Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11

["Anthony G. Basile" <blueness@gentoo.org>]

On 10/9/15 5:44 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> When talking about Gentoo Social Contract violation by GitHub
>> integration I apply to the following cause of the Social
>> Contract [1]:
>>
>>   However, Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or
>>   metadata unless it conforms to the GNU General Public License, the
>>   GNU Lesser General Public License, the Creative Commons -
>>   Attribution/Share Alike or some other license approved by the Open
>>   Source Initiative (OSI).
>>
>> If developer commits changes directly to git without bugzilla being
>> used, this is OK, because out git repo is free and we control it.
>> But when we start to depend on github pull requests or similar
>> proprietary metadata, the Social Contract is violated.
> I don't see how we're "depending" on github if we've already agreed
> that you can do the same thing without using it in the first place.

You become dependent in that discussions about a bug or patch are now on 
github and if that goes away you loose it.  Therefore we depend on 
github to keep that history for us and that history is as important as 
the fix itself.  Saying that you don't have to use github doesn't fix 
this unless that history is mirrored on our bugzilla.

xkcd says it best https://xkcd.com/743/   Many gentoo devs get this and 
that's why they're unhappy about where we've come with this.  I 
contribute to Gentoo under the assumption of the Social Contract.  I 
expect it upheld and not watered down.  You can say "I don't see" and 
put depend in quotes, but all this does is discourage me from 
contributing and remind me that the conditions under which I contributed 
can be just waved away by capriciousness.  This is not an issue that you 
will make go away with redefining "depend".  It strikes at the moral 
fiber of the open source community.

As for rage quitting an issue, are you sure that watering down the 
Social Contract won't cause other kinds of quitting?  This issue is 
above such theatrics.

>
> If I told you that I secretly push all my changes to github, then pull
> them to another machine, then push them to gentoo, would that be some
> kind of violation of the social contract.
>
> Nobody is required to even look at github to do their job, and I don't
> believe that there is a proposal to require anybody to do so.  If
> there were I think we could consider that separately from having an
> integration.
>
> People are using github TODAY to work on Gentoo.  If it went away
> tomorrow, it really wouldn't affect us much.  It is just an optional
> tool, and I don't see the proposal changing that.
>
>> IMO the best solution will be to deploy some free platform like
>> Gogs for code review, pull request and all other fashionable
>> features as was already suggested in this thread by Hasufell.
> You're welcome to do that, and if you need permission to get infra to
> host it you're welcome to ask us for it, assuming they're willing to
> host it for you (and if that is really the limitation then that is
> something we can try to tackle).  Right now nobody is actually doing
> the work on that, and I don't see the value in holding up the project
> people are working on merely because they could be volunteering their
> time on something else instead.  By that argument we'd still be using
> the 32-bit binary emul-* packages.
>
> Ultimately we're a bit of a do-acracy and you get further with an
> implementation and an argument than you get with an argument alone.
>


-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@gentoo.org
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