Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo's future directtion ?

[hasufell]

On 11/22/2014 11:20 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 1:54 PM, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> No one would care in such a distributed model if there is one person
>> blocking progress somewhere. They would just move on, regroup around a
>> new overlay and start working there and let that guy/project rot forever.
>>
>
> Nobody can block progress under the current model.  If you feel
> otherwise, please point them out so that they can be dealt with.
>

They can block progress and they do. And by saying we allow conflicting
ideas in one repository we are even making it worse.

The council is a workaround to make the broken project structure not
look too bad.

>>
>> We don't need more authority, we need less... and we need more actual
>> opensource workflow. Our tools, our organizational model and our
>> workflow are ALL ancient. And they don't seem to work very well, do they?
>
> Gentoo is already fairly non-authoritative where the main tree is
> concerned.  I'm all for more overlay support, but I doubt it is going
> to fix the kinds of issues you're bringing up.
>
> The problem with java is that nobody wants to work on it.  Lots of
> people want to talk about working on it, but nobody is writing
> ebuilds.
>
> The problem with games is that nobody wants to work on those either.
> Lots of people like to talk about the games project blocking progress,
> but now that this has been eliminated, there isn't some flood of new
> games ebuilds.
>

I strongly disagree. I know a fair amount of games overlays where people
do work on games ebuilds. They just don't give a sh*t anymore to try to
get that stuff into the main tree, because they were alienated long ago.

The image of the games team is so bad, that not even gentoo devs bother
anymore (except me, uh). Yet neither the council, nor comrel has done
anything radical, except giving recommendations, asking for them to
elect a new lead, blah blah.

In a distributed model this project would just have been abandoned by
the community 8 years ago and people would have started a new fresh
overlay. Currently this all sucks, because it will conflict with in-tree
ebuilds and because we don't have good enough tools for this kind of model.

> People love to talk about elitist old-timers blocking progress, but it
> seems to me that many of the old-timers don't do a whole lot of
> anything.  I think the complaint is really that other people aren't
> doing the work we want them to do.
>

It's not about elitist old-timers, it's about a more dynamic model that
has low tolerance for
* bugs being open since 8+ years, because no one bothers to
review/change stuff (check nethack bug)
* territorial behaviour
* slacking devs slacking so hard, but not stepping down

In addition, this model requires a workflow that is long overdue,
including proper VCS like git or mercurial and a review culture. None of
this happens on a larger scale. Instead we are stuck with tools like
bugzilla for ebuild reviews and push our happy ebuilds to the CVS
repository.

So now guess again why people don't bother, because:
* have to become gentoo devs over a period of 6 months or so, then
realize they are stuck with territorial crap, people ignoring each other
and have to appeal to the council, comrel or whoever multiple times
before something happens?
* or they have to write bugs reports on bugzilla, attach ebuilds
manually, get a partly review in a timeframe of 9 months if they are
lucky, re-push attachments, start again
* or they can try to contribute to sunrise which may be simirlarly slow
(mind you, I've been a sunrise dev, so we can talk about that if you like)
* or they just start their own overlay and stop caring to collaborate
with gentoo devs
* If they are very lucky, then their favorite project already uses an
overlay-workflow (e.g. haskell, science). And those projects usually are
so slow with moving their overlay ebuilds into the tree, that it's
almost useless doing so. They should just stop and focus on their overlays.