Randy McMurchy wrote:

> Tushar Teredesai wrote these words on 07/23/05 19:38 CST:
>> On 7/23/05, Greg Schafer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> 
>>>Where is the development happening? I do not see it happening on the LFS
>>>lists.
>> 
>> I think the development happens on IRC coz I have not seen any major
>> discussion on the lists.
> 
> If this is true, then it sucks. As has been requested by many users
> of the mail lists, development should happen here, not on IRC.

I agree with Randy here 100%. I've expressed my views privately on this
matter before with Gerard and more recently with Matt. IRC when used
incorrectly is most definitely unhealthy for LFS, if not unethical. What's
worse is that it now seems every LFS team member has become one of "them"
ie: the dreaded IRC junkie.

The IRC crowd just does not seem to get it.

If you discuss things and make decisions on IRC then you are doing
yourselves and everyone else a dis-service because no "information trail"
is left for search engines to pick up. This is a CRITICAL problem. Any
sane person should realize that search engines play a pivotal role in the
modern Internet world, and even more so in the Open Source sphere. Think
about it for a moment, think about the word "Open". What you guys say on
IRC is effectively behind closed doors -- it's not "Open".

There are ways to fix it:

 - log all public IRC sessions and put them up on the web so search
   engines can find the text

 - ban all LFS development from occurring on IRC

 - ban all IRC altogether :-)

I was joking with the third one, obviously.

Introducing edicts and whatnot asking folks to post summaries to mailing
lists etc just doesn't cut the mustard. It's way too easy for it not to
happen and it just isn't robust, and it's been proved right here with
Jim's commit. By all means, use IRC for the things that it's good for,
providing support, discussing experiences, fostering community,
meaningless banter etc.

LFS could learn a helluva lot from the GCC project. Some GCC dev's use IRC
to thrash out development issues before making patches and posting them to
the list. The big difference is that GCC has a formal patch submission and
peer review process which means that nothing falls thru' the cracks and
information loss is minimized.

It should be clear by now that I don't do IRC. I've dabbled with it in the
past but the f'wit factor was just too high for me. If I were to be really
cynical I would speculate that hardcore IRC junkies are... socially
deficient in the real world... or have personality defects... or have
power hungry delusions... or suffer from short person syndrome, or bald
head syndrome, or tiny peni^H^H^H^H <insert your fav' syndrome here>.. but
luckily I'm not cynical :-)

My 2 cents and all IMHO.

Regards
Greg
--
http://www.diy-linux.org/

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