Re: [gentoo-project] Social Contract clean-up

[Daniel Robbins]

On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 1:59 PM, Paweł Hajdan, Jr. <phajdan.jr@g.o>
wrote:
>
> Glad to hear this.
>
> The discussion so far seems rather abstract. I wonder if we could
> attempt collecting some specifics (maybe on a wiki page?), such as the
> major pain points, and unaddressed issues. I'd happy to have a wider
> audience vote on such items.


The vision I have for the User Representatives is that they would help
shape this effort. I think it could involve any number of approaches.
Ultimately, I think it's going to be building relationships with people,
having conversations, having a presence at shows, collecting feedback, and
looking for opportunities to positively influence ongoing dev efforts to
help to address this feedback.

For example, I did a speaking engagement at a University in Krakow last
year. Their feedback was overwhelmingly -- "We love Gentoo, but we can only
afford used laptops here in Poland, as University students. It takes too
long to compile everything." Especially with things like webkit-gtk, guile
and others that eat up a ton of time. Can we look at ways to address these
concerns without compromising the from-source nature of Gentoo? I am
planning to try to address this in Funtoo in some way. Now, I have to say
that it's been a year since I heard this feedback and I still don't have a
set of binary packages for these people. But I haven't forgotten. And I
have engaged in a variety of efforts to work my way towards the point where
I *can* potentially offer binaries for older systems. This has meant
changes to our infrastructure, changes to our release model, changes to our
profiles -- there is a lot of ground-work to be laid to address some of
these issues.

So I think that for the User Rep, it is more a job of having a consistent,
steady voice in development decisions, so the groundwork is laid for
improvements that will eventually benefit users. In many cases, this is a
marathon, not a sprint.

Best,

Daniel