Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Questions for Candidates (was: Questioning/Interviewing council nominees)

[hasufell <hasufell@gentoo.org>]

On 07/01/2013 08:37 PM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn wrote:
> hasufell schrieb:
>>> They can each have their own ebuild in portage. I do not think that overlays
>>> are the solution here.
>>
>> That idea is so bad I hope we will never see it happen.
> 
> That's what GLEP 39 explictly allows.
> 
>>>> Will that make any1
>>>> reconsider his attitude about being a maintainer and realize that it
>>>> means to serve the _user_?
>>>
>>> No, it means to scratch an itch.
>>
>> I think we will not improve as a distro if we do not redefine our
>> priorities.
>> I have the feeling that our work is not user-centered anymore, but
>> developer-centered and that concept is simply wrong and no sane business
>> manager would ever disagree.
> 
> If you want a user-centric distro which is run by business managers, that
> niche is already occupied. If Gentoo tried to achieve a linear user
> experience, putting uniformity over diversity, then we'd just become a poor
> copy of Ubuntu. Would it increase our user base? Probably. Would it still be
> Gentoo? I'm not sure.
> 
> 

That is wrapping words in my mouth or at least misunderstanding on
purpose. Please read more carefully.

I knew people would jump on that anecdote of business management. I was
not talking about gentoo becoming a business, but about facts based on
experience in the world of (free) software development which tell us to
involve the user in development. That user can very well consist of
specific group we are explicitly targeting, so your other point is wrong
too: I did not talk about widening the userbase by putting "uniformity"
over "diversity". I did not mention any of these words, you said them. I
was talking about _consistency_ (at least on a certain level) and that
does not necessarily conflict with diversity and does not involve
changing our userbase. It does conflict with diversity at those points
where people stop working together and stop discussing issues and just
go their own way either by doing things against our philosophy/policy or
by being stubborn/uncommunicative.
That can happen in numerous ways, especially on those issues which are
definitely worth _global discussion_, such as eclasses, supporting a new
init-system, switching a default implementation, messing with profiles,
with portage, PMS whatever.

Did any1 in those recent discussions ask: do _our users_ actually want
feature x or feature y, implementation foo or bar?
If the answer is yes and it makes sense for us too, then we should not
care about a minority of devs that do not like that course.

Ofc we have our low-level principles that might not change in the
forseeable future, but that does not mean we can ignore what our
community thinks and circumvent conflict resolution by avoiding each
other which is basically what that sounds like.

Bringing up the word "ubuntu" in this dicussion is a really poor thing.

Do you hold the concept of "maintainership" over "common sense"?