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

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 5:44 PM, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
> On 11/22/2014 11:20 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>
>> 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.

What do you do if somebody blocks progress in your overlay structure?
You start another one.

What do you do if somebody blocks progress in the current Gentoo
project structure?  You either ask the Council for help, or start
another project.

You have just as many options under the status quo, and actually more.

Now, what you would get is the ability to have more variety in quality
standards, since general QA/etc would not apply.

>
> 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.

Well, then by your argument there is nothing wrong, since they're
already in the distributed model.  There is nothing I can do about
people feeling alienated.

If you want to contribute to Gentoo, then do it.  If somebody blocks
your progress then ask for help.

What I can't stand is people moping about their feelings being hurt
from umpteen years ago.  I can't go back and fix the past.  Get over
it - contribute or don't.

>
> 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.

The games team has ZERO power over any dev doing anything to any
package in the tree.  That was the outcome of the most recent Council
decision.  We didn't disband the team because we thought that having a
team focused on games wasn't a bad idea, but so far nobody else seems
all that interested so it seems as likely as not that there won't be a
games team in the future.

How is that not doing something radical?  What more do you want us 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

The reason the nethack bug is still open is because nobody cares
enough to fix it.  ANYBODY can make themselves a maintainer of Nethack
right now and fix the bug.  The reason that the Nethack bug is still
open is because you apparently care enough about it to post about it,
but not enough to fix it.  I'm not going to fix it, because I don't
use Nethack.

The issues you bring up were an issue in the past, and nobody really
has any tolerance for it these days.  You keep bringing up past issues
that have been fixed, which really sounds to me like a demonstration
that we're running out of real current issues to fix.

If there is somebody blocking progress on something, by all means
point it out.  However, it needs to be a case where somebody is
actually trying to do something, not just complaints about all the
great stuff that could get done if somebody cared enough to even try.

>
> 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.

Sounds great.  Looking forward to your contributions to the git
migration, which by all indications is just about done.  Maybe you
could get started on a gerrit front-end or something.

>
> 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?

Most of this stuff is fixed, and every issue that has come up in the
last year has been resolved in the course of a single Council meeting.
Please cite an example to the contrary.  Having attended just about
every Council meeting in the last year I can cite plenty of cases
where stuff like this was fixed.

> * 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

You realize that the last point is basically your proposed solution.
If they don't want to do this today, why would they want to do it
tomorrow?  They're not going to be collaborating with Gentoo devs
under your model, since there won't be all that many of them to
collaborate with.

> * 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.
>

The problem is that most of the overlays don't support everything in
the main tree.  For example, right now it is REALLY painful to run qt5
on a stable box, because the qt5 overlay just introduced changes
making it incompatible with stable qt4.  That sort of thing is likely
to get worse rather than better in a distributed model.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more overlay support.  I'm all for
reform when there is something to reform.  However, in all your
complaints about developers causing conflicts you're actually becoming
part of the problem.  You're basically coming across as being
impossible to satisfy, because you bring up vague complaints without
anything that anybody can act upon, and I find it rather frustrating
personally as these sorts of issues are something I'm really committed
to fixing.

--
Rich