Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

["Canek Peláez Valdés" <caneko@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28/04/2013 18:11, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>>> What we complain about here is basic low-level software changes that
>>> > affect much more than just their own little universe, and will do it ON
>>> > ALL LINUX MACHINES NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.
>> The source is out there NOW AND IN THE FUTURE. If there is enough
>> developers interested in maintaining something, it will be maintained;
>> but you cannot force no developer to maintain nothing.
>
> You keep saying this, over and over in many places for many reasons.
>
> But it just is not true.
>
> It's easy to get a dev to support something - you just ask them.
>
> Have you ever asked a dev to support something you needed?

Yes of course; you can ask a developer for anything: you can ask him,
for example, to throw himself over a cliff. Believe me: he will
probably not do it.

I said: you cannot *FORCE* a developer to maintain nothing. You want
to *FORCE* them to support PA-less systems (in the case of GNOME,
perhaps, in the future) and /usr-separated systems without initramfs
(in udev case), only because *you* think is the right thing to do, or
because it was previously "supported" (in the /usr-separated it was
actually a problem waiting to happen).

The developers in those projects made their choice: make yours. Stick
with those projects and accept that the developers word is law; or
contribute so that your word has weight; or fork the project; or
switch projects; or whatever. Complaining over choices already made by
the people in charge is not very productive.

Of course you can express your opinion. But without any code behind
it, the most probably outcome is that it will be ignored.

Even more in a place like this list: some Gentoo developers read
gentoo-user, and from those even less are upstream in certain
projects. But the majority of the people writing the code (the kernel,
systemd-udev, PulseAudio, GStreamer, GNOME,
whatever-application-you-use) most of the time don't read this list.

Complaining here about PulseAudio being a hard dependency on GNOME is
basically yelling into an echo chamber: you will most of the time get
only responses from people with the same opinion as yours, and they
all will get into a long rant about the evils of who-knows-what new
fangled project that goes against "old Unix principles" (whatever that
is). And. Nothing. Will. Change... because the people coding the code
are the ones making the decisions. And they do not read (in general)
this particular mailing list.

The developers in several projects are making their decisions;
sometimes they listen to users, sometimes they don't. If we don't step
in and contribute code to said projects, arguing here about what
constitutes a "good" or a "bad" developer is pretty pointless.

To finish (this mail and my participation in this thread), you know
what developer is famous for not listening to users? Linus Torvalds.
Google what has happened whenever someone has tried to set up a
petition campaign to get something into the kernel.

And he's certainly one of the best project leaders we have.
--
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México