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

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 12:29 PM, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
>
> That's a common misconception in gentoo. Someone has an idea and no one
> cares until he "makes it happen". A lot of ideas are not so trivial that
> you can just "make it happen". You need consensus, a shift of thinking,
> workflow and maybe even that people work TOGETHER on that idea.
>
> But no, you keep saying "make it happen" and "by all means, start
> working on it", completely ignoring the nature of the issues brought up.

I think the issue is that 99% of the developer community doesn't think
that there is anything seriously wrong.

If you're waiting for a large mass of developers to decide to make a
huge change, then you're just going to wait forever.  All the packages
I use work fine, and if one doesn't work I can fix it.  For most
Gentoo devs, that's all they're really expecting to get out of the
distro.

If you want to change the mindset, then you're going to have to do
more than just talk about it on the lists.  Historically things change
in Gentoo when somebody builds something that is so obviously useful
that just about everybody adopts it.  For years we argued about why
anybody should bother moving beyond EAPI0.  Now it seems like the
majority of the tree is EAPI5.  That wasn't a policy change.  It
wasn't begging and pleading.  It was the fact that slot operator
dependencies happened and everybody saw the benefits to themselves of
updating.

>
> I don't know of literally any big project except gentoo that still does
> not _require_ a review workflow. Git would be the perfect excuse to
> "make it happen", but that's something people have to agree on.
>

Gentoo is a release-less distro.  First, most projects that aren't
distros aren't really comparable to a linux distro because most
projects represent something unified in design, while distros tend to
be diverse collections.  Distros that involve releases naturally
involve review/testing/etc, as there is the concept that the release
should be fairly free of bugs.  In Gentoo there is no expectation that
the distro is ever free of bugs - there is just WAY too much churn and
there is never some kind of concept of overall quality.

The other problem with a reviewer workflow is that most Gentoo devs
don't want to be or deal with reviewers.  It is hard enough to get
maintainers to just not block collaboration entirely.

If you want to do THAT big of a cultural change, you'd probably be
better off just forking the distro, as you'll end up having to ditch
almost all the current devs anyway.

>
> I don't think there is any hope left that this will become sane.

If your vision of sanity is a world where all devs do nothing but
review pull requests all day, I wouldn't have too much hope.  I think
it is a nice concept, but I just don't see it happening here.  I
wouldn't mind participating in it, but you're not going to get much
support for banning the current way of doing things.

The thing is, you don't have to ban direct commits to adopt a reviewer
workflow.  Just add the review-oriented workflow as an alternative to
direct commits, and encourage its use.  By all means try to recruit
devs who will use the new workflow.  If it is competitive it will
flourish and nobody will mind its existence.  Killing the status quo
just makes it hard to go back if the new way doesn't work out, which
makes it extremely risky.

>
> So, having 200+ core developers with push access is not just completely
> wrong from the workflow perspective... it also makes it nearly
> impossible to break with more fundamental concepts that are not
> appropriate anymore.

Hardly.  You can let those 200+ core developers keep doing what
they're doing, while you add your 20 more developers who can do the
work of 500 developers using your new workflow.  Time will clearly
demonstrate which way works better.

>
> So, to reiterate: if you want to change more fundamental concepts in
> gentoo, you need a job at google and be resistant to burn-out. And now
> you are telling me nothing is wrong with our contribution culture?

I think you need to think about why you contribute to Gentoo in the first place.

If your goal of contributing is to get everybody else to do something
differently then that is a MAJOR recipe for burnout.

If your goal of contributing is to make somebody that nobody else is
working on work better, then you're positioned to succeed.  You can do
that in whatever way you want, including getting others to contribute
while you review the code, etc.  You need to start small, and entice
others to join you.

--
Rich