Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: revisiting our stabilization policy

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 16/01/2014 19:56, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:54 AM, Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se> wrote:
>> Sergey Popov wrote:
>>> As i said earlier, problem begins when we NEED to stabilize
>>> something to prevent breakages and arch teams are slow.
>>
>> Isn't that simply a matter of assigning and respecting priority on
>> bugs properly?
> 
> Are you suggesting that we should forbid people from working on
> lower-priority bugs anytime a higher-priority bug exists?  That would
> probably just reduce the amount of contribution.  You can't force
> anybody to work on the higher-priority ones.
> 
> Sure, in an ideal world people work on the high-priority stuff.
> However, often somebody either prefers to work on a lower-priority
> bug, or finds it easier to do so.  Simply marking a bug as
> high-priority doesn't make the bug get resolved.
> 
> Bottom line is that people work on what they work on.  Unless you can
> find people to work on the stuff that you want done you need to make
> work go away.

+1

"Respecting bug priority" feels like that corporate BS I have to put up
with every day. Like every sysadmin team world-wide, we're understaffed
so the only bugs that get any attention at all are ones where some fool
of a manager thinks he can shout louder than anyone else.

Gentoo is not like that. As you say, devs will work on what they feel
like working on, heavily influenced by their own sense of
responsibility. We have nothing to offer maintainers except
fuzzy-feel-good and recognition; we have to trust them to do the right
thing.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com