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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Thank all of your for your continuous support. I will not be deploying
> any scripts to improve integration in any way.

Ok, this makes this the second item on the agenda where the proponents
essentially have announced an intention to quit before the meeting
because of voiced disagreement.  As with the other, I suggest we move
forward and discuss/decide so that at least the issue has some closure
and either Michał or others have a sense of what does and doesn't have
support.

Gentoo is a relatively large project.  If this were a group of 5
self-selected developers maybe we could all just do our own thing and
rely on the fact that we knew we agreed on everything before we
started.  If we had a big complex release process we could perhaps
rely on the fact that revert wars and such aren't really visible to
our users.  We have neither of those, so we need to have at least a
semblance of governance before we go making changes.

In both of the cases at hand (dynamic deps and github integration) the
proponents have known for many months that the issues were
controversial.  When you propose any change you're going to have to
expect opposition.  When you propose a controversial change you're
deluding yourself if you think you'll avoid it.

People have a right to voice contrary opinions with reasoned
arguments.  The fact that not everybody agrees with those arguments
does not diminish their value.

You do have a right to expect timely resolution of the issues, but the
council meeting schedule isn't a mystery.  We meet once a month per
the wiki page, and the meeting chairs are all pre-announced.  Your
issue will be discussed on the lists before we meet, as a courtesy to
the entire community so that we can make informed and reasoned
decisions, and there is no appearance of insiders/etc.  We just have
too many users to go shooting from the hip on things that are directly
visible to them, even if this might have been more fashionable at a
time in the past.

I appreciate the efforts individuals and teams go through to come up
with new features, and seeing them criticized, perhaps unfairly, is no
doubt difficult.  However, there are others in Gentoo who contribute
and they need us to have some kind of semblance of policy to do so.
That includes teams like QA, or Comrel, or Infra, who don't want to be
the referees in revert wars and battles over bugzilla configuration
and so on.  They count on some kind of semblance of order to do their
jobs.  So does the entire developer community, because in the end
we're all trusting each other to cooperate.

The Council doesn't operate solely as a popularity contest.  We don't
print out and weigh the emails for and against to make every decision.
Bring your arguments to the lists.  You don't have to have the last
reply to every email to win.  Indeed, you don't /necessarily/ need to
reply to any of them to win.  So, take a break from the argument if it
is making your blood boil.  Half the time when people seem to want to
give up on issues it is in cases where 6/7 council members seem
inclined to support them.  You'll never persuade everybody, nor do you
have to.

-- 
Rich