From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from lists.gentoo.org (pigeon.gentoo.org [208.92.234.80]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by finch.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 3534E1382DE for ; Mon, 27 Jun 2016 19:57:46 +0000 (UTC) Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0171B9420A; Mon, 27 Jun 2016 19:57:44 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp.gentoo.org (smtp.gentoo.org [140.211.166.183]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 5AC5C94208 for ; Mon, 27 Jun 2016 19:57:43 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-wm0-f42.google.com (mail-wm0-f42.google.com [74.125.82.42]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) (Authenticated sender: djc) by smtp.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 8B15B340D73 for ; Mon, 27 Jun 2016 19:57:41 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mail-wm0-f42.google.com with SMTP id f126so113717043wma.1 for ; Mon, 27 Jun 2016 12:57:41 -0700 (PDT) X-Gm-Message-State: ALyK8tKEZvEegHKTzOIUCV0H2c8PRHY93qYRyOTh0WVgDhZM5LxfOpn/+l7P30eQhiOANUPkD+FmV6Vm7TSWeA== X-Received: by 10.28.56.68 with SMTP id f65mr12706889wma.58.1467057458249; Mon, 27 Jun 2016 12:57:38 -0700 (PDT) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Project discussion list X-BeenThere: gentoo-project@lists.gentoo.org Reply-To: gentoo-project@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.28.229.2 with HTTP; Mon, 27 Jun 2016 12:57:18 -0700 (PDT) From: Dirkjan Ochtman Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2016 21:57:18 +0200 X-Gmail-Original-Message-ID: Message-ID: Subject: [gentoo-project] Council manifesto 2016/2017 To: gentoo-project@lists.gentoo.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 X-Archives-Salt: eb6d4c03-1272-477f-9205-a9dfee032a6d X-Archives-Hash: c94c2838bfaf94f55dc752a493392b29 Hi all, Sorry I have not managed to formulate a manifesto sooner. If you haven't voted yet, please consider whether you think my positions as formulated below make sense. I've been a Gentoo user since about 2004 and developer since for 7 years now (I think?). My home team is the Python project, where I was the elected lead for a couple of years before handing that role over to the very capable Mike G. In my day job, I'm the manager of a C++ development team (jobs available in C++ and Java, BTW!); in my spare time I do a lot of open source work (100 commits in 15 projects in the last month), mainly in Python and more recently in Rust. For me, Gentoo is about being modular, flexible, and therefore in many ways supporting of doing cutting-edge stuff with. In order to improve further, I see two important goals: improve the community, and make sure we don't get stuck with legacy stuff/scaling problems. Improving the community: Personally I feel that many of our discussions devolve into long threads with long emails reiterating the same positions over and over. If you, too, feel that this is an issue, I would like to take a bit more active role in moderating discussions in our community (I'm mainly thinking on gentoo-dev), or empowering others to work on trying to better moderate mailing list threads, for example by making sure summaries are posted along the way to keep things accessible. With a pretty big team, we need to make sure that we keep moving forward, instead of getting bogged down in the status quo. At the same time, some individuals take so much responsible that they can come across quite hostile, even when they act with the best interest of the distribution at heart. In the past, I have reached out to some on an individual basis to make sure they're okay, to discuss how responsibilities can be shared better, and how such outbursts can be avoided. I think it can be useful to zoom out a bit and figure out how things can be managed/improved without placing an undue burden on some individuals that will feel a lot of stress from the responsibility. Finally, recruitment is ever important. Improving our contribution "funnel" (going from being an interested outside observer, to being a user, to filing a bug, to creating a pull request, to becoming a developer) is very important to me to guarantee the long-term health of the distribution. Improving the code/technical stuff: As Gentoo ages and grows, I worry that we're taking longer and longer to move stuff forward. For example, think of stabilizing new Python versions, stabilizing Apache 2.4 (where I took a somewhat active role) or bringing new gcc versions to all of our users. Having a single obscure blocker can sometimes delay the process for everyone else for months, which I think will grow worse over time and become unacceptable. We will need to think about better ways to move forward. Note that I'm largely a user of the stable distribution (on amd64), with targeted unstable packages where I know I can trust and/or track upstream. We will have to figure out ways to leave un(der)maintained packages behind sooner if we are to keep up the pace -- and I think with today's software not keeping up to date is not an option. Security is another part of this puzzle that I think is extremely important. I'm not a bash or PMS wizard -- others are much better for that. Instead, expect me to focus on bigger picture things, but with deep software engineering experience. If this sounds useful/interesting, please consider voting for me. If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know! Thanks, Dirkjan