Re: [gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> 
> From what I see, projects are pretty free to govern themselves. How do
> you see it differently?
> 
> As Weeve said, he's still trying to get people to stop breaking SPARC
> keywords, just like 3 years ago. It's just when trying to do anything
> larger than a single project that you run into issues.
> 
> Thanks,
> Donnie
> 

Projects that are by intention gentoo-spanning
(infra,qa,portage,council) all have issues.

QA:
QA doesn't want to step on toes, Halcy0n tried to give QA the power to
fix things and it failed.  Developers (nor gentoo) can say "we want good
qa!" but it seemed that the qa as the QA team define{s,d} it was
inappropriate, because there were numerous issues.

What kind of QA do we want, is a good question; because I don't think
anyone here knows, and it's something I'd like to see answered.

PORTAGE:
Portage developers are afraid to put anything new in the tree for fear
of breaking things (and somewhat rightly so).  But as noted, it also
means you get new stuff very infrequently.

I think the portage team has either done a poor job of bringing their
issues to the table; or the community has done a poor job addressing them.

INFRA:
Infra could be so much more as far as giving out access to do stuff, as
I see it now you have to be on rather good terms with them to get
anything done.  However a correlation here I've noted is that people
that seem to do work (and get noticed for it) have good relations with
infra and those that don't, well don't ;)

I don't really have a solution here, I'm not on infra; I realize that
you guys maintain a lot of stuff you have very little idea about, when
there is a problem in $area, you have a guy to cover that, but that
person isn't always available and it creates frustration.  I can see why
taking on new projects and ideas are difficult given the manpower issues.

COUNCIL:
The council technically has the authority to do most things,
being our elected representatives.  They don't do much; mostly this is
our fault as the community itself sets their agenda.  This is where I
think the current system fails, people are afraid to take issues to the
council.  Part of this is because issue X is "not appropriate for the
council", which I think is hogwash in many cases.  If they aren't doing
anything at these meetings I would think some global issues are being
repressed rather than assuming we have none to address (which many would
agree is false).  If the meeting agenda is empty, give them other issues
to work on.

-Random Rant Guy
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