Re: [gentoo-dev] Going against co-maintainer's wishes (ref. bug 412697)

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 3:43 AM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 26 May 2013 15:23:44 +0800
> Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> Where is this policy documented?
>
> Nowhere, I think. I've seen it coming in the late thread, looked common
> sense enough to me.
>
> If it is to be documented, I think we should document it in a more
> general fashion. To cover all stuff like completions, logrotate and so
> on.
>

As others have already pointed out, we are an organization, not a CPU.
 We can't make EVERYTHING a rule, and devs should act in a cooperative
manner so that this remains the case.

Sure, this can be made into a policy, and if things get out of hand
I'm sure it will be.  I'm not quite sure I see the need yet, as we
don't have an example yet of a maintainer not cooperating with the
systemd team on the installation of init files (in the present example
Ben isn't actually a maintainer, since he stepped down).

If Ben wants to boycott systemd by not maintaining any packages that
support it, that is his choice.  I just suspect that the end result of
that will be that he'll end up not maintaining much of anything.  I'd
hate to see that happen, as it would be a loss for Gentoo.  But,
frankly, letting any one person dictate the direction of the entire
distro by essentially threatening to quit would be worse.

Gentoo is about choice - and the nature of choice is that most of the
choices it supports are ones that you wouldn't personally make.  We do
a reasonably good job letting everybody have their cake and eat it
too.  However, it really isn't an appropriate distro for absolute
purists of almost any kind - it reeks of compromise.  We package
proprietary software (we don't redistribute the copyrighted parts), we
more-or-less run on Windows/OSX, we support that X32 alternate
architecture that some believe has no useful purpose, and so on.

If you really want to influence the battle of the init
implementations, then write code, not emails.  Maybe that is a wrapper
that allows OpenRC to support systemd units.  Maybe that is more
functionality for OpenRC.  Maybe it is something else.  However,
trying to influence things by just spitting into the wind isn't going
to do much but get your face dirty. Sure, devs can quit, but that
isn't just a loss for Gentoo.  Frankly if your main goal in life is to
avoid systemd then you're better off supporting Gentoo which is likely
to support that option nearly forever far better than any other
distro.

Rich