Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Ebuild Janitor Project -- Any formalities to joining it?

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Ebuild Janitor Project -- Any formalities to joining it?

[David Nielsen]

This is just getting out of hand...

I announce a project and suddenly I'm the antichrist.

I did not treated to fork portage anywhere - I can't even code python
for crying out loud.

Okay, the main issue seems to be getting along with developers.

Here's a little background, I have Tourette' syndrome and I'm on
antidepressants following an attempt at taking my life, bare with me I
have a short fuse - I take shit all day.

Here's what makes me happy, getting good ideas, and this project seemed
like a good idea - So I took a chance, I never expected the project to
take off the way it did, I figured I would fix up a few critical ebuilds
a week and submit them to Bugzilla. It seems we need a quicker solution
without compromising the stability of portage as a whole - we don't want
broken shit in there do we?

We also need an agreement on Janitorial suggestions on portage and USE
flag improvements - If we are to review all ebuilds we probably need to
have an easy way to debating new USE flags other than bugzilla.

Here's the plan as laid out in advance:

We plan to release a tarball once a week with new ebuilds, now we are
not asking for them to just go directly into portage, so there needs to
be some developer review time going on also if possible - we also wanna
make sure we waste as little time as possible right?

The plan has also always been to keep the project extremely open, that's
why we have the forum, it's an exellent way of keeping track of what
people are doing and what concerns we might have. We could simply cry
"help" when we need some assistance which might work fine. There
shouldn't be a exceedingly great need for developers input when talking
just ebuilds, we are talking a new USE flag every now and again maybe.

As for future ideas for portage development, I would suggest checking
the forum every now and again, there are some extremely wacky people
throwing around ideas in there, once an idea is developed we will submit
it to gentoo-dev for debating.

deal ?

Lovechild

Oh the janitor forums are down for the time being, I'm unaware of the
reason - Slougi is in charge of that.

On Sun, 2003-05-11 at 23:14, Zach Welch wrote:
> David Nielsen wrote:
>  > Frankly people like you kill every possible joy I might get out of
>  > this - all you do is complain, not one word about the relative
>  > niceness of this project and what it could do for the state of the
>  > ebuilds.
> 
> Okay, I will not let you toss around phrases such as 'people like you'
> without throwing my hat in the ring.  When I started reading this
> thread, I was very optimisitc about the possibilities your project
could
> hold, and I personally think a user-managed project to track new
ebuilds
> would better than using developer resources.  But when I look at this
> reply, I can almost watch as your newly formed political island starts
> sinking into the sea.  Be careful before you start shaking things
up....
> 
>  > That being said - No, I didn't talk to anyone about it before going
>  > ahead, portage is gpl'ed, I can do what ever I want to it, and I
>  > intend to. I didn't want to announce anything untill it was off the
>  > ground because I think people spend FAR to much time talking and
FAR
>  > to little time actually doing something.
> 
> You are absolutely correct about portage being GPL'd.  You can do
> anything you want with it; however, the attitude you demonstrate here
> will accomplish nothing but to alienate you from the developer
> community.  I personally believe you've just done a great disservice
to
> your project by saying these things, as your statement here amounts to
> nothing less than a thinly veiled threat to fork Gentoo.  I'm pretty
> sure I speak for all the other devs when I say: go for it.
> 
>  > I didn't expect it to take off this fast, we have been going for a
>  > few days, and there are now several ebuilds waiting in queue to be
>  > comfirmed working once that has happened they will be forwarded to
>  > bugzilla. (This all written in the guidelines on the forum, but I'm
>  > guessing you didn't even take your time to read that).
> 
> The problem with your system is one of trust.  Developers do *not*
> blindly trust submissions of new ebuilds.  Even if your system works
> perfectly to improve the quality of Bugzilla submissions, it will take
> time for the project to earn the trust of the Gentoo developers.  Your
> starting off by implying 'people like you' are part of the problem
will
> make it more difficult (if only a little) for you to find support for
> those submissions.
> 
> I just want everyone to understand that that there are more than
> technical issues at play here; the process for getting something into
> Portage involves more than technical discussion or review - it
requires
> getting along with the project leaders, demonstrating to them that you
> know what you are doing, and contributing only what the majority of
> developers are willing to support.
> 
> Most of the developers are working their butts off behind the scene -
I
> personally put in no less than 60 hours a week on Gentoo, improving it
> is now my full-time, self-employed job.  All of the cross-compiling
and
> embedded support that I am presently developing with and for Gentoo is
> GPL'd and available, and there are others that manage to contribute
far
> more than me (both visible and behind the scenes).
> 
> There is far more work being done by developers than can be given
> credit, so complaints of this nature that appear to come out of
nowhere
> are tantamont to blasphemy and more than enough to give us ulcers.
> 
> All this coming from someone that (a) would be willing to support your
> project from the "inside" and (b) is helping with the back-end
services
> that could make it feasible from a QA standpoint.  In other words,
> someone that you really want to have on your team.  You can easily fix
> this with me, but I want this to be a lesson to the wider community:
> 
> The way that individuals interact, both politically and socially, with
> the Gentoo culture matters more than anything that you can bring into
> it.  In other words, a technical solution is only welcome when it does
> not disrupt the culture - the culture must be ready for the solution.
> Put more broadly: we don't want you playing in our sandbox if you
don't
> want to play nice. THIS GOT ME KICKED OUT OF GENTOO, LISTEN TO ME!
> 
> The point being that, as much as many of us might love the idea of
your
> project, we are not ready to implement it today.  It will be too
> distruptive to the existing culture; reform can not happen overnight.
> In that respect, discussion this subject further on these lists is
*not*
> appropriat - it will only cause further distraction and disruption.
> 
> Please, I want this thread to end here and now, and I thought very
> carefully about whether I should send it at all.  Flame me personally
> but keep it off the list.  If my sentiments do not truly reflect those
> of "management", then let them put in any final words.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Zach Welch
> Gentoo Developer
> 
> 
> --
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list


--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-dev] Re: culture clash (was: Ebuild Janitor Project)

[Zach Welch]

David Nielsen wrote:
 > I announce a project and suddenly I'm the antichrist.

Your not discussing it with any developers makes it an issue. You and
everyone else that would come along and say "we're doing it this way"
without having so much as consulted with the existing developers makes
that label not so undeserving. Your project itself is not at fault.

I deservedly wore that same label once for these exact same reasons.

 > I did not treated to fork portage anywhere - I can't even code python
 >  for crying out loud.

That's not the point -- the initial reaction to your side-stepping the
development team tends to be, like most human reactions, fairly
predictable: fight or flight. More generally and narcissticly: if you're
not with us, then you're against us.

This is not technical reality I am talking about. This is all about
political and social perceptions - a reality that you will eventually
acknowledge even if simply by failing to over time.

 > Okay, the main issue seems to be getting along with developers.

The developers come and go -- you must fit with the culture. There is a
big difference, and only the daily interactions make it seem otherwise.
Have no doubt -- no single individual within the Gentoo Linux community
is so important that the project can't survive without them, myself
fully included.

 > Here's a little background, I have Tourette' syndrome and I'm on
 > antidepressants following an attempt at taking my life, bare with me
 > I have a short fuse - I take shit all day.

You are not the only person involved with this project that can make a
similar claim. I am very sympathetic to such circumstances, and
certainly it helps frame my interactions with individuals. However, in
the end: it does not matter. Disruptive behaviour eventually leads to
individuals being driven out of a social group because of its impact on
others, not the reasons that may or may not motivate it.

These are problems that each of us must control; if you are 'off' on a
given day, then don't turn the computer on. I have learned firsthand
that if you can't control your interactions, you are signing your own
pink slip in this organization.

Having suffered this briefly, I can imagine no greater social punishment
that can be leveled against its individuals than to permanently cast
them out from a group to which they want to belong. For extreme cases,
we call that "prison", and there can be no worse place for a person that
still feels the human need to be part of the surrounding society.

If you want to be a member of any society, you simply cannot egregiously
or continually behave outside established cultural norms - or you will
go to jail, you will not pass GO, and you will not collect $200.00.

 > Here's what makes me happy, getting good ideas, and this project
 > seemed like a good idea - So I took a chance, I never expected the
 > project to take off the way it did, I figured I would fix up a few
 > critical ebuilds a week and submit them to Bugzilla. It seems we need
 >  a quicker solution without compromising the stability of portage as
 > a whole - we don't want broken shit in there do we?

What "critical" ebuilds are not already in portage? Adding more packages
to the tree is not my idea of critical. Maintaining what we already have
should be higher priority.  If you're really worried about things
being broken, you'll take a look at ways to help us improve our existing
QA situation without throwing more ebuilds to the fire.  That pretty
much means working through the existing bugs already in Bugzilla, and
working with Bugzilla for managing submissions of fixes and patches.

In any event, I say again - I am fully behind your ideas *in theory*,
possibly even before you were considering them:

http://cvs.gentoo.org/~zwelch/udder/

In fact, some of the herds ideas tossed around lately are echos of the
exact same I issues that I pressed too hard and resulting in my first
pink slip. I was right in my solutions -- completely wrong in both their
timing and presentation. I know I could still get myself "fired" again
by pressing too hard on similarly premature issues, have no doubt.

We are still talking only theory with the ideas of Udder and herds
even today. The implementation is slowly creeping into existence, and
there is nothing anyone (not even myself) can do to hurry it along any
faster than it is already moving.  Too many chefs spoil the soup.

On the other hand, you have essentially proposed to spend your time and
resources maintaing your own forums, trees, etc. Instead, you might
consider that your ideas' time has not quite yet come, focusing your
efforts with helping us within the larger context that we have already
started to try and achieve.

When the timing is right, your ideas can be made to flourish - but you
must also accept that the community process will transform them into
something that resembles, yet may prove to be vastly different, than
what you started out doing. Of course, we must all be willing to make
these compromises along the way, both technically and socially.

Such is life.

 > We plan to release a tarball once a week with new ebuilds, now we are
 >  not asking for them to just go directly into portage, so there needs
 >  to be some developer review time going on also if possible - we also
 >  wanna make sure we waste as little time as possible right?

Collecting ebuilds is not the problem. If you want this to work, users
must be doing all of the QA steps, wrapping their results up in an
automated report form that the developers can verify locally. And this
goes back to the key point, there must be *trust* between the users
doing this work and the developers maintaining the tree.

For example, I would happily install an ebuild from certain developser
without even looking inside it. Needless to say, I am not so cavalier
about packages I received from Bugzila. I have yet to see my first
trojaned submission, but that's not for lack of looking. I must be able
to trust the submitter to have gone to the same lengths I do before I
will trust their ebuilds.

Further, many submissions come with absolutely no quantitaive
information as to why it should be trusted. Most ebuilds are drastically
undercommented, insufficiently protected against failures, and lacking a
general feeling of having been "engineered". An innocuous looking
statement like rm -rf "${A}/${B}" can not be let slip out the door if
there is a chance that A and B could both be left unset. And that is not
a hypothetical situation - these events have happened.

Even if an ebuild or patch looks well-engineered, I will not trust
someone's changes simply because they claim it fixes a problem: I must
also comprehend what that patch is doing only to the exent that I am
personally unfamiliar with the source. Anonymous submissions require my
full comprehension.

The real solution to these problem is improving the order, structure,
and efficiency of communications. If we could all get together, learn to
trust one another, the world would be a better place. And since that's
not likely to anytime happen soon, let's work together with what we do
have and struggle (yes it will be a struggle) forward toward those
distant goals.

When submitters and developers meet in IRC and bridge the gap, problems
can get solved very, very fast. While adequate, e-mail is a very big
step away from this level of interaction, and the current web-based
systems offer only shreds of back-end integration I want to see us have
someday. Personally, I loath the web forums and will not go near them
when I can help it, but that should not shut me out from what is
happening there -- we need an infrastructure that unites us together,
not yet another forum that fragments our resources.


In the end, I encourage you to do whatever you want to do, but do not
expect Gentoo developers to do anything for you until you manage to fit
into the existing culture. If you're not working with the group, you
have effectively forked yourself - even if that was not your intention.
Setting up a new forum is not playing in the existing culture, and I
personally consider it borderline unethical to be advertising it using
"legitimate" Gentoo resources.

Now all that said, I would love to see your group to propose a plan that
can be supported within our existing culture. I, for one, am truly
joyful to see a group of users willing to step up to this enourmous
challenge, but simultaneously challenging the surrounding culture makes
the result problems nearly intractable. There are enough technical
issues to keep us busy without having to deal with social volatility at
the same time.


Please come talk to us on IRC to resolve these things; for those of you
that haven't caught on, that medium might just be the singularly most
effective catalyst for change in this project. In fact, I have the
#gentoo-udder channel was set up precisely to help us resolve these issues.

Cheers,

Zach Welch
Superlucidity Services


--
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: culture clash (was: Ebuild Janitor Project)

[Luke Graham]

Mate, he just wants to tidy up some ebuilds and submit them to bugzilla. Stop 
talking rubbish about herds and culture. Sorry for the top post, but the 
message below is so bloody long.

On Wed, 14 May 2003 09:31 am, Zach Welch wrote:
> David Nielsen wrote:
>  > I announce a project and suddenly I'm the antichrist.
>
> Your not discussing it with any developers makes it an issue. You and
> everyone else that would come along and say "we're doing it this way"
> without having so much as consulted with the existing developers makes
> that label not so undeserving. Your project itself is not at fault.
>
> I deservedly wore that same label once for these exact same reasons.
>
>  > I did not treated to fork portage anywhere - I can't even code python
>  >  for crying out loud.
>
> That's not the point -- the initial reaction to your side-stepping the
> development team tends to be, like most human reactions, fairly
> predictable: fight or flight. More generally and narcissticly: if you're
> not with us, then you're against us.
>
> This is not technical reality I am talking about. This is all about
> political and social perceptions - a reality that you will eventually
> acknowledge even if simply by failing to over time.
>
>  > Okay, the main issue seems to be getting along with developers.
>
> The developers come and go -- you must fit with the culture. There is a
> big difference, and only the daily interactions make it seem otherwise.
> Have no doubt -- no single individual within the Gentoo Linux community
> is so important that the project can't survive without them, myself
> fully included.
>
>  > Here's a little background, I have Tourette' syndrome and I'm on
>  > antidepressants following an attempt at taking my life, bare with me
>  > I have a short fuse - I take shit all day.
>
> You are not the only person involved with this project that can make a
> similar claim. I am very sympathetic to such circumstances, and
> certainly it helps frame my interactions with individuals. However, in
> the end: it does not matter. Disruptive behaviour eventually leads to
> individuals being driven out of a social group because of its impact on
> others, not the reasons that may or may not motivate it.
>
> These are problems that each of us must control; if you are 'off' on a
> given day, then don't turn the computer on. I have learned firsthand
> that if you can't control your interactions, you are signing your own
> pink slip in this organization.
>
> Having suffered this briefly, I can imagine no greater social punishment
> that can be leveled against its individuals than to permanently cast
> them out from a group to which they want to belong. For extreme cases,
> we call that "prison", and there can be no worse place for a person that
> still feels the human need to be part of the surrounding society.
>
> If you want to be a member of any society, you simply cannot egregiously
> or continually behave outside established cultural norms - or you will
> go to jail, you will not pass GO, and you will not collect $200.00.
>
>  > Here's what makes me happy, getting good ideas, and this project
>  > seemed like a good idea - So I took a chance, I never expected the
>  > project to take off the way it did, I figured I would fix up a few
>  > critical ebuilds a week and submit them to Bugzilla. It seems we need
>  >  a quicker solution without compromising the stability of portage as
>  > a whole - we don't want broken shit in there do we?
>
> What "critical" ebuilds are not already in portage? Adding more packages
> to the tree is not my idea of critical. Maintaining what we already have
> should be higher priority.  If you're really worried about things
> being broken, you'll take a look at ways to help us improve our existing
> QA situation without throwing more ebuilds to the fire.  That pretty
> much means working through the existing bugs already in Bugzilla, and
> working with Bugzilla for managing submissions of fixes and patches.
>
> In any event, I say again - I am fully behind your ideas *in theory*,
> possibly even before you were considering them:
>
> http://cvs.gentoo.org/~zwelch/udder/
>
> In fact, some of the herds ideas tossed around lately are echos of the
> exact same I issues that I pressed too hard and resulting in my first
> pink slip. I was right in my solutions -- completely wrong in both their
> timing and presentation. I know I could still get myself "fired" again
> by pressing too hard on similarly premature issues, have no doubt.
>
> We are still talking only theory with the ideas of Udder and herds
> even today. The implementation is slowly creeping into existence, and
> there is nothing anyone (not even myself) can do to hurry it along any
> faster than it is already moving.  Too many chefs spoil the soup.
>
> On the other hand, you have essentially proposed to spend your time and
> resources maintaing your own forums, trees, etc. Instead, you might
> consider that your ideas' time has not quite yet come, focusing your
> efforts with helping us within the larger context that we have already
> started to try and achieve.
>
> When the timing is right, your ideas can be made to flourish - but you
> must also accept that the community process will transform them into
> something that resembles, yet may prove to be vastly different, than
> what you started out doing. Of course, we must all be willing to make
> these compromises along the way, both technically and socially.
>
> Such is life.
>
>  > We plan to release a tarball once a week with new ebuilds, now we are
>  >  not asking for them to just go directly into portage, so there needs
>  >  to be some developer review time going on also if possible - we also
>  >  wanna make sure we waste as little time as possible right?
>
> Collecting ebuilds is not the problem. If you want this to work, users
> must be doing all of the QA steps, wrapping their results up in an
> automated report form that the developers can verify locally. And this
> goes back to the key point, there must be *trust* between the users
> doing this work and the developers maintaining the tree.
>
> For example, I would happily install an ebuild from certain developser
> without even looking inside it. Needless to say, I am not so cavalier
> about packages I received from Bugzila. I have yet to see my first
> trojaned submission, but that's not for lack of looking. I must be able
> to trust the submitter to have gone to the same lengths I do before I
> will trust their ebuilds.
>
> Further, many submissions come with absolutely no quantitaive
> information as to why it should be trusted. Most ebuilds are drastically
> undercommented, insufficiently protected against failures, and lacking a
> general feeling of having been "engineered". An innocuous looking
> statement like rm -rf "${A}/${B}" can not be let slip out the door if
> there is a chance that A and B could both be left unset. And that is not
> a hypothetical situation - these events have happened.
>
> Even if an ebuild or patch looks well-engineered, I will not trust
> someone's changes simply because they claim it fixes a problem: I must
> also comprehend what that patch is doing only to the exent that I am
> personally unfamiliar with the source. Anonymous submissions require my
> full comprehension.
>
> The real solution to these problem is improving the order, structure,
> and efficiency of communications. If we could all get together, learn to
> trust one another, the world would be a better place. And since that's
> not likely to anytime happen soon, let's work together with what we do
> have and struggle (yes it will be a struggle) forward toward those
> distant goals.
>
> When submitters and developers meet in IRC and bridge the gap, problems
> can get solved very, very fast. While adequate, e-mail is a very big
> step away from this level of interaction, and the current web-based
> systems offer only shreds of back-end integration I want to see us have
> someday. Personally, I loath the web forums and will not go near them
> when I can help it, but that should not shut me out from what is
> happening there -- we need an infrastructure that unites us together,
> not yet another forum that fragments our resources.
>
>
> In the end, I encourage you to do whatever you want to do, but do not
> expect Gentoo developers to do anything for you until you manage to fit
> into the existing culture. If you're not working with the group, you
> have effectively forked yourself - even if that was not your intention.
> Setting up a new forum is not playing in the existing culture, and I
> personally consider it borderline unethical to be advertising it using
> "legitimate" Gentoo resources.
>
> Now all that said, I would love to see your group to propose a plan that
> can be supported within our existing culture. I, for one, am truly
> joyful to see a group of users willing to step up to this enourmous
> challenge, but simultaneously challenging the surrounding culture makes
> the result problems nearly intractable. There are enough technical
> issues to keep us busy without having to deal with social volatility at
> the same time.
>
>
> Please come talk to us on IRC to resolve these things; for those of you
> that haven't caught on, that medium might just be the singularly most
> effective catalyst for change in this project. In fact, I have the
> #gentoo-udder channel was set up precisely to help us resolve these issues.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Zach Welch
> Superlucidity Services
>
>
> --
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

-- 
luke@trolltech.com                        Fax: +47 21604801
Trolltech AS, Waldemar Thranes gt. 98, N-0175 Oslo, Norway

--
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: culture clash (was: Ebuild Janitor Project)

[David Nielsen]

On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 03:42, Luke Graham wrote:
> Mate, he just wants to tidy up some ebuilds and submit them to bugzilla. Stop 
> talking rubbish about herds and culture. Sorry for the top post, but the 
> message below is so bloody long.

To please the worried part of the developers we have now added a warning
message to each and every ebuild forum on our project site, so to avoid
bug reports coming from potentially broken or in heavy development
ebuilds made by the team. 

Now could we possibly get some positive feedback for a change?

- Lovechild


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: culture clash (was: Ebuild Janitor Project)

[Martin Schlemmer]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1494 bytes --]

On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 11:32, David Nielsen wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 03:42, Luke Graham wrote:
> > Mate, he just wants to tidy up some ebuilds and submit them to bugzilla. Stop 
> > talking rubbish about herds and culture. Sorry for the top post, but the 
> > message below is so bloody long.
> 
> To please the worried part of the developers we have now added a warning
> message to each and every ebuild forum on our project site, so to avoid
> bug reports coming from potentially broken or in heavy development
> ebuilds made by the team. 
> 
> Now could we possibly get some positive feedback for a change?
> 

I have not yet looked at your site (sorry), but sorda always hectic
here.

Basically I think you guys misunderstood each other terribly
(hopefully 8).  Anyhow, we are talking about transforming the
way things work to get better QA, and take some load off
developers (or should we say guys with CVS commit privs).

*I* (note me in my personal opinion) think that what you guys
started, is a step in what we were thinking (the herds thing),
but rather sudden and with more force/success than imagined ;)
If we talk about this, we should be able to work something
out that will be for the better for our community as a whole.
Right ?

Anyhow, I tried to forward to a few people, hopefully, the
right ones will respond =)


Regards,

-- 

Martin Schlemmer
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop/System Team Developer
Cape Town, South Africa



[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: culture clash (was: Ebuild Janitor Project)

[David Nielsen]

Could I possibly ask you guys to stop CC'ing me, I am on gentoo-dev
already.

Anyways, Spider has joined the forums has begun to kick us around so we
do it "the right way"(tm) - which is a good thing, since that should
ease entry into portage for the ebuilds.

So here's to ya mate.

- Lovechild


On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 21:41, Martin Schlemmer wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 11:32, David Nielsen wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 03:42, Luke Graham wrote:
> > > Mate, he just wants to tidy up some ebuilds and submit them to bugzilla. Stop 
> > > talking rubbish about herds and culture. Sorry for the top post, but the 
> > > message below is so bloody long.
> > 
> > To please the worried part of the developers we have now added a warning
> > message to each and every ebuild forum on our project site, so to avoid
> > bug reports coming from potentially broken or in heavy development
> > ebuilds made by the team. 
> > 
> > Now could we possibly get some positive feedback for a change?
> > 
> 
> I have not yet looked at your site (sorry), but sorda always hectic
> here.
> 
> Basically I think you guys misunderstood each other terribly
> (hopefully 8).  Anyhow, we are talking about transforming the
> way things work to get better QA, and take some load off
> developers (or should we say guys with CVS commit privs).
> 
> *I* (note me in my personal opinion) think that what you guys
> started, is a step in what we were thinking (the herds thing),
> but rather sudden and with more force/success than imagined ;)
> If we talk about this, we should be able to work something
> out that will be for the better for our community as a whole.
> Right ?
> 
> Anyhow, I tried to forward to a few people, hopefully, the
> right ones will respond =)
> 
> 
> Regards,


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