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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn
<chithanh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Rich Freeman schrieb:
>> As far as I'm concerned, kids who can't get along can go play
>> someplace else.  If you want your own apache ebuild that can't be
>> touched by anybody but you, that's what overlays are for.
>
> And then the Gentoo portage ebuild loses its maintainer? How is that supposed
> to make anything better?

First, most people aren't going to quit over this.  The maintainer
doesn't have to do anything but not actively revert changes made by
the project teams.

If they do quit, somebody else will have to step up and maintain it,
or it gets treecleaned (eventually).  Short-term it might be a loss.
Long-term I think it is the only way we can thrive.

You can't make everybody happy.  If we make Gentoo the best place for
FOSS contributors to be if they don't want to have to cooperate with
anybody else, then those are exactly the sorts of applicants we will
get.  If we make Gentoo a place where it is easy to make big (optional
to users and devs alike) changes and initiatives, then people
interested in these will come join us.  Somebody made an excellent
point about making sure that candidate developers were a good cultural
fit, but just what kind of culture do we want them to fit into?  Not
everybody is going to agree on what kind of culture we should have,
but not making any choice at all is resulting in WW3 in the trenches
and nobody seems to be happy as a result.  Sometimes you just have to
make a choice.

Frankly I've never been one to cater to "do it my way or I'll quit."
If doing it their way makes sense that's fine, but if it isn't a
win/win then sometimes no deal is the lesser evil.

Rich