Re: [gentoo-dev] State of Developement

[Evan Read <eread@freeshell.org>]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 11:01:02AM -0700, Jeremiah Mahler wrote:

> > re: where to focus on, thats not my domain, however documentation is ALWAYS 
> > appreciated (developers hate documenting things ;).  As for the new ebuilds, 
> > you can submit them to bugzilla, just dont expect them to be added to the 
> > system before 1.4 is released.
> > 
> Q: Can I help, can I help
> A: Sure, you can take out the trash and scrub the toilets.

And what the problem? If you don't like the way the developers dish out 
duties on their OS, don't use it. Developing ebuilds that might make a 
release that isn't coming out in the next month sounds generous to me.

 
> > > 	I havent checked, but is gentoo-core still closed?
> > yes, it is.
> > 
> Ivory tower?

Their prerogative.

> As a user of Gentoo, I feel like a child whose parent has to double
> check everything I do. And in the same way that the child 
> becomes frustrated with their parent because they place no trust
> in the child, I am frustrated with Gentoo because it places no
> trust in the users.

Maybe you should maintain a large collection of ebuilds outside of their 
tree or maybe maintain your own stable branch of Gentoo to _build_ the 
trust instead complaining that you can be trusted with no proof (I assume 
what you have written here is all you have communicated to the 
developers).
 
> Among all the distributions I am familiar with, Gentoo is,
> in my opinion, the best as far as placing trust in it's users.
> But Gentoo is also, in my opinion, far from what I imagine as ideal.
> 

So they don't trust you, and they trust you? As far as I am concerned, 
until you have CVS commit access, they don't trust you.  But that is ok.  
Because I implicitly trust them.  Well, I am not sure I do, hence Gentoo 
runs in VMWare for me).  I want them to save me from myself. gentoo-core 
can't break!


At the end of the day, it is their project.  They ask you to submit bug 
reports (with patches if you like) and to test. To do all the things a 
developer does.  They just tell you they would like to look at the quality 
of your submissions before they are commited.

Why aren't you thanking God that is the case? You should be afraid to ask 
for commit access on a source tree (which I assume gentoo-core would 
imply).

Read this: 
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/01/31/Big_Scary_Daemons.html


Thanks.

-- 
Evan Read
http://eread.freeshell.org

"The future comes 60 minutes an hour no matter who you are or what you 
do." 
	The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis