Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Plan, then communicate (no-list)

[Richard Freeman]

Steve Long wrote:
> Alec Warner wrote:
>> Talking to users is exhausting when the user really has a
>> misconception about a given problem, program, or feature.
> Yeah it's called requirements analysis (whichever model you use.) That's why
> it's such a source of problems.
>

True.  I think one of the underlying issues in this mess though is "who 
is the customer?"

If I'm assigned to a project at work I typically have a customer that 
I'm aiming to make happy.  If the customer ends up happy, I get 
rewarded, and if the customer is unhappy I get punished.  If somebody 
other than the customer gives me some requirements they're usually only 
taken into consideration to the degree that they can be handled without 
significant additional cost, or interference with the customer's needs.

It is the same in the open source world.  The customer is whoever 
rewards or punishes you.  Most often the customer is a peer of some sort 
- you take care of their php headaches and they take care of your 
baselayout headaches or whatever.  The customer is often yourself - you 
want to use some package not in portage - just add it.  Rarely is the 
customer an end user - the users aren't really in a position to reward 
you except in the most general sense - and if you take care of everybody 
else chances are you'll make a bunch of users happy anyway.

I'm not saying this is how it ought to be - but it is how it tends to be 
in the open source world.  How does IBM get its fancy hardware supported 
in linux?  They do a few things - one is that they write the drivers 
themselves, and two is that they give away all kinds of fancy code away 
so that the kernel maintainers are inclined to commit those drivers and 
take them forward.  They don't just stand up and complain that there 
aren't enough kernel devs buying mainframes and writing code for them.

You can always ask nicely - but one person asking nicely doesn't 
obligate anybody else to respond.  If what they're asking for entails a 
lot of work or a long-term maintenance commitment, they might need to do 
it themselves or find somebody else willing to do it.  However, asking 
nicely will generally get you further than asking rudely.

More than anything else gentoo needs people to step up and DO things. 
If your favorite package is stale volunteer to maintain it.  Or at least 
volunteer to proxy-maintain it - convincing a developer you're willing 
to take the responsibility seriously so that they can do commits for 
you.  What you can't just do is throw an ebuild into bugzilla and 
complain when it doesn't get committed - a dev would be reluctant to 
just commit an ebuild without personally making sure it works well - 
since they get to deal with all the complaints when 5,000 servers stop 
working.

I'm not too worried - people are stepping up and the current situation 
will pass.  Considering that even welfare recipients find something 
about their free money to complain about in the US I'm not surprised 
that users who are offered a free operating system can find time to make 
demands of the people who gave it to them.  That's just human nature.  I 
think that most users will just take all of this in stride.  I'd love to 
see more done to get users involved and make them feel like they have a 
voice, but users do need to understand that while they have a right to 
speak up nobody has an obligation to take orders...
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