Seemant Kulleen napisał(a): > Dear All, > > I'm forwarding this on behalf of Spider. If anyone would like to send a > message to him, please respond to me privately and I'll forward your > wishes along. > > Thanks, > > Seemant > > ------- BEGIN > > Well, I guess the time has come to say farewell. > > Not without a slight taste of bitterness in my mouth as I write this. > Sadness to see an old bunch of friends in the distance, reminiscent > of Samwise standing behind and watching Bilbo, Frodo and his friends > depart for other shores. > > Still, I think its time to tell some history of where we came from. > > The project I joined was small, we were... Twelve, I believe. My > first additions were some clumsy additions for stuff I was missing > when transitioning into Gentoo. Some small tools, backgrounds. > Nothing fancy, just getting the compiler to work, some hacks on the > kernel, a few tweaks to things here and there. Work was basically > down to the "don't screw up" principle, and if you did , it wasn't > the end of the world, because all the users were "hackers" and > developers themselves. When portage died ( happened about every sync > or so...) you fell back and did things manually. Was easier that way > anyhow. > > QA, what was that? > > Devrel? Well, we had IRC, does that count? Later on it was Seemant. > Seemant doesn't scale very well so he sorta burned out. Found out > that drobbins didn't scale very well either, it got hard to keep track > of things. At one point I think I was listed as maintainer of about > 20% of the tree. We were also cause of some of the first really rough > breakages. libpng incident and others caused us to think some more > about ABI stability. > > People came and started to muck around more, without really knowing > what they were doing, so we realised we needed another check for it. > in came the ~x86 nomenclature. Tagging, Keywords. Starting to clean > up the mess that our "one size fits all" USE flags were. > > The project grew and we started to get a lot more developers, far too > many to know them all even by handle. Things got more organized into > "teams" "herds" and so on. It also became a lot more demanding, you > don't screw up. Fin. The QA watchdogs were there. I know, I was one > of them, chasing about stability and quality. > > Things also started to take on a more "professional" attitude. yes, > in quotations, because we still lacked a clear path, road map, reason > and function. However, we had "deadlines" that never held, (deadlines > with volunteers?) teams started to bicker in between each other, > "you touched mine" started to remind you more and more about the > twins in a long car-ride, bickering about who's fingers were on what > seat. > > Suddenly the apple wasn't just a bit sour when you bit on it, its > started to take on that sweet tone of rot. > > People weren't joking around and doing what was fun, but holding in > mind some arbitrary product quality that wasn't specified. Different > groups had different goals and agendas. All from a working system on > an alpha, to embedded systems and network-wide installations. We were > going to fit it all, without much overview. > > Through that, people started to lose touch on who does what. When > things went strange in glibc you didn't log on and ask Az or me, you > filed a bug report or contacted the herd. When mozilla was screwing > around in the initscripts you didn't commit a fix (no no) but you > filed a patch and a bug. vs one of the clunkiest implementations in > history, "bugzilla". > > When you had an argument it was more dirt piles and backstabbing than > work going on, and you ended up with a politicized system of councils > and committee's to handle the insurgence. > > There was the cabal. > > And throughout this, we were still hacking around doing things for fun. > > Well, fun? I know for me it changed from that. Stopped being hacking > around for fun to get things to work, turned towards "you must reply > to these mails.." "you must fix bugs within <n>days" and more > hassling with infrastructure and administration than doing work. > > Somewhere along the line it changed too much. Got too complex and > complicated. We're still in that mess. > > A typical example of the institutionalisation of the project is myself. > > Had anyone just bothered to send me an email I would have replied. > "no, he's gone, terminate the account." that part works. > > But. > > You could have told me. > > Since we're now so fond of bureaucracy, I'll add the following: > > I retain copyright of all works committed to the Gentoo foundations > CVS repository, the license remains as GPL v2, and you have my full > permission to continue to use it. Texts and guides written and/or > co-authored by me will be treated the same way. (No, I never signed a > copyright transfer to the project) > > > So long, thanks for all the fish. > > And, remember. Give the kids in the back something to do and they will > stop bickering. > > Damn, he hit a point. Everything has changed since there was just few developers and just a bit more users around. But I think that is the way of growning projects from fun to responsiblity. Is it good? Well it's hard to say. I hope that discussion will be best to resolv this problem.
-- Damian Florczyk Gentoo/NetBSD Development Lead -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
