Hola Ryan, On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 10:14 -0700, Ryan Phillips wrote: > This is a follow up to Mark's (halcy0n's) thread regarding QA Policies and > seemant's letter on herds, teams, and projects. > > I believe the way Gentoo is doing things is broken. There I have said it. > The > entire project has reached a level of being too political and trying to solve > certain problems in the wrong way.
There certainly is scope for doing some things better, but this is of no surprise to any of us. Gentoo has grown and matured quite a lot over the past few years and what worked with 15 developers doesn't work all that well with 300+, in the process of finding out what works best we have (and will continue to) encounter difficulties and situations that doesn't please everyone. However, I wouldn't say that it's all bad. > Some of these problems are intermixed. Please consider them starting points > for discussion. > > __Problem: Developer Growth__ > > I find that developer growth as being a problem. Adding a developer to gentoo > should be as easy as 1. has the user contributed numerous (~5+) patches that > helps the project move forward. If yes, then commit access should be given. > Adding a developer is usually quite a chore. There are numerous reasons why > this is a problem: having a live tree, taking a test, and not defining within > policy when a person could possibly get commit access. Having just completed my ebuild and end quiz last week (having been a 'fake developer/staffer' for a little while longer) I must admit that I didn't in any way find the quizzes to be at all difficult or hard, and certainly not at all something that made it more difficult to become a developer. If anything I found taking the quizzes to be educational, now, I may be blessed by having Seemant as my mentor; he did ensure that he took the time to review my quiz properly and that he also took the time to expand on the questions already asked in the quiz (We played 20 questions and he made me answer a bunch of semi related stuff which in turn helped me ellaborate on my answers as well as getting a better understanding of the various bits mentioned in the quiz). And while I have been around for a bit now, I certainly value the work my mentor did in ensuring that I felt comfortable and confident before taking the plunge and submitting. As for the work involved from recruiters, they certainly didn't leave me hanging around and when my quizzes were submitted it went pretty fast ahead, they were marked, passed and my access was changed. I personally believe that the quizzes could be more difficult. And I hope that the current revamp of the recruitment process will be one that will benefit potential developers as well as current developers, Gentoo as a whole and of course our user base. > All these reasons leave the project stagnant and lacking developers. On the contrary, now while I agree that some projects may be lacking in man power I think overall there is more likely to be some deadweight. I know Bryan (kloeri) has done quite a job out of clearing out and retiring inactive devs, but I still believe that we may be overstaffed in some areas. Maybe those areas that are lacking need to look at why they are not attracting people? Or why people who showed interest didn't stick around for the entire recruitment process? I believe that we need to ensure that we have top notch, high quality devs rather than aiming for quantity. And of course, we don't want a situation where it's too easy to become a dev only to have people yo-yo in/out of the project as and when the fancy takes them. <snip> > __Problem: QA Policies__ > > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/37544 > > It seems that the QA Policies are a product of a Live Tree, and going > partially > non-live would solve the problems listed. > > Everyone here is on the same team. There will be some breakages in the tree > and those can be dealt with. Like Seemant [1] said, herds are just groups of > like *packages*. The QA Policy is wrong when it says cross-team assistance; > we > are all on the *same* team. The tree should naturally work. If it doesn't > then that is a bug for all of us. Although we are all here to work on Gentoo and hopefully have a unision goal, the motivation and the ideas for implementation and of course what we find important differ. For the most part we are a group of pretty decent people, but we don't always agree. Which is perfectly fine. > Conflict resolution should not be a subproject. It should *not* exist at all. > Rules need to be in place to avoid conflict. Having some sort of voting > structure for all the developers (this doesn't mean requiring everyone to > vote) > and not just the council or devrel makes a lot of sense for most things. If I > don't like how someone is acting within the project there should be a vote and > then see if that person is kicked out. No trial, no anything besides a vote. > And if I lose I have to deal with it. Either stay with the project, or find > something else. This solution just works. I am not entirely certain what your definition of conflict is, but in a group as large as ours there will no doubt be a conflict of interests and beliefs. People can't be expected to agree 100% all the time, and lets be realistic, if we did we would be going absolutely nowhere and this would be terribly boring. Now, I believe that having a votes only system in place could be quite dangerous and could easily be abused. Say Developer X annoyed me, so I decided to ensure that there was a vote, I could easily fabricate some reason for why I thought he was bad for the project and I could certainly win people over on my side to ensure that he was voted out. Now, admittedly the current policy for dealing with conflicts of the sort of nature where action needs to be taken against a developer has been proven to give more headache than what it's worth and therefor Devrel are attempting to work on changing the way they deal with this. Now, the discussion about this has been open on the gentoo-devrel@ ML for a few days and it appears that no-one has any input on the proposed new policy at all. Personally I would like to see a change, I would like us to be able to avoid having to go through things such as a hearing process. I would like for trolling/flaming and personal attacks to be discouraged and stomped down on as and when they occur rather than when they have become the sort of problem that affects the morale and motivation for all of us. But that's a different discussion for a different time and a different mailing list. > Gentoo should be a fun environment. The previous paragraph should be taken as > a last resort. Quite. "It's supposed to be fun, too." Now, personally I find Gentoo to be primarily fun. I am involved with some incredibly awesome teams and I deal with people who just plain kick arse. And I know that for many they find the same within their projects/teams/whatevers... It's just a shame we can't make it global yet ;) Cheers, Christel Dahlskjaer -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
