2007/7/6, Duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
"Dustin J. Mitchell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Fri, 06 Jul 2007 10:20:51 -0500: > Well, keep in mind that I run in what is probably a slightly different > circle -- server admins. > > Gentoo has a *lot* to recommend it technically for administering a > server -- fine-grained control, careful management of the upgrade path, > transparency, extensibility, etc. > > But the cultural shift is painful when folks like me try to interact > with the Gentoo user or developer community. I think I'm a fairly > technically adept person (hey, I passed the ebuild quiz), yet several of > my bugs have been blown off fairly rudely, by developers who had > obviously not read the entire bug. Of course, interactions on IRC are > even worse. > > The result is that I don't file bugs anymore -- I make a fixed local > copy of the ebuild and call it a day. Since I can't recommend that my > clients and employers do the same, I set them up with a RedHat-derived > base system and then hand-compile the necessary software on top of that. I'm not a server admin and not dev, but I hang out on the dev group/list (group thru gmane), in large part because that's one thing I can do to get a heads-up on stuff coming down the pike before it affects me. I'm also tech literate enough to generally understand development principles, but have only done bash scripts (with kdialog on occasion) on Linux, and VB back before MS decided they didn't want customers that actually cared about their privacy any more and forced me to jump to Linux. (Yes, I owe MS a bit of the credit for one of the best moves I ever made, OFF of MS! =8^P ) Maybe someday I'll be a dev, but it's slow going learning the stuff as a hobby, on one's own. Anyway, so I hang out on the dev list. Having done so since I switched from Mandrake (with Gentoo release 2004.1), I've been around awhile. You think they're rough on you, try the dev list! They are equally as rough on each other! Basically what it comes down to is that people have to develop much thicker skins. I had to. It took awhile and I still believe things could be far better if people would just be a bit more tolerant, and read things in the light most favorable to the other guy instead of the least, particularly when there are cultural and language differences thrown in as well. So yeah, don't take the rudeness personally. If you can, learn to live with it. Reopen the bug if need be, asking why it got closed without even being fully read. Keep in mind "invalid" doesn't mean what it might look like, they /think/ the bug's invalid, but they aren't really calling you a know-nothing. (Yes, I've had the invalid thing happen too, and it bothered me greatly at first.) Sometimes you may have to jump thru a few hoops that you don't believe are necessary, but if it gets the bug fixed... Not trying to name names, but in particular, bug wranglers is a tough job, and sometimes they get pretty cranky and even the devs think they've gone too far on occasion. One thing I had occasion to learn, that I've observed many tech oriented folks haven't. For years I was used to being the guru. Then I joined an ISP (and the ISP's newsgroups) where there was a VERY high level of expertise, one guy was one of about 12 with full commit rights to one of the BSDs (I'm a Linux guy so don't remember which one), and they ALL (or it seemed that way) ran big web and mail servers and the like. I was to them the newbie tech illiterate they had to explain things to, much as I was used to explaining things to others. Well, let's just say I learned to shutup and listen pretty fast, and to qualify my statements much more accurately or cite references when I could. That's an experience I've decided every tech oriented person needs to have. It's REALLY an eye opening and humbling experience. Unfortunately not so many get it. Another thing is that many of these devs are still in school, college, even high school. They're immature and their blood runs hot. They may know their stuff decently well, but they don't have the perspective of years and it shows. They may know their stuff, but they don't always know what they /don't/ know. So anyway, yeah, I've learned to have a /much/ thicker skin. I personally try to always be respectful and give the other guy the benefit of the doubt, but I know that's not the rules everybody plays by now, and if I have a point to make or a bug I want fixed, I'm a bit more insistent on it now. Sometimes I shutup for awhile, but following the dev list, in a few months, there's often an excuse to point it out and effectively appeal the decision. I've had several bugs eventually fixed with variances on the theme, and in fact just got a bug reopened that someone else had filed as well, that I stumbled upon myself. (In this case it was a gcc-4.2.0 related bug, filed while that version was still masked. An announcement on the dev list just said they intend to unmask 4.2.0 to ~arch in a few days, so it's time to reopen the bug and get it fixed. I mentioned it as a reply to the announcement, and low and behold, less than an hour later, reopened it was, and reassigned to toolchain, with amd64 in the cc as it was amd64 -fPIC related too.) Now you may or may not be willing to hassle all that, it's up to you. If you can develop the thick skin, tho, and with a bit of patience, you can get some of those bugs fixed. OTOH, even if you can develop a thick skin, it's still not something you can really recommend to others. That remains true. Maybe someday, but not ATM. So with RH/Debian/whatever I'd recommend they stick too. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list i can understand that they are pretty pissed off with bugs that cannot be
reproduced but if you mismatch the place of some bug, they should automatically switch it to the right place, as the people do on other bugzillas.... if they cannot control themselves, maybe it would be good if they would have some people that only do the mediation between them and users.... another great disappointment is that sabayon problems wich regard ebuilds in the gentoo general tree are encouraged to be unanswered by users.... i think that this is not a good choice.... take kubuntu/ubuntu/edubuntu - you can try to mix the 3 versions without any problems (and i know that cause i used to use a very tainted kubuntu with also fedora and suse packages).... i don't really understand why problems with packages of sabayon (which is a dev branch of gentoo in the end) that are installed from the official gentoo repo cannot be questioned on the official gentoo forum.... right now i'm downloading the sabayon dvd to try it and see what are the changes inside and i'm currently using some stuff from their repo (which didn't installed from official repo) as ati-drivers (which in some way are more stable and with which i can run beryl, while with the official gentoo released ones i cannot).... another very important question is why the gentoo branch doesn't pass on to paludis, which is really,really,really greater when compared with portage (at least for dep resolving which is about 40 to 50%).... an example is that paludis has found some packages that are installed on my system without any reference.... these were installed by portage and when i've removed them i didn't have any problems using my apps.... i cannot do any more without it and only have installed portage because some gentoolkit tools are still emerge based as the.... the last thing is why continuing to use etc-update when you have dispatch-config that is 1000000000000000 time better than the etc-update idiot output?!?! i really think that gentoo has lost its innovation character which was its racial trait when it was born.... that's why i've decided to have a look at sabayon, which seems to embody these traits.... -- beso d-_-b
