On 02/10/2007, Alan Burlison <Alan.Burlison at sun.com> wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: > > > Pick a possibility: > > > > 1) Contributors that have contributed in the past aren't motivated due > > to lack of Sun resources that are (perceived???) as being necessary to > > make contributions > > We've already agreed on that one. > > > 2) New contributors are scared away and don't know how to contribute > > since almost none of the projects or communities have a simple "How to > > contribute" page > > That's an easy fix, and one that the communities and projects could do now.
Since the OGB shouldn't have to tell projects to do this, is there a better way to communicate such suggestions to projects? > > 3) Contributors see all sorts of decisions made off-line and then > > announced on the lists by Sun folks which leads them to believe that > > their voice wouldn't matter anyway since they weren't asked to begin > > with > > Welcome to a distributed community, working on a huge software project. > This has been a fact of life for me in *all* my time in Sun > Engineering. I work in the UK, not MPK and most of the time I have > little idea what is happening in areas that I'm not directly involved in > - why would someone from say, ZFS, consult *me*? I really think there > were enough hints that something was up in the packaging area - even *I* > in my bunker in Darkest Derbyshire realised that. If you want to know, > you have to ask. Regardless of the reality, the perception is that the *Open* in OpenSolaris implies this consideration being given without being asked for. Whether that is reasonable to expect is beyond my abilities to qualify. > > 4) No one but Sun folks (as far as I know) has the ability to really > > help maintain or manage the opensolaris.org website since it appears > > to require access to Sun private resources > > Yes. Although if individual people had the right skills and were > prepared to be phoned up at 3:00am in the morning when the site went > titsup, I'm sure we would welcome them. Maybe one of the things that needs to happen is a volunteer drive. A shared load is easier to bear... > >> thread that appeared on sysadmin-discuss about the new packaging system? > >> Again, proposals for the packaging have been available for some > >> considerable time, and the people who are now being so abusive didn't > >> see fit to comment at the time. > > > > Sorry, but in the case of ips, I never saw a proposal. I saw a few > > blog posts and emails fly here and there about interesting concepts > > around packaging and then one day, "poof!" it was on opensolaris.org > > and it had apparently been in development for some time already. > > > > If you want to know why folks were upset, just go back to the lack of > > communication about what was happening. > > See 3) above I don't think it really applies as blog posts, commentary, etc. was made so obviously a post about intentions, strategy, and rationale could have also been made offering an opportunity to comment. It's silly to expect people to ask about something unless they know what to ask about. How would I have known to ask about ips unless I knew ips existed? Should I continually email all Sun aliases and ask "do you have any unannounced projects you can share information about"? > >> I agree with Keith on one thing - Sun engineers are not some sort of > >> private development team that is at the beck and call of random people > >> who subscribe to sundry opensolaris.org lists. In all the other > >> communities I've been a member of, having your voice listened to is a > >> privilege, not a right, and it's a privilege that's earned in proportion > >> to the contribution level, not volume level. > > > > That's all well and good to say except that a large number of > > operations right now *require* Sun resources. It's really frustrating > > for you to accuse community members of not wanting to contribute or > > become involved whenever the majority of the processes require Sun > > resources to do anything useful at all. > > [examples snipped] > > I agree entirely, it's extremely frustrating on *both* sides of the > fence. However kicking the messenger is both unfair and extremely > demotivating. I can assure you that working on this project is Don't take this as kicking the messenger (brushes the dirt off) :) ...ahem. Let's not play a blame game. I don't blame Sun for all of the failings of the community, and vice versa should be true as well. > *extremely* challenging, and being pelted with rocks by the opensolaris > community isn't exactly helpful. As has been pointed out many times > before, there is no such person as "Sun", there are individual people, > and it is *them* who are the target of the rants. Before people post > yet another "***SUN*** did/did not do X/Y/Z" email, they should go > through and substitute *their* name for "***SUN***". If they wouldn't > like to receive such an email, then they shouldn't send one. I think that just comes back to basic etiquette. I wholeheartedly agree that there have been some rather unfortunate communications between parties on the mailing lists. At the end of the day, it's just a software community, not life and death and it would be better if it were taken a little more lightly :) > And it's even more frustrating to be the target of continual sniping and > carping from members of the opensolaris community (both inside *and* > outside Sun), when the people who carp the most tend to be the ones who > contribute the least. > > Mostly the responses we give are polite and placatory. Well, I've > personally had enough of being a pi?ata. If I see something that I > consider to be an unreasonable gripe, I'm going to call it out. ...and I personally think you should. While I don't think an unreasonable response should have one in kind as that only tends to escalate matters, I do think that folks should be reminded about how best to present matters. > > Yes, I'm aware of the hg transition, etc. -- that will help. But in > > the meantime, the contribution barrier is high in terms of resources, > > poor to little documentation of the process to contribute, and a lack > > of communication sometimes from communities. > > > > I apologise in advance to all the sponsors and others who have helped > > me, but it isn't incredibly motivating to contribute when the smallest > > contributions take *weeks* or *months* to actually be reviewed, used, > > or accepted. > > One word. Resources. We're agreed then...except, *Sun* resources, specifically. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth
