[gentoo-dev] Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[gentoo-dev] Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

Why do we let utterly *useless* discussions eat into our precious
developer time?

Why is it that this thread has 500 replies, but Mart's
maintainer-wanted thread has less than 10?

I *do not care* if the ebuild format will not be "properly extensible"
when the need arises. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

I *do not care* if support for live ebuilds is perfect. The three
major consumers of live ebuilds (x11, kde, and gnome) are *NOT*
complaining.

Why is the council spending so much time on *utterly useless*
discussions? Have we eliminated all other problems facing Gentoo that
we now have time for enhancements of questionable value in the near
future?

I would like to petition the Council to _strongly_ discourage such
discussion, and not to waste it's own time on things like this.

Hell, in my opinion EAPI-3 is a m00t discussion when we have entire
herds and archs wasting away due to inadequate developer resources and
users constantly being discouraged and turned away.

Let's not blatantly ignore our REAL problems. We can no longer afford
to maintain the status-quo of pedantic masturbatory discussions on the
finer points of ebuild formats. We cannot AFFORD to look the other way
while the distro rots away.

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan who is extremely worried by this denial-syndrome in
the gentoo community.

[gentoo-dev] Re: Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Duncan]

Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@gentoo.org> posted
8b4c83ad0905152258i61b0e8ebh869f323519b1906f@mail.gmail.com, excerpted
below, on  Sat, 16 May 2009 11:28:57 +0530:

> Why is it that this thread has 500 replies,

500?  Try 34 posts in the fallacies of glep55 thread, total, including 
OP, on that thread (not this one, no references header, single post as I 
read this).  But who's counting?  (I wasn't, but just did.)

> but Mart's maintainer-wanted thread has less than 10?

I counted 23, including OP.

That's not such a huge difference, made even less (just eyeballing it, 
perhaps even flipping the lead) if you count only the posts from Gentoo 
devs (yes, that would exclude me, too).

Never-the-less, it's a point worth considering, statistics or not.  But, 
I did see indications the council is acting to come to some conclusion on 
it, which would put it to rest, finally.  They moved on the benchmarks, 
which is really the first physical movement on the thing, and seems to me 
to signal that they are tiring of the debate and want some concrete 
numbers to finally put it to rest, approval or disproval.  We'll see.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
>> Why is it that this thread has 500 replies,
>
> 500?  Try 34 posts in the fallacies of glep55 thread, total, including
> OP, on that thread (not this one, no references header, single post as I
> read this).  But who's counting?  (I wasn't, but just did.)
>
>> but Mart's maintainer-wanted thread has less than 10?
>
> I counted 23, including OP.
>
> That's not such a huge difference, made even less (just eyeballing it,
> perhaps even flipping the lead) if you count only the posts from Gentoo
> devs (yes, that would exclude me, too).
>
> Never-the-less, it's a point worth considering, statistics or not.  But,
> I did see indications the council is acting to come to some conclusion on
> it, which would put it to rest, finally.  They moved on the benchmarks,
> which is really the first physical movement on the thing, and seems to me
> to signal that they are tiring of the debate and want some concrete
> numbers to finally put it to rest, approval or disproval.  We'll see.
>

My god. This just proves that people are not willing to see the oncoming train.

The statistics are irrelevant. Go ahead and count how many posts have
been made about GLEP55 and 54 since they were introduced.. Now please
compare with how many posts have been made about maintainer-wanted.
Then perhaps you will see what I mean by "useless talk".

This stuff does not need to be resolved, put to rest, approved,
disapproved, or whatever! It needs to be kicked out till we can get
*BASIC* stuff fixed.

You don't fuss about the type of faucets in the bathroom when the roof
is falling apart do you?

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Ben de Groot]

Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
> The statistics are irrelevant.

So why do you bring them up?

> This stuff does not need to be resolved, put to rest, approved,
> disapproved, or whatever! It needs to be kicked out till we can get
> *BASIC* stuff fixed.

I agree, but apparently council thinks it's worth their time.

But I disagree on the maintainer-wanted thread. It's not that important
an issue. We have Sunrise already, so let's try to improve that.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (qt, media, lxde, desktop-misc)
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering PR liaison
______________________________________________________

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
>> The statistics are irrelevant.
>
> So why do you bring them up?
>

That's the question you should ask Duncan. Not me. I provided
statistics to highlight and provide dramatic effect. People who prefer
to discuss them and make it the primary (and only) point of reply
should reconsider their tactics.

>> This stuff does not need to be resolved, put to rest, approved,
>> disapproved, or whatever! It needs to be kicked out till we can get
>> *BASIC* stuff fixed.
>
> I agree, but apparently council thinks it's worth their time.
>
> But I disagree on the maintainer-wanted thread. It's not that important
> an issue. We have Sunrise already, so let's try to improve that.
>

Alright, so you say it's not that important. Then bring things up that
*are* that important. Then we can solve those instead.

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[AllenJB]

Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
> On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
>>> The statistics are irrelevant.
>> So why do you bring them up?
>>
> 
> That's the question you should ask Duncan. Not me. I provided
> statistics to highlight and provide dramatic effect. People who prefer
> to discuss them and make it the primary (and only) point of reply
> should reconsider their tactics.

Sorry, but what? You post things to a discussion on a mailing list and 
expect people not to discuss them? Then tell those people that THEY are 
the ones who should reconsider their tactics?

> 
>>> This stuff does not need to be resolved, put to rest, approved,
>>> disapproved, or whatever! It needs to be kicked out till we can get
>>> *BASIC* stuff fixed.
>> I agree, but apparently council thinks it's worth their time.
>>
>> But I disagree on the maintainer-wanted thread. It's not that important
>> an issue. We have Sunrise already, so let's try to improve that.
>>
> 
> Alright, so you say it's not that important. Then bring things up that
> *are* that important. Then we can solve those instead.
> 

While I disagree with the maintainer-wanted project idea itself, the 
fact that it has appeared does mean people are thinking about these 
things and the thread has brought up discussion on what is wrong with 
Gentoo and how it can be fixed. These are good things.

While the original idea may not be implemented, the discussion it has 
brought about will hopefully push things a little further in the right 
direction.

AllenJB

[gentoo-dev] Re: Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Duncan]

Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@gentoo.org> posted
8b4c83ad0905160454h132e44fboecd75784934fe9fd@mail.gmail.com, excerpted
below, on  Sat, 16 May 2009 17:24:57 +0530:

> That's the question you should ask Duncan. Not me. I provided statistics
> to highlight and provide dramatic effect.

Wow, the number of follow-ups generated on the net due to not properly 
communicating "dramatic effect" must be... <dramatic> Wow, over all the 
years of email and usenet, what, 500,000?  No, probably too low.  Maybe 
500 million?  Or is it 500 billion? And (somehow we're now counting all 
of Internet history as a single thread, forgetting the fact that if 
that's what we're doing, we don't have to mention thread at all) that's 
what, at least 500,000 unnecessary messages IN THE SAME THREAD. What a 
waste!  Why are we wasting our time on other stuff with such a big waste 
staring us in the face?</dramatic>  If only people would learn to mark 
drama or sarcasm as such!

But a question, what would /you/ do if someone threw out numbers with no 
hint of dramatic effect indicated that you were losing 90%+ of your 
messages, but with no hint in /your/ messages (quotes of stuff you never 
saw the original of, etc) that such loss was occurring?

My reaction was to question it, post my counts, and wait for some clarity 
to appear in the replies, which it did.

Be that as it may, I apologize that given no indication otherwise, I took 
the literal text as just that, literally intended.  It would have saved 
us both some trouble had I (somehow) recognized the intention.  
<sarcasm>There really otta be a tag for that!</sarcasm>

Of course, what /really/ makes your point is that it wasn't so obvious 
that I couldn't miss it.  If 500 posts was even plausible, to that single 
thread in the given time... well, I guess that makes your intended point, 
doesn't it?  And pretty dramatically, I might add. =:^)

Don't tell me you schemed all of this to make the point even /more/ 
effectively! =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Luca Barbato]

Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
> The statistics are irrelevant. Go ahead and count how many posts have
> been made about GLEP55 and 54 since they were introduced.. Now please
> compare with how many posts have been made about maintainer-wanted.
> Then perhaps you will see what I mean by "useless talk".

You may propose other items for the council, so far we got what got 
proposed w/out rejecting anything, feel free to bring up problems, we 
are trying to let people have voice and avoid proposing stuff ourselves, 
vote on them and so be it.

Please bring the discussion on the council meeting.

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero

Re: [gentoo-dev] Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 16 May 2009 11:28:57 +0530
Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Why do we let utterly *useless* discussions eat into our precious
> developer time?
> 
> Why is it that this thread has 500 replies

Because the way Gentoo works, any objection to a proposal, valid or not,
whether or not it's already been addressed, has to be answered before a
proposal gets anywhere. Thus, every time people post nonsense about
GLEP 55, every post has to be answered or the Council goes "there are
unanswered objection, so we'll postpone it".

> but Mart's maintainer-wanted thread has less than 10?

Because most people either don't care or don't see it leading to
anything useful.

> I *do not care* if the ebuild format will not be "properly extensible"
> when the need arises. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

People are already using hacks in the tree to get per package eclasses.
This is something that should be in EAPI, but can't be.

> Let's not blatantly ignore our REAL problems. We can no longer afford
> to maintain the status-quo of pedantic masturbatory discussions on the
> finer points of ebuild formats. We cannot AFFORD to look the other way
> while the distro rots away.

Part of the reason the distro is rotting away is that isn't delivering
anything new. I'll remind you that EAPIs 2 and 3 fix several extremely
major user complaints.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Denis Dupeyron]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Because the way Gentoo works, any objection to a proposal, valid or not,
> whether or not it's already been addressed, has to be answered before a
> proposal gets anywhere. Thus, every time people post nonsense about
> GLEP 55, every post has to be answered or the Council goes "there are
> unanswered objection, so we'll postpone it".

As usual you are extrapolating, but you're at least partly right.

If the author had documented these objections and the answers in the
glep then it would have made it possible to avoid most of what you
call the nonsense.  Anything buried on the lists, especially in such
threads as those discussing this glep, can't even remotely be
considered documented or addressed. The answers need to explain
everything, even what seems obvious or stupid, in a way that all devs
can understand. There is an attempt at doing this in the glep but it's
long on asserting and short on explaining, and does not cover it all
by far. As it is today the glep is a good draft but definitely not
voting material, which is certainly one of the reasons why voting it
is taking so long.

Piotr, the author, is currently away and has been mostly inactive for
more than a year now. I just talked to him on irc and reminded him
that as per glep 1 "the GLEP author is responsible for building
consensus within the community and documenting dissenting opinions".
Which he is clearly not doing, at least anymore. Whatever the reasons
of his inactivity, the glep should be currently considered without a
champion and its ownership should be transferred as stipulated in glep
1.

Thus, I'm asking council to transfer the ownership of this glep, as
well as glep 54, and restrain from voting on them until the dissenting
opinions have been properly documented in each of them. Any new
champion will be fine with me, but I'm proposing, if you agree, that
you become the new champion as glep 1 doesn't require the champion to
be a developer. I do not doubt that the practical issues due to you
not being a developer will be worked around.

Denis.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 16 May 2009 15:13:50 -0600
Denis Dupeyron <calchan@gentoo.org> wrote:
> If the author had documented these objections and the answers in the
> glep then it would have made it possible to avoid most of what you
> call the nonsense.

Except that at the last Council meeting, there were complaints that
objections *had* been included and discussed in the GLEP, and claims
that including such material made the GLEP less clear.

This is another of those issues where whichever way it's done, some
people complain.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Denis Dupeyron]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Except that at the last Council meeting, there were complaints that
> objections *had* been included and discussed in the GLEP, and claims
> that including such material made the GLEP less clear.

As unfortunate as it is, council members have the right to forget
about some of the details of some of our rules. And we have the right
to remind them about them.

> This is another of those issues where whichever way it's done, some
> people complain.

As long as you go by the rules those who complain about you doing so
are wrong. I've been told you were not the kind who was afraid of
being right.

So, what do you think about my proposition ?

Denis.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 16 May 2009 15:27:59 -0600
Denis Dupeyron <calchan@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > This is another of those issues where whichever way it's done, some
> > people complain.
> 
> As long as you go by the rules those who complain about you doing so
> are wrong. I've been told you were not the kind who was afraid of
> being right.

I'm also not the sort of person who's going to waste hours and hours
documenting answers to every nonsensical objection that people make up.
Most of the objections being raised to GLEP 55 are in the "not even
wrong" category -- people are claiming GLEP 55 is bad because invisible
green cows are eating the moon.

> So, what do you think about my proposition ?

It's pretty clear that objections and voting aren't even being based
upon what the GLEP says these days, so I don't see any point.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Can we stop wasting time and bandwidth? (was: The fallacies of GLEP55)

[Richard Freeman]

Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
> Let's not blatantly ignore our REAL problems. We can no longer afford
> to maintain the status-quo of pedantic masturbatory discussions on the
> finer points of ebuild formats. We cannot AFFORD to look the other way
> while the distro rots away.
> 

What exactly is your proposal?  Ban discussion of GLEP 55?  I doubt less 
posts on GLEP 55 will mean more developers joining arch teams instead, 
or whatever.

People work on the things they want to work on.  If they want to work on 
EAPIs that is fine by me - that is forward progress.  The solution to 
progress in one area and not another is not to stop the area that is 
moving forward.

Sure, if there were actual resource contention at stake that would make 
sense.  However, if you tell a dev not to work on A but instead to work 
on B the most likely outcomes are that they'll:
1.  Work on A anyway.
2.  Start a separate project to work on A if you actively prevent them 
from doing so.
3.  Work on C, or D, or on nothing at all.

At best they might give B a token effort.  After all, if they wanted to 
work on B they would have done so in the first place.  By all means 
advertise needs in case people aren't aware of them and find them 
interesting, but you can put a gun to people's heads and tell them what 
to do.

If you want more people in the arch team start with the -user mailing 
list and take time to mentor somebody who is interested in maintaining 
packages as a dev.  Or, if you'd rather donate money to a fund to offer 
to pay people to do maintenance.