Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> Hell no, but ...
> 
> We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
> Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
> users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.

So what are _you_ doing to make it better?

> For example:
> - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental
> overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the
> hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist.
> Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just
> take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the
> hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported any
> longer. 
With Zorry we just got a new recruit for working on hardened things,
especially toolchain. It's not as dead as you make it sound ...


> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained,
> but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but
> also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a
> documentation wiki, but ... 
yeah, as long as no one just creates a wiki there won't be one. People
are waiting on other people, who are waiting for Godot. Just do it.

I remember the long and whiny road to get a blog aggregator - what
killed the waiting deadlock was simply karltk setting up one (unofficial
etc.etc.) and suddenly people saw that it was good.

> - Understaffed herds: For example net-mail, netmon and others - were
> missing lots of developers and their support in lots of areas. Sadly
> those areas are mostly those ones, one might need packages for their
> business servers from.
And still, when someone tries to fix things in such an understaffed herd
people go all territorial and are like "omg u touched my package".
Right now I'm quite confused what our project strategy seems to be, as
far as I can tell there's one group aiming for an aesthetical optimum
and the other group just wants to get things fixed. And they are not
cooperating well ...

> So - what to do now? 
For me it's simple. I try to
- dedicate time to fixing things. Takes lots of time, can be demotivating
- try to motivate and recruit new users - hard to motivate them, and
with our current recruiting setup it's hard to keep them motivated
- not get demotivated by the "OMG it's all bad" attitude some people radiate

And don't just start discussing how to discuss things. That's not going
to work. You'll end up with a pretty specific plan how to discuss the
whole thing, then get bored and not discuss it at all.

Just start fixing things. Set yourself some personal goals (do on
average one commit a day? fix one bug a day?) and try to reach them. If
you do, set yourself some new goals.

I have found some pretty amazing proxy-maintainers in the last weeks,
there's quite a lot of progress happening. There's still lots of
potential, but most people only start interacting with us once we have
started to show some activity.

Right now we might be in a not-that-excellent position, but it won't
just go away. It needs all of us to _do_ something.

wkr,

Patrick