Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: repo/gentoo.git, or how committing is challenging

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

On 12/22/2015 02:14 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 7:53 AM, Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> I'd replace gkeys-gen with a ~10-line shell script ... if I had some
>> motivation to dig through some old experiments of mine where I managed
>> to set all parameters for pgp from CLI. Which is all that gkeys-gen
>> would do!
> Sounds great.
>
>> I guess we fundamentally disagree - if you do shoddy work, it is shoddy.
>> I won't praise you for it.
> Nobody is looking for your praise.
>
>> That's my time, spent to work around deficiencies I shouldn't even see -
>> if other people had done their job. And that's just frustrating if it
>> happens again and again, and instead of doing something interesting I
>> spend most of my time just being janitor and cleaning up stuff.
> I hope you're not the one looking for praise.  I can't imagine that
> your pep talk has done a great deal to motivate people to spend time
> improving the Gentoo Keys experience.
Well, it's abandoned anyway (bugs open for >1 year means there's
literally no one working on it, for a year)
Like the git 'migration' it's half-finished work with little thought
about workflow or user experience, "Change is Progress"

If we didn't have it at all I would not have had to file bugs, spend
time being very confused, etc. So all in all it has negative value in
its current state. And it wastes the time of everyone who tries to use
it, which is a few man-weeks of work ground away with inefficiency and
carelessness. Imagine how much progress we could have had if someone had
spent one afternoon on writing coherent docs!

>
> Do you want to see this fixed?
> Are you willing to do the fixing yourself?
I don't have infinite time, and wasting a day documenting things that
should have been documented a year ago is not a good way of spending time.

>
> If the answer to the first question is yes, and the second is no, then
> you've just volunteered for the job of either community motivator, or
> frustrated user.  The goal then is to make people care more about
> going out of their way to fix things than going out of their way to
> find ways to make you even more frustrated.  Which do you think is
> going to be more emotionally satisfying to those who read this thread?
>
Things working.

So, the trick is not to have user-visible breakage.

Now you know the great trick too and can apply it to your daily life.