Re: [gentoo-project] Some focus for Gentoo

[hasufell]

Donnie Berkholz:
> On 14:41 Thu 15 Jan     , hasufell wrote:
>> How do you want to _ensure_ focus with 263 developers having direct
>> push access without any strict review policies?
>>
>> How do you want to ensure focus if the council and GLEP 39 say that we
>> may have conflicting ideas in ONE single repository and that we may
>> voluntarily break tree consistency (can give examples)?
>
> I discussed some of this, in terms of what specifically "focus" would
> look like, in my response to Daniel.
>
>> You are tackling the wrong problem. The problem is not lack of ideas and
>> people having focus on these ideas.
>
> Instead, it is...?
>

Sorry to answer so late. I didn't have the time yet.

The main problem in my opinion is that our organizational concept as a
whole doesn't work so well... or at least not any more. With concept I
don't just mean focus on technical stuff, but the question where does
that focus come from and how do we process ideas?

As I said... we have a lot of people with ideas and some are very
focussed. Ofc we can discuss a technical focus and you/we might even be
lucky and the majority agrees with you... now. And in 3 months?

Afais gentoo is a very loose group of devs with optional communication,
but everyone having access to one repository. Conflicting ideas and
inconsistencies are allowed, unless it's about EAPI. Maybe this has
worked for some time, but I think that was rather coincidence.
And this has lead to several problems:
1. very high bus factor in some areas (as in: lets not hope mgorny,
vapier or jer quit gentoo... commit rate will go down a lot or bugzilla
just die)
2. point 1 also resulted into some devs getting special privileges which
sometimes amplifies point 7
3. low QA
4. difficult collaboration model
5. major conflicting ideas not being properly mediated: e.g. multilib vs
portage-multilib, because portage-multilib wasn't in-tree anyway and
multilib was an eclass concept
6. allowing inconsistencies that may break user experience: e.g. we have
games.eclass, but the council says... well, you may or may not use it
(instead of saying we wipe it out completely or we follow the concept of
special permissions consistently)
7. a lot of organizational problems these days and a high burn-out rate
for people who come up with new ideas

I think there are only two ways out of it:
1. Make gentoo more centralized to ensure focus. One possibility would
be to give a lot more power to the council and make it the main hive for
new ideas (already proposed that a year or more ago during council
election, afair).
2. Make gentoo more decentralized and reduce the number of core-devs to
allow conflicting ideas which is one of the main points of GLEP 39, IMO.
But now make this idea actually possible on the technical and
methodology level.
This would imply a major restructuring of the organizational model and a
redefinition of "core development", which would also ensure focus of
that core development. (already proposed this a few weeks/months ago)

I think we are currently a hybrid of both concepts and I think that is a
problem. It's not enough to come up with ideas to focus on. You also
have to come up with a way to ensure focus... or a way that doesn't need
to ensure focus, at least for some areas.