Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Future of gentoo's stable and unstable trees: what are your thoughts?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 2:18 AM, Hans de Graaff <graaff@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2017-07-24 at 23:22 +0000, Peter Stuge wrote:
>
> > More troubleshooting and fixing "hard" problems, less routine work.
>
> Except that some of that routine work is actually what I enjoy doing in
> Gentoo. I already get plenty of the other two in my day job.
>

This goes to a principle of volunteer work - you can't really direct
the work of volunteers (at least not with anything close to 100%
efficiency).  If you tell a volunteer they aren't allowed to work on
x, that doesn't mean that the time they used to spend on x is now
available to the organization to work on higher priority projects.  It
just means that they won't work on x any longer.

If a volunteer wanted to be working on something they considered
higher priority, they would probably already be doing it, or they
would be the ones looking for somebody to take over the lower priority
jobs.

Paid work is an entirely different matter, because the project most
employees are really working on is the "collect a paycheck" project
and what they do to collect it tends to be secondary.  That obviously
isn't 100% the case and if you're trying to retain the next Elon Musk
the rules are different, but it holds for most normal work.

So, don't assume you can fix manpower problems by delivering less.
You might be able to fix them by relaxing rules so that you can
deliver the same with less effort, but keep in mind whether those
rules added some kind of value to the final product.

-- 
Rich