Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting 2015-01-13: call for agenda items

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 3:28 AM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:04 -0500
> Dean Stephens <desultory@g.o> wrote:
>> On 12/29/14 15:06, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> > I'll certainly agree that not everything needs a formal project.
>> > However, if a project wants to have authority/autonomy beyond
>> > anything-goes, then it should welcome members and elect a lead
>> > regularly.
>> >
>> There is at least a defensible argument to be made that being able to
>> reject applicants is more important to being able to maintain a
>> coherent project than the often indicated duty to accept anyone who
>> shows interest.
>
> But Gentoo is primarily about the Community, not the quality of the
> product. Requiring technical ability discourages contributions, and a
> lack of bugs decreases the volume of forum posts, so they are
> poisonous to the Community.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the casual reader of this thread to
judge what kinds of behavior are poisonous to the community.

In any case, if a project is actively rejecting applicants I'd say
that this would make it far more alive than the typical Gentoo project
from the complaints I've been hearing.  Part of me suspects that we've
gotten so good at ticking each other off that most of us just retreat
into our private interests and just do what we want to do until we
step on enough toes that we lose our commit rights.  You can't have
"quality of the product" if nobody is interested in actually working
on a "product" as opposed to a few random components that can be used
to build a product if people are willing to deal with the integration
issues, especially when things like creating documentation apparently
aren't essential to doing development, so it would just KILL us to
have to create a wiki account.

Since most of us don't have the time to completely build a
self-contained Linux distro on our own, we're left with the
apparently-unenviable task of working with other people to accomplish
this.  I'm all for making this as painless as possible, but I'm not
entirely convinced that going along with pleas like "do I HAVE to read
mailing lists" or "do I HAVE to let somebody co-maintain MY package or
join MY team" or "why CAN'T I get into a revert-war with somebody who
wants to add a feature to MY package that I don't personally use" is
really going to lead to the sort of distro that any of us actually
want to use.

If dealing with this kind of stuff seems unpleasant to you, take some
comfort in the fact that it isn't any more pleasant for the rest of
us.  :)

--
Rich