Re: [gentoo-dev] Spider's Resignation from the Project

[Jason Huebel]

My heart sank more and more as I read spider's retelling of Gentoo history.  
He's right, you know.  There are too many agendas, too much bickering, 
crushing bureacracy and a declining number of personal relationships within 
our community.  Thankfully, the small group of people I call friends within 
the community still remain (many of them from the amd64 team, naturally). But 
I admit that I'm just as guilty of becoming distant from fellow developers.  
And it's for many of the reasons that spider discussed. The bureaucracy has 
grown to the point that it's a hassle to get anything done.  If you have to 
rely on a herd to complete something, then the expectation is that you should 
file a bug report. And bugzilla is the gaping maw inside which time stands 
still.

I commented on what I thought should be done to bring some focus and vision 
back to Gentoo in my reply to plasmaroo's resignation email. Sadly, I doubt 
anything will come of it.

If anything good can come out of plasmaroo and spider's resignation, maybe 
it's that the remaining veteran developers-- developers who remember Gentoo's 
glory days-- will the spurred to action and lead Gentoo away from its current 
melancholy. I know this has been jarring for me. So much so that I intend to 
be much more active in IRC and on the -dev and -core MLs. I don't intend to 
file bugs internally anymore unless I simply can't contact a developer within 
a herd directly through IRC or email.

-- 
Jason Huebel
Gentoo Developer

GPG Public Key:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x9BA9E230

"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."
Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Spider's Resignation from the Project

[Lance Albertson]

Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Seemant Kulleen wrote: [Thu Oct 12 2006, 08:50:33AM CDT]
>> 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.
> 
> A minor correction here:  Spider did receive the retirement-bug e-mails,
> but never knew it until today as his filters munched them.  It doesn't
> change his argument that Gentoo is much less personal now than it was
> "back in the day", but it does, at least, make things look less
> malicious.

I often wondered if people's filters would muck away such retirement
bugs sometimes. Perhaps devrel might send personal emails along side bug
emails just in case they don't watch their bug email that much.

-- 
Lance Albertson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager

---
GPG Public Key:  
Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

ramereth/irc.freenode.net



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: [gentoo-dev] Spider's Resignation from the Project

[Grant Goodyear]

Seemant Kulleen wrote: [Thu Oct 12 2006, 08:50:33AM CDT]
> 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.

A minor correction here:  Spider did receive the retirement-bug e-mails,
but never knew it until today as his filters munched them.  It doesn't
change his argument that Gentoo is much less personal now than it was
"back in the day", but it does, at least, make things look less
malicious.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear  
Gentoo Developer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76


pgphTaOx3hQoG.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: [gentoo-dev] Spider's Resignation from the Project

[Damian Florczyk]

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 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. 

[gentoo-dev] Spider's Resignation from the Project

[Seemant Kulleen]

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 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.


-- 
begin  .signature
.. signature ..
end

--- END

-- 
Seemant Kulleen
Developer, Gentoo Linux

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list