Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Trying to become a Gentoo Developer again spanning 8 years...

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 6:40 PM, William L. Thomson Jr.
<wlt-ml@××××××.com> wrote:
> On Monday, October 3, 2016 6:12:16 PM EDT Rich Freeman wrote:
>>
>> 1.  How do we reconcile the differing membership of the developer and
>> Foundation communities?
>
> In most other projects, the foundation/board controls the direction of
> development. Best examples are Gnome and FreeBSD, maybe Debian.

That is nice, but I didn't talk about reconciling the boards, but the
membership: the people voting for the boards.  There are devs who
aren't Foundation members, and there are Foundation members who aren't
devs.  The former is easy to handle (devs can juts apply to become
members).  The latter is harder to handle (do we start automatically
kicking members as soon as they're no longer developers?  If not, you
now have a distro whose direction has more outside control by people
who don't necessarily have the same stake in it.

>> 2.  If only one body is ultimately in charge, what kinds of qualities
>> do we want in its leadership?  Ultimately they'd have authority over
>> both technical and financial concerns (in reality, no matter what you
>> put on paper).  Does it make more sense to elect a financial board and
>> have them have oversight over the technical side?  Or does it make
>> sense to have a technical board, and have them have oversight of the
>> financial side?  Or do we go for both in one (which means finding
>> people who are both competent and interested in dealing with both)?  I
>> think the reality is that you need both in one to some degree, since
>> all issues would ultimately fall on them.
>
> Typically finances follow development. In other projects like Gnome board
> members tend to be businesses. Which I assume if they agree with direction
> help provide further funding.

Again, that doesn't really speak to the qualities of the leadership.

Should a board member be good at legal stuff (so that the lawsuits and
such you speak of don't happen)?  Or should they be better at
technical stuff (since they have the power to override everybody else
on technical matters?  Or do we need people who want to do both?  Will
both areas get the proper attention when people's efforts are divided
across them, vs having a group of people whose only job is to ensure
the IRS is happy and that we're following the law, and so on?  If
you're concerned that either the Council or the Trustees aren't doing
their job right, then splitting the effort of one board across both
areas is hardly going to improve things, since there is no obvious
synergy.

Note that neither the council nor the Foundation currently sets any
kind of direction for Gentoo.  They decide on overall policies, but
where Gentoo invests tends to be up to the individual contributors.
If we have a lot of Java contributors, then we probably have a lot of
Java packages.  If we don't have any, then you have the state we're in
now.  We don't have limits on how many people we take, where we need
to prioritize how many people we "hire" for this or that.  Ultimately
we accept anybody who meets the criteria.

>> > It is a perverted structure no other projects have such a structure. Which
>> > is why others rise as Gentoo falls.
>>
>> This is a non-sequitur.
>
> Given I have never found any other business or project structured like Gentoo,
> it seems pretty accurate. Even Daniel said how things ended up is not what was
> intended. That is damn near the definition of perversion.

I didn't say it wasn't "perverted."  I said that your statement is a
non-sequitur.

You suggest that the structure is the cause of us not being as great
as you think Gentoo would otherwise be.  I don't think you've made a
convincing argument that a re-org is really going to change things.

I've yet to see somebody say "I'd love to donate more of my
world-class effort to Gentoo, but man the way those Trustees work is
just so off-putting."  Most candidate devs could care less about the
way the Trustees are set up.

>
>> While I do think that some kind of reform might be beneficial, I don't
>> really see it having any significant impact on where Gentoo stands in
>> the "marketplace" of distros.
>
> Limited vision... Gentoo should be playing a major role in open source
> integration.

Sounds great, but I don't see how its meta-structure is hindering this.

>
> I cannot see him ever doing the quizzes, or going through the normal
> recruitment. In my opinion he should not have to. Gentoo should treat him as
> special and help get him on board.

Is he even interested in being a Gentoo developer?  What is in it for
him?  And if it is just altruism why couldn't he be bothered with the
quizzes?

>
> For FOSS development, next to like maybe BSD, there is not really much better
> than Gentoo...
>

No argument.  So, if we've already conquered the world, what is the problem?

I think there are various reasons that it might be ideal to fix the
meta-structure.  However, I don't think it will improve much in how
the day-to-day Gentoo experience is felt, and it could very well be a
distraction from other things that actually do improve the day-to-day
experience.  The things you're expressing concerns about (few people
care about maintaining Java in the Gentoo repo) aren't going to be
solved by changing how the Foundation works.  It isn't like re-orging
the Foundation/Council is going to make the CoC go away, or that the
values of a majority of the devs are going to change when they vote
for whoever ends up being in charge.

-- 
Rich