34 not, given some styles of debate...
35
36 For sake of argument, let's say the differences truly are irreconcilable.
37
38 Who has the track record of successfully completing projects? Which
39 project do we expect to provide more value for the distribution?
40
41 Abstaining in such a case doesn't really make sense to me. After all,
42 if the issue has been brought to the Council, it's because people want
43 us to make a decision! Even if I'm not a user of either project in the
44 disagreement it's still my responsibility as a Council member to
45 become informed and to make the best decision possible.
46
47 Deferring makes sense when we have reason to believe that we'll be in
48 a better position to make a decision later. I don't know who said it
49 but I appreciate the quote, "When the facts change, I change my mind.
50 What do you do?". If we're just going to rehash the same discussion
51 with no additional information in next month's Council meeting, we
52 might as well save ourselves the headache and make the decision today.
53
54 > 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?
55
56 I think I've performed well. RelEng is chugging along, I'm still
57 improving things as time allows. X11 packages are all up to date. I
58 got GNOME 40 into the tree (and stabilized) and that seems to have
59 made a lot of users happy:
60 https://www.reddit.com/r/Gentoo/comments/nc6u1v/gnome_40_available_in_gentoo/
61
62 > 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
63 > try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
64 > I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
65 > "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.
66
67 I'm really interested to continue improving our RelEng build tools
68 (catalyst, automation scripts). They're currently pretty confusing to
69 set up, and I've got a handful of ideas (and a GSoC student!) that
70 will make them a lot simpler to use. Gentoo's all about being able to
71 customize your system by building from source, and so it's always been
72 kind of strange to me that it's so difficult to build your own stage
73 tarball or LiveCD image.
74
75 I'm now employed by Google working on the ChromeOS graphics team.
76 Though my job isn't specifically related to the Gentoo-bits in
77 ChromeOS, I do think it's an area that I can help with. I'm going to
78 work to upstream fixes from the chromiumos-overlay to Gentoo, and I'd
79 love to get more ChromeOS Googlers contributing directly to ::gentoo.
80 ChromeOS uses a lot of cross compilation infrastructure that most
81 developers don't exercise, so it seems like an area ripe for
82 improvement with benefits to both Gentoo and ChromeOS.
83
84 > 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
85 > for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
86 > the decision to be made for it? Would you consider a small number of
87 > departing views on the mailing list or IRC to be enough to derail a
88 > proposal? When do you consider a controversial issue to have been
89 > discussed enough?
90
91 Quoting my manifesto: Consensus need not be unanimous.
92
93 I think a Council member should be involved in finding and/or building
94 consensus around an issue. That means listening to those you disagree
95 with! Reasonable people can disagree and still get along, and drilling
96 down to find the difference in priorities and/or judgement gives you a
97 better understanding of the issue.
98
99 It seems to me that you know when a discussion has run its course when
100 you start seeing the same points made and remade. Again quoting my
101 manifesto: the purpose of a discussion is not for others to hear your
102 point. Restated, the purpose of the discussion is to understand the
103 issue. I think we should all have the maturity to acknowledge when an
104 issue is understood, that it's not valuable to continue to try to
105 drive your point into the other person's skull.
106
107 Thanks a bunch for your questions!