Problems at Gentoo Discussion

[Slalomsk8er]

me 2

[steveL]

because we have zero interest in returning to a state where we have one individual in charge of everything? when Daniel was in charge he made decisions single-handedly, often without logical reason and against the feedback of the developer and user community. that is not an open model. we'd like to do better than that.

How is "one individual in charge of everything" significantly different from a secretive cabal, particularly one who considers the wider members of the community "stupid" and not worth interacting with or listening to? If there's a commitment to an open model, I'm not seeing it, and I don't consider conducting ones business in secret to be a very open approach.

Er the only real authority in Gentoo atm is the Council. They are also the ones with ultimate responsibility for most of the decisions we care about wrt what happens to Gentoo technically. They certainly do not conduct their business in secret, and if anything are even more open than previously since they allow unvoiced contributions in meetings (a change that only came in this academic year; ofc if you talk nonsense or are disruptive in there you will get muted pretty damn quick.) See their project page for full logs of every meeting. (Admittedly there was a secret meeting or two around proctors' disbandment last year; hopefully that kind of thing won't happen again and if it does we'll all be arguing against such on the dev m-l.)

I see this as more akin to workers discussing a management change. As users (patients of medical staff is a good analogy) we have zero idea of what the day-to-day work is like; while we can decide on outcomes we would like, or complain about mistreatment/rudeness and the like, we are not qualified to dictate how the work should be carried out. I have no problem with trusting the devs collectively to decide what conditions they want to work under (and i have had my fair share of run-ins with individual devs, and been flamed by the m-l; I am far more biased to users when a distinction is being made, since I think devs have a duty to behave to a higher standard than us, and you can't blame someone for not knowing something, it's simply foolish.)

You talk about openness: just how open is drobbins controlling all the appointments to the board of trustees? I mean, his offer is conditional on that, and he has given no indication of whom he'd appoint, only that it's take-it or leave-it and you have one week to decide. Thing is once that's accepted, he then has full legal control of all Gentoo IP. Think about it: Gentoo accepts this, and all the work done by all the devs over the years belongs to him. How do we know his employer isn't supporting him in this so that they can take Gentoo and make it into the next Ubuntu, while the people who've actually made the software get zilch? After all, he'd get a promotion and a pay-rise, plus he'd be back running Gentoo and he'd have all of us thanking him for "saving" Gentoo.

Once that step has been taken there's no going back. Please note: I am not saying this is his intention; we simply do not know, since he hasn't exactly been open about it and we have zero idea whom he wants to appoint to the board. It just sounds like he wants a clique around him, just like back in the old days. I did post a comment to his blog welcoming his involvement but asking him only to reconsider the terms: I wouldn't accept them for anything I do, so why would I possibly expect the devs to hand over all their work to him?

Funnily enough the comment didn't get through moderation. Might be because I also pointed out that whatever US law might say about copyright assignment, the ROTW doesn't always concur. My understanding would be that in the absence of the Foundation, copyright would revert to the original author. Certainly any contributor who wanted to protest that they handed their work to the Community, and not drobbins, would have a valid case imo. Since there hasn't been a Foundation for however many months, reconsituting it now would still leave Gentoo open to that problem if a case could be made that the Trustees no longer represented the Community. Having them all as appointees of one person, the Chair, would blatantly be such.

we're discussing this amongst ourselves right now, because really the Foundation has zero effect on the Gentoo you know and love/hate. feel free to freak out amongst yourselves if you like, but we're not going to rush a big decision based on knee-jerk reactions.

First observation: "Discussing amongst ourselves." Above you accuse Daniel of working against the feedback of the developer and user community. I suppose one way to avoid the sin of working against feedback is to eliminate the chances of feedback entirely. Then there's no feedback to work against.

Second observation: There is a clear "us vs. them" bias in your mindset. The wise and benevolent "us" is rationally discussing amongst themselves (allegedly, since this in secret). The great unwashed "them" is 'freaking out' and engaging in "knee-jerk" reactions.

Well let's be clear: there is always an us/them in any service industry between the people who provide the service and their clients. Retail workers, nurses, police: anyone who works with the general public comes to view them as a pita. That's just the way it is. And since none of us users would be affected by the change, how exactly does our POV on the proposed change to their conditions have any relevance?

Prediction: Nothing happens. Things temporarily improve and the community is collectively punished in some fashion for this entire argument. Really, the users have no power or say in this, and they know it. So it's their way or the highway, anything else is just fantasy.

I don't think we should have a say for the reasons I outlined (it's not our working conditions.) I am curious as to how you think we'll be "punished" though. What, our boxen will all deliver a mild electric shock every time we log onto this site? ;p

It was claimed that the dev base was in decline. He proposed that you could refute the decline by not counting the retires by claiming they did nothing. Logically if they did nothing then you can't really count them as additions either.

Spot on slonocode; made me laugh as well, so thanks :-)

Please note: I would really love drobbins to be part of Gentoo officially again, and at a strategic level, not just coming in as a standard dev again. I wholly support him being a Trustee, and would love his ethos and attitude (as expressed on the m-l) to be the definition of a Gentoo dev. I just don't see why he needs to be in full legal control of Gentoo, nor do I like the heavy-handed tactics he has used. I don't see him as being that open, sorry. If he were he wouldn't even be thinking of having only his own appointees; honestly it's Stalinist imo.

"Strong leaders are good; strong institutions are better. A strong community is best of all."

[c0d3g33k]

Worse yet, unless I missed it, but I've yet to hear a single developer echo those sentiments. Aren't any users bothered by that?

I'm sorry, but I just don't get any of it. I'm beginning to wonder if there are some that will think Gentoo is in dire trouble as long as it's not as popular as Ubuntu or something. Never mind that, while the Gentoo website and GWN stay dormant, and even with no 2007.1 or 2008.0, I can run versions of software under Gentoo that, under other distros would require waiting for their next release.

I don't mean to offend anyone who's in favor of taking the drobbins offer or anything, and I'm not even saying I'm sure it'd be a bad thing...but seriously...the reactions I'm seeing very much do look like 'freaking out'.

Tom

Hi Tom,

To your first point above, my impression, based on observation of Gentoo over the years, is that the current group of developers is to a large degree self-selected. By definition, the group of people responsible for creating the current status quo will be happy with it and see nothing wrong. They are happy with themselves and how things are because they played a part in getting to the current state. Any developers who didn't quite fit in or were frustrated with the friction went their own way. As has been pointed out many times, this is open source and volunteer work, so the barrier to exiting is low if you're not having fun. So no matter how well intentioned, it's easy in these kind of volunteer efforts to form a clique that believes what they are doing is the best and (intentionally or unintentionally) drive away those who have a different vision. So when you wonder why users aren't concerned by the fact that no developers are concerned, a possible reason is that the developers and the users don't share the same vision. It's an easy state to reach if the conditions are right.

As to the "Gentoo is in dire trouble" concern. I've been part of many organizations over the years. Some worked well, many were dysfunctional. Anybody who has been in the workforce for any length of time has likely had similar experiences. One key observation, at least for me, is that organizational dysfunction is not an obvious and fast moving phenomenon. When things are clicking and working well, everybody knows and feels it, though most would be hard pressed to define exactly why. It just feels right, the work is fun, the sense of working toward a common purpose is in the air and progress toward that common purpose is mind bogglingly rapid. (Note - this is exceedingly rare. Sadly.) When things aren't working well, everybody knows and feels it too. But the decline and failure isn't rapid, and in fact parts of the organization may be doing wonderful work. But things just kind of lose the magic, slowly grind down and more and more things become painful and difficult. It's more a sense of friction and being weighed down than an obvious problem. The sense of common purpose is missing, the organization fractures into unintegrated groups each working with their own priorities in mind. I think that's what a lot of people have been feeling with Gentoo though they don't know how to express it because it's so hard to nail down.

It's not about being as popular as Ubuntu or something. It's not about dire trouble that will result in immediate failure. It's about the nagging feeling that driving the ship toward the north where the icebergs are might not be such a great idea. But when you point this out to captain or crew, they tell you about their fine ship and how it will never sink, just go back to the banquet room and have fun. Trust us. We know what we are doing. And therein lies the folly. Time and again that's proven to be false. Everything wasn't ok. There were no WMD's. Maybe that small voice saying "hey guys, maybe that's not such a good idea" was right.

[russK]

You talk about openness: just how open is drobbins controlling all the appointments to the board of trustees? I mean, his offer is conditional on that, and he has given no indication of whom he'd appoint, only that it's take-it or leave-it and you have one week to decide. Thing is once that's accepted, he then has full legal control of all Gentoo IP. Think about it: Gentoo accepts this, and all the work done by all the devs over the years belongs to him. How do we know his employer isn't supporting him in this so that they can take Gentoo and make it into the next Ubuntu, while the people who've actually made the software get zilch? After all, he'd get a promotion and a pay-rise, plus he'd be back running Gentoo and he'd have all of us thanking him for "saving" Gentoo.

Help me understand your point, isn't just about all of the code GPL2?

[steveL]

You talk about openness: just how open is drobbins controlling all the appointments to the board of trustees? I mean, his offer is conditional on that, and he has given no indication of whom he'd appoint, only that it's take-it or leave-it and you have one week to decide. Thing is once that's accepted, he then has full legal control of all Gentoo IP. Think about it: Gentoo accepts this, and all the work done by all the devs over the years belongs to him. How do we know his employer isn't supporting him in this so that they can take Gentoo and make it into the next Ubuntu, while the people who've actually made the software get zilch? After all, he'd get a promotion and a pay-rise, plus he'd be back running Gentoo and he'd have all of us thanking him for "saving" Gentoo.

Help me understand your point, isn't just about all of the code GPL2?

Yeah but only the copyright owner can grant an exception to that. That's how people like Trolltech make their money. Or are you saying the IP is effectively worthless because it's under the GPL?
Further, the code has nothing to do with the brand nor any commercial usage of it (eg like RedHat selling support.) And drobbins has tried to set up commercial entities based on Gentoo before: Gentoo Games, Inc and Gentoo Technologies, Inc. Please note: I am not saying there's anything necessarily wrong with that, simply that it's a possible motivation for this move (and the support of his employer.) And it's hardly been discussed in the open has it?

It would also be based on not just the work drobbins and many others did years ago, but all the work done since. And there has been incredible progress and innovation within Gentoo in that time.

I have no real issue with Gentoo collectively deciding to setup as a RedHat-alike; I do have an issue with drobbins taking full control of it in such a manner (one week, no discussion, all his own appointees, censorship of comments on his blog) in reaction to a perceived weakness. The Foundation hasn't existed since last summer: has Gentoo stopped working? I missed all the threads where the quality of the software suddenly plummeted (expat was from a year previously). The truth is the Trustees had very little to do with Gentoo development. Since drobbins has made clear he would make significant changes to the development process, one can only infer he means to use legal control to enforce developmental policy, a clear breach of the separation between Trustees and Council.

Personally I much prefer the Software Freedom Conservancy -- I don't think those projects are bad company to keep and all administrative stuff would be taken off dev hands, with the right to return full control at any point in the future. That sounds both more in the spirit of the original structure, and less of a risk to my jaded ears.

[rhill]

because we have zero interest in returning to a state where we have one individual in charge of everything? when Daniel was in charge he made decisions single-handedly, often without logical reason and against the feedback of the developer and user community. that is not an open model. we'd like to do better than that.

How is "one individual in charge of everything" significantly different from a secretive cabal, particularly one who considers the wider members of the community "stupid" and not worth interacting with or listening to? If there's a commitment to an open model, I'm not seeing it, and I don't consider conducting ones business in secret to be a very open approach.

I don't understand, what secretive cabal are you referring to? The council? All meetings are public and summaries and complete logs are posted. Or do you mean the devs in general? Almost everything we do is on public mailing lists or IRC. This particular discussion is being done on our private list because it concerns legal information that cannot be made public, and, to be perfectly honest, having a thousand different people who don't fully understand the situation offering opinions, though they all mean well, would not help us right now. It's been difficult to keep order even among ourselves. How would bringing in the public at this time make this better?

Where did anyone call anyone stupid?

we're discussing this amongst ourselves right now, because really the Foundation has zero effect on the Gentoo you know and love/hate. feel free to freak out amongst yourselves if you like, but we're not going to rush a big decision based on knee-jerk reactions.

First observation: "Discussing amongst ourselves." Above you accuse Daniel of working against the feedback of the developer and user community. I suppose one way to avoid the sin of working against feedback is to eliminate the chances of feedback entirely. Then there's no feedback to work against.

I suppose, but then how do you make intelligent informed decisions? You can't. You need feedback. More importantly you need relevant feedback.

We, the developer community, are the people this decision affects. Therefore we are the people talking about it. Who does our legal work, what state of the US we should reincorporate in, what fees and taxes we will need to pay, what lawyers we need to contact, what the current status of our assets are and if we need to move them and how, which of our bylaws are currently ratified and which are valid under the initial articles of incorporation, and (to a lesser extent) what legal status our reincorporation will take - 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) (we became (6) for a particular reason, and we need to re-evaluate that as well) are not issues that generally affect our user base in any direct way.

Second observation: There is a clear "us vs. them" bias in your mindset. The wise and benevolent "us" is rationally discussing amongst themselves (allegedly, since this in secret). The great unwashed "them" is 'freaking out' and engaging in "knee-jerk" reactions.

Hey look, a strawman.

The Us are actually a group of developers who generally care nothing about administrative and legal matters and who are now getting a nasty crash course in business law. We are annoyed we were not informed the ongoing gong show that were our Trustees was failing. We are embarrassed that for so long we simply believed "someone else" was handling our affairs, when they were in general being passed to /dev/null. We are angry that every attempt to assess the status of the Foundation was met with reassurances it was progressing as planned. We are not wise nor benevolent. We are confused. We are tired. Some of us are unwashed. But, we are progressing.

The dirty Them, which I'm assuming meant you, the users, or giant ants was a construct of your own. The freaking out and knee-jerk reactions I was referring to mostly meant Slashdot and those running around screaming Gnetoo is dying!!!!!!!1!11!. Gentoo is not dying. Nothing is changing but the copyrights on our ebuilds. Probably not even that.

And we are taking your input. We have been listening. We realize you have concerns and we do our best to make fun of them at our secret meetings where we wear the skins of our ancestors and roll dice made from teeth to divinate which package we should hide the incomatible API bug in for the next release.

(muahaha)

Seriously though, we do listen to what you have to say. There's even a user survey in the works to gain more of that input. We're also considering the user response in our current situation. We have press releases explaining things currently awaiting final review. We do care about you (in a platonic kinda way), and if you care about us, you'll give us some space while we quietly freak out among ourselves.

[nihilo]

because we have zero interest in returning to a state where we have one individual in charge of everything? when Daniel was in charge he made decisions single-handedly, often without logical reason and against the feedback of the developer and user community. that is not an open model. we'd like to do better than that.

How is "one individual in charge of everything" significantly different from a secretive cabal, particularly one who considers the wider members of the community "stupid" and not worth interacting with or listening to? If there's a commitment to an open model, I'm not seeing it, and I don't consider conducting ones business in secret to be a very open approach.

I don't understand, what secretive cabal are you referring to? ... Or do you mean the devs in general? Almost everything we do is on public mailing lists or IRC. This particular discussion is being done on our private list ....

I think that's probably the 'secretive cabal' mentioned. Whenever you discuss important issues behind closed doors and leave your users guessing for days on end what will actually happen to their beloved distribution, some will be paranoid about why secrecy is necessary and what is really being discussed.

Most open-source and free-software projects do everything in the open, and since things have obviously become very screwed up with Gentoo recently, users are liable to think that nothing is being done until we actually see evidence of something being done.

A non-public discussion does nothing at all to alleviate user concerns, and frankly, I'm really surprised that there still has not been any kind of official announcement. The situation doesn't get much worse than the current one, and we're still in the dark. It's 3 days since everything blew up! Nobody expects a final solution yet, but some kind of official communication is expected.

[WhiteSpade]

DirtyEpic, thank you for your response. I have been reading through a lot of these threads, documents, etc and your response has been the most reassuring out of everything.
I am looking forward to the official announcement and survey; it will be good to get an idea of how everyone feels.
Thanks for stepping up to the plate and helping out Gentoo.

---Alex

[massimo]

That's just the creator of Gentoo. So why they hesitate ?
Won't it be courtesy and normal from the gentoo comunauty to permit his come back ?

because we have zero interest in returning to a state where we have only one individual in charge of everything? when Daniel was in charge he made decisions single-handedly, often without logical reason and against the feedback of the developer and user community. that is not an open model. we'd like to do better than that.

Now it is obvious what happens when you do stuff among yourselfs.

[c0d3g33k]

Lots of interesting stuff

Ya. You're right on many counts. It is a lot like the prospect of a management change, and management changes can definitely suck. Particularly when the change involves possible reduction of autonomy. I've been there, done that, have the T-Shirt, have the scars, cried the tears and moved on. Change is scary. And inevitable.

As far as all the scary what if's are concerned - that's all they are. Coming from other sources in the northwest U.S., this is labeled FUD. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

Daniel had every opportunity to stir things up the middle of last year when he found he still had the rights to Gentoo IP in his name. Legally. But he didn't take advantage of that - he tried to nudge the current parties responsible to take up the reins and complete the process. Including taking him out of the picture entirely. "Please, make me NOT President of the Gentoo Foundation". "No, Really, Please". Since that gesture failed, spectacularly, I think the recent involvement by Daniel is motivated by the desire to save his baby, so to speak.

Go back and read last year's funtoo. IMHO, the July 27th posting (http://blog.funtoo.org/2007/07/your-cho ... entoo.html) gives a good idea of what he's all about. Be sure to read his responses in the comments, too. I don't see a money grubbing power monger or dictator there.

Lord knows if I founded a distribution and left it in the hands of trusted individuals who completely dropped the ball I would be motivated to try one more time to get it right. What would you do? I don't see the boogeyman under the bed. I see a man who mistakenly gave his trust and has learned the lesson we all learn at some point in life: "If you want things done right, do it yourself". You worry about Daniel getting full legal control of all Gentoo IP and doing something nefarious. Daniel offered that up to the foundation. The trustees blew it. Entirely. Utterly. He practically begged them to do something as simple as file papers. That's all they had to do. Didn't happen. And you're worried about what *he* might do with the Gentoo IP? Yes, he might do ... wait for it ... something! As in not nothing. As in he cares about the fate of something he had a large part in creating and wants to make sure it's actually ok. Understand this. Absorb this. Grok this. This man wants to make sure that something he trusted to fuckups isn't fucked up yet again. And you're worried about that?

Think about it.

As far as the whole "developers vs. users" debate:

I'm a developer. (Professionally, that is, not for Gentoo). Used to be a scientist - had more fun writing the tools than doing the science. In my professional life, I've seen self-important high school dropouts slag accomplished lawyers, physicians, scientists and businessfolk, calling them "lusers" because they don't understand the sublime intricacies of Perl or HTML or XML or CSS or Struts or Java or C++ or C or Lisp or Assembly or <insert specific technology here>. Self-important people who had the audacity to think that understanding a <form> tag, or a do:while loop or 'public static void main(String args[])' trumps the ability to keep somebody out of prison, or save someone's life or discover new drugs or found a successful company. Here's a wakeup call: Software development is something we used to do on the side in addition to our real jobs because it was a useful tool to accomplish our real goals. If you're a developer and you start feeling full of yourself, realize that *a lot of people can do it themselves, they just don't have the time*. It's like any other skill. Devote yourself to it and be a professional, but don't assume that your skills are the pinnacle of achievement against which all else pales. My motivation for developing software professionally is because it enables other professionals (or ordinary people) to do their jobs better, easier and quicker. The moment I forget that and assume that my self-indulgence is more important than enabling people to accomplish more with better tools, I've failed. Because there's nothing more sad than creating a tool that nobody wants to use. I hate that more than anything. Users aren't there to justify and validate your need to develop. Developers are there to develop tools that enable other human beings to do great things. My opinion of self-important developers is left as an exercise to the reader.

Don't sell yourself short as a developer - it's a wonderful skill to have. But realize that it's a skill that is fully realized only when it is enabling something else work better. You can't eat code, or drive it, or keep warm in the winter with it. But code can make these things better, more affordable, less expensive. So next time you are about to rake a "luser" over the coals, think about what they might be trying to accomplish. And realize they will accomplish it without you, easily. They have been doing so for all of history, not just since Babbage first conceived of his difference engine. So keep things in perspective.

[AllenJB]

Most open-source and free-software projects do everything in the open

I believe that if you look closely, at large projects such as distros anyway, you'll find this to be false - someone mentioned Debian as an example before, but even they have a private list they don't want people listening to according to some quick research (I also note that they have had discussions on opening the archives - Gentoo's devs have had similar discussions regarding -core in the past but decided against it).

I suspect I'd get similar research results for many projects, including just about any of the larger distros and I'd certainly bet that the Apache foundation has one too.

[c0d3g33k]

I don't understand, what secretive cabal are you referring to?

Already clarified by someone in a followup post, I think. Perhaps a slightly overboard term to illustrate how things look to a lot of people from the outside, so to speak.

It's been difficult to keep order even among ourselves. How would bringing in the public at this time make this better?

Clearly. Bringing in the "public" might not make things better, but it might make Gentoo feel more like a community project. Gentoo has been smelling a bit like a Cathedral in recent times - isn't the Bazaar more preferable?

Where did anyone call anyone stupid?

That would have been AllenJB channeling the developer gestalt in the "poll" thread (around page 11). Not an official statement, granted, but it did ring true. That particular word may not be bandied about commonly, but I recognize the attitude. It's understandable, as it can be frustrating to reach an accord with users, but I've never seen any good come of it in real life. Maybe "not worth listening to" would be more accurate. I've seen the statement "Gentoo developers don't pay attention to the forums" enough to think that the latter is to some extent true.

I suppose, but then how do you make intelligent informed decisions? You can't. You need feedback. More importantly you need relevant feedback.

Precisely. And yeah, relevant feedback is tough. The S/N ratio never seems to be easy, but that seems to be part of the human condition. I haven't found any better way than to take it all in, then filter (when I've been in the position to make decisions based on feedback.) Which means communicating with people.

We, the developer community, are the people this decision affects.

No, you are a subset of the people this decision affects. You, "the developer community", may be affected more directly in certain ways than other people, but more people than you will be affected. That's part of the point that people have been trying to make. You, "the developer community", are not the Gentoo community, you are part of the Gentoo community. A damned important part, but still a part. But You, "the developer community" seem to be acting like you are the only part that matters.

And we are taking your input. We have been listening. We realize you have concerns and we do our best to make fun of them at our secret meetings where we wear the skins of our ancestors and roll dice made from teeth to divinate which package we should hide the incomatible API bug in for the next release.

Heh. Funny. Nicely done.

Seriously though, we do listen to what you have to say. There's even a user survey in the works to gain more of that input. We're also considering the user response in our current situation. We have press releases explaining things currently awaiting final review. We do care about you (in a platonic kinda way), and if you care about us, you'll give us some space while we quietly freak out among ourselves.

It's the "us" and "you" that still bugs me, and probably many others. The thing that appeals to me about FLOSS more than anything else is that it's power lies in the small contributions of the many, not the heroic contributions of the few. When it works, that is.

[douglas_goodall]

That's just the creator of Gentoo. So why they hesitate ?
Won't it be courtesy and normal from the gentoo comunauty to permit his come back ?

because we have zero interest in returning to a state where we have only one individual in charge of everything? when Daniel was in charge he made decisions single-handedly, often without logical reason and against the feedback of the developer and user community. that is not an open model. we'd like to do better than that.

it may be that Daniel does not wish to assume his previous position of dictator and just wants to run the business side of Gentoo (the Foundation). but it's not clear right now if that's his intent.

we're discussing this amongst ourselves right now, because really the Foundation has zero effect on the Gentoo you know and love/hate. feel free to freak out amongst yourselves if you like, but we're not going to rush a big decision based on knee-jerk reactions.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

we're discussing this amongst ourselves right now

that is not an open model, but we'd like to do better than that.

[Jokey_]

When I see these posts about following a single leader, it really tastes bad. Why? Well let's look at one project we've started some time ago.

Quite a lot of people were stopping by on IRC with a request to have their ebuild added. Some ebuilds looked really scary and were not even remotely in a state to be "just added" as some users requested. So I took time and sat together with them to have their ebuilds improved to a state that a version bump wouldn't require (m)any change to the ebuild. Guess what? Once they got it, they came up with more ebuilds. But how to handle all of them?

During that time I added quite a bunch of them to cvs as people promised to send me a quick notice once there is a new version out there as I can't check every ebuild for new versions every day. But sadly none of them (exactly one exception being virtualbox stuff) sent a notice or came back. So I'm with the stuff myself and with apps I don't know anything about to sanely test on a version bump.

At that time it was already obvious, with 1.5k ebuilds and two developers who mainly worked on this, we will be unable to add all ebuilds to cvs. So we came up with a way for users to do what we do each day and get the idea behind it. Yet we've kept the requirement of knowing all ebuild stuff in and out from them by reviewing their stuff before they commit it themselves and watching stuff as it improves.

Maybe you know this project, we call it "Sunrise". There you can make your own steps to get a feeling of what it requires to properly maintain an app with gentoo (including getting bug reports, suggestions from other people,...) without the need of being through the recruitment process. Currently we have around 170 committers, ~90 who came back more than once and made 8 pretty active devs out of it.
There are around 400 ebuilds in there, some come in, some move over to portage tree, so it's a pretty constant flow. As you see, a bunch of people seemed to have thought about it and now got involved to help out.

But I've read every now and then (even in this thread) that some users don't feel that welcome when contributing suggestions. Why that?
Not all humans are really as open to really broken stuff they see when reviewing ideas and contributions. It's known as a human factor to sometimes just say what you think instead of packing it into some nicer words and people feel offended. Sometimes one just may have a bad day (trouble in RL or whatever reason) though the user won't know and it potentially becomes even worse and the discussion gets heated.
How to solve it? One option would be replacing all devs with robots though it's not possible at the moment. So we can just work around it by pointing people to channels like #gentoo-sunrise or #gentoo-dev-help to have some people review stuff that are generally more open to even the most broken stuff people come up with.

But back to my initial question about the leader... Well the project start was close to the opposite of ideal. Both devs were heavily biased towards such a project and we failed to convince them easily. It required a lot of talk but worked in the end.
Note the important point: We had the chance to convince people. It was hard work but we managed to do it and in the end our project was approved and great success so far. With a single leader a simple "no" it would have been just "no". Simple as that.

So when we get our famous leader back, it should be in a balanced way and not an all or nothing option.

[Slalomsk8er]

So when we get our famous leader back, it should be in a balanced way and not an all or nothing option.

Yes, even some of us don't like to have him back as the only leader in charge.

we became (6) for a particular reason

May I ask where I can find a pointer to that reason, so I can add it to the Wiki?

There's even a user survey in the works to gain more of that input.

This is a very wise move in my opinion. There is a need to give you some input among the community or at least I have that need. Take a look at my proposal:

http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/msg_00150.xml

[nihilo]

Most open-source and free-software projects do everything in the open

I believe that if you look closely, at large projects such as distros anyway, you'll find this to be false - someone mentioned Debian as an example before, but even they have a private list they don't want people listening to according to some quick research (I also note that they have had discussions on opening the archives - Gentoo's devs have had similar discussions regarding -core in the past but decided against it).

I suspect I'd get similar research results for many projects, including just about any of the larger distros and I'd certainly bet that the Apache foundation has one too.

Well, I was thinking of the Kernel and Python, both of which are important to Gentoo, but you're right that it seems Debian has a private list. I don't know about other distributions.

I have used many of the Apache sub-projects though, and they don't have private lists -- I don't think any of the ones I used did. I'm not sure about the HTTP Server project itself, but all the other sub-projects that I've participated in generally have just a dev list, a user list, and possibly a commit list and an announce list. Everything relating to those projects takes place on publicly readable mailing lists, so the user community always knows what's going on. And the most important news to the news page as well. Contrast that to Gentoo, where all users are completely oblivious to what is going on, and all we know are rumors and hearsay and what we can guess.

What I'm saying is that if you are not going to have open mailing lists -- and there may be legitimate reasons why a closed mailing list is necessary, but it should only be used for things that MUST be private -- then it is absolutely necessary to keep the user community in the loop. I can't imagine how Gentoo could possibly do any worse of a job at keeping the users informed than it has over the last few months, so I guess that's what I and others are upset about when we talk about 'secrecy.'

[cyrius]

I saw this post and would like to mention again that gentoo needs a head.
I found it as a good analyse of the situation.

Again : How could "devs" say Gentoo is Open Source and done for users when you have remarks like that :

dirtyepic a écrit:
cyrius a écrit:

That's just the creator of Gentoo. So why they hesitate ?
Won't it be courtesy and normal from the gentoo comunauty to permit his come back ?

because we have zero interest in returning to a state where we have only one individual in charge of everything? when Daniel was in charge he made decisions single-handedly, often without logical reason and against the feedback of the developer and user community. that is not an open model. we'd like to do better than that.

it may be that Daniel does not wish to assume his previous position of dictator and just wants to run the business side of Gentoo (the Foundation). but it's not clear right now if that's his intent.

we're discussing this amongst ourselves right now, because really the Foundation has zero effect on the Gentoo you know and love/hate. feel free to freak out amongst yourselves if you like, but we're not going to rush a big decision based on knee-jerk reactions.

This enforce the post of D.Robbins; Especially the point 2.
Discuss it among yourselves, dev for yourselves, take decision yourselves and use this distro yourselves alone as you clearly separate the dev from the user communauty.
When i read that, there are two world : Dev world, and the other world that clearly know nothing and is not relevant for Gentoo distro. Anyway,
It seems the dictator is not the one you pointed out with your finger. You think that Gentoo is democratic ? Wrong, that's just a theater animated by a little group of persons to give the feeling to the user it is. But anyway, it's not. Then why complaining about ? You are just forgetting that what make a distribution living is his entire user communauty that is not just resumed by the dev communauty as it was mentionned in a previous post.

You say you have zero interest ? i would like to read gentoo has zero interest. And gentoo is constitute by the devs and the users, not only the devs !

With this mentality, gentoo will go in a trap because of a lack of managment and reflexion that permit gentoo to evoluate and grow in a good way.
A sane reaction is not a fear reaction, Gentoo should answer to Daniel Robbins that they will submit a vote with three possibilities to the Gentoo communauty during one week or one month :

Refuse the proposal of D.Robbins
Accept partially it : D.Robbins as a president, but not all the trustees have to be changed (just 2 or 1 for sample)
Accept it fully.

This list of alternative is not exhausted. Trustees have to fill it.
Then the whole communauty will decide and react. Not only a little group of persons that appropriate themselves the Gentoo distribution.
During this vote, it won't be any possible to create a new user. Only users with a valid email address and a gpg key could vote. Only user created six month ago could vote.
As you wish, you can ponderate the dev vote as 2 and the user one as 1 to reflect the time and mind devoting which has to be considered. Trustees have to decide this ponderation.

In a parallel way, a special forum could be dedicated to collect the proposals to justify a roadmap and a mind orientation for the Gentoo distribution.
If devs afraid about an hold up from D.Robbins, trustee have to change the status of the gentoo foundation to prevent any kind of such possibilities.

What about this kind of idea ?

[Jokey_]

Gentoo's devs have had similar discussions regarding -core in the past but decided against it).

When I look at that folder of my inbox, I can tell you that there are mostly internal announces like outages or devs sharing their phone numbers for contacts when events are coming up. (Hardly one wants those on a public mailinglist)
There's roughly just a thread a month so we don't have any "real" conversation there, those are taken to -dev or in future to -project and have always been at least since I have been a dev.

I do know that other project maintain more active secret lists but we definitely do not.

[Slalomsk8er]

Gentoo's devs have had similar discussions regarding -core in the past but decided against it).

When I look at that folder of my inbox, I can tell you that there are mostly internal announces like outages or devs sharing their phone numbers for contacts when events are coming up. (Hardly one wants those on a public mailinglist)
There's roughly just a thread a month so we don't have any "real" conversation there, those are taken to -dev or in future to -project and have always been at least since I have been a dev.

I do know that other project maintain more active secret lists but we definitely do not.

This sounds sane to me. I hope we can read the current discussion at -core after it is over in -project.

[steveL]

It is a lot like the prospect of a management change, and management changes can definitely suck. Particularly when the change involves possible reduction of autonomy. I've been there, done that, have the T-Shirt, have the scars, cried the tears and moved on. Change is scary. And inevitable.

Yeah but this is a step backward. Gentoo was already too big for one person to run when drobbins left. It's even bigger now. Why go back to putting that much pressure on one person's shoulders (quite apart from the point jokey made.) Individuals make mistakes: when they're the "top dog" they find it much harder to admit those mistakes. Democracy may be slow etc, but it's still better than dictatorship.

As far as all the scary what if's are concerned - that's all they are. Coming from other sources in the northwest U.S., this is labeled FUD. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

That's how you see it: if it's all nonsense, why on Earth does he need to appoint all the trustees without even saying what their backgrounds are so we can decide whether they make sense in terms of expertise? You seem to accept no authority from the devs, insistent we all have to vote on it (and after we're done voting they have to live with the consequences, even if they didn't choose them) but you want all the devs simply to accept him as their dictator. Wow thinking of it like that, no wonder they're a bit peeved (as well as being as alarmed about the whole Foundation thing as most users are.)

Daniel had every opportunity to stir things up the middle of last year when he found he still had the rights to Gentoo IP in his name. Legally. But he didn't take advantage of that - he tried to nudge the current parties responsible to take up the reins and complete the process. Including taking him out of the picture entirely. "Please, make me NOT President of the Gentoo Foundation". "No, Really, Please". Since that gesture failed, spectacularly, I think the recent involvement by Daniel is motivated by the desire to save his baby, so to speak.

You may well be right: knowing the dev community as he does though, surely he must have known such an ultimatum was not going to go down well? I see it more as he wants to be back in the limelight, as the top dog. No doubt it was thrilling and he's not been treated the same in the real world since, that's for sure.

Go back and read last year's funtoo. IMHO, the July 27th posting (http://blog.funtoo.org/2007/07/your-cho ... entoo.html) gives a good idea of what he's all about. Be sure to read his responses in the comments, too. I don't see a money grubbing power monger or dictator there.

Sorry but words don't mean jack to me; we had a Prime Minister who stood up and lied his ass off in Parliament, and we believed him. Look where that got us. It's fine to say the tone of communication matters, and so on, and I totally agree: it's just not enough. I don't know the guy and have no reason to trust or distrust him. I'd distrust anyone who tried to railroad me into something, and that's exactly how I see this. It's not like he didn't know about the Gentoo nfp list (which is how I know trustees gave up last summer and the intention was to move to SFC.) If his "baby" was so important why wasn't he checking up on it himself?

Lord knows if I founded a distribution and left it in the hands of trusted individuals who completely dropped the ball I would be motivated to try one more time to get it right.

Actually he left it in the hands of the Community as a whole: yeah there were 13 trustees, but as everyone keeps on, it's not about us and them, it's just all of us in the Gentoo Community. Those people were never meant to be in post forever were they?
As for trying to come back he did that last year. While I applauded the stance he took (if not how he went about it) it was a shame he only lasted one day (had he really no clue what the m-l was like? There are archives.) And here we are now with the "my way or the highway" similar to the "I don't like the way I'm being spoken to and have no real power, so I'll storm off." Only now he sees Gentoo as at a moment of weakness so he's pushing for the power, all the while throwing out FUD which he could've discussed openly on the nfp list, archived for everyone to see, but with only the people who bother reading it contributing: that would have been a much less divisive (and melodramatic) move imo. I for one would have discussed it on the forums and people would have been able to read a level-headed discussion between him and the remaining Trustees, about the issues. Instead, this hoopla: aren't you tired of all the drama?

What would you do? I don't see the boogeyman under the bed. I see a man who mistakenly gave his trust and has learned the lesson we all learn at some point in life: "If you want things done right, do it yourself". You worry about Daniel getting full legal control of all Gentoo IP and doing something nefarious. Daniel offered that up to the foundation. The trustees blew it. Entirely. Utterly. He practically begged them to do something as simple as file papers. That's all they had to do. Didn't happen. And you're worried about what *he* might do with the Gentoo IP? Yes, he might do ... wait for it ... something! As in not nothing. As in he cares about the fate of something he had a large part in creating and wants to make sure it's actually ok. Understand this. Absorb this. Grok this. This man wants to make sure that something he trusted to fuckups isn't fucked up yet again. And you're worried about that?

No I'm just pointing out that he has business interests, and has always had a profit-motive; there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that for the last 4 or 5 years Gentoo has been a Non-Profit, strictly for-the-community distro. You say this is purely about rescuing Gentoo and nothing else: I say you're naive and that's just not how the real world works. Let's agree to differ.
See my response to http://blog.funtoo.org/2007/07/so-can-i ... -back.html as well: I don't think Gentoo ever was totally his: it was always the result of the labour of many people (if nothing else, virtually every significant package apart from portage and baselayout are from upstream.) In particular all testing is done by users, and there are thousands of bugfixes from those same users. Then there's the masses of work done by the devs as well. Yes he had the initial idea and with only a few others created enoch, portage and Gentoo. No argument: he's owed by this distro. But not fealty.

As far as the whole "developers vs. users" debate:
<snip potted career history>

I totally agree that code without users doesn't get anywhere.

I've had this thread pointed out to me: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=63329
What's interesting about it is that it contains all the issues we're discussing now, most especially complaints about the closed management style (as well as the first mention of a C++ package manager that i've seen). And it's from when drobbins was still running the show. So are you really sure this "rot" only started when he left? Maybe there's always been that attitude at the core, and he was as guilty of it as anyone else. Maybe it's just a natural result of a service industry: you don't think all those waiters/shop-workers and the like are really that glad to see you, do you?

That doesn't stop their management telling them to focus on customer service.

[omnio]

<rant>
Seeing that gentoo.org has been updated with some news made me sad. So it takes a huge noise from the users for the devs just to say something like "We are still here". Or maybe they weren't even thinking we were expecting something ; well, thinking this makes me even more sad. And looking at the mailing lists it seems that there are several devs who don't think that there is a problem in gentoo. Why are we posting on topics like this? Because we have too much spare time. There is no problem. Go home.
I won't move away from gentoo after 4 years ; but I also don't like to be in a cold place.
</rant>

[V-Li]

Being a dev for about 18 months (hey, one of the Sunrise guys, hi Jokey_), I see this crisis as a catharsis. The uproar and movement made some old bricks crumble and people in the project began moving. Disussion among developers is very nice (without flames) but still leading somewhere. A new newsletter is being formed (see -dev, you want it transparent) and I think we can have more luck with a monthly edition. In the end, I am looking forward into the future of Gentoo.

[bmichaelsen]

Being a dev for about 18 months (hey, one of the Sunrise guys, hi Jokey_), I see this crisis as a catharsis. The uproar and movement made some old bricks crumble and people in the project began moving. Disussion among developers is very nice (without flames) but still leading somewhere. A new newsletter is being formed (see -dev, you want it transparent) and I think we can have more luck with a monthly edition. In the end, I am looking forward into the future of Gentoo.

Well said.

[cyrius]

Just to inform :http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/lu_ ... t_us_to_do

What are you expecting us to do?

Seems that some of people started talking about issues, lots started to listen to them and whatever they said, other picked up blogposts and just wrote on them...

Fine and dandy, still I'm with tsunam and ferdy.

http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_150039.xml

We are alive and from what I could see the future isn't that dark on the technical side.
PermalinkPermalink 4 comments

Comments:
Comment from: CkION [Visitor] Email
uhm, todays 2/3 gentoo news talk about issues that occurred due to "reduced man power". So i don't listen "some guys" but the official info...
Well, if you think that a fail for a new release is nothing serious and there was no need to take actions months ago... plz tell us so the users can decide what they are going to do next.

What we expect you to do? You already know...


PermalinkPermalink 15 January, 2008 @ 12:49
Comment from: Luca Barbato [Member] Email
2/3 of gentoo is a classical. I'm afraid you can't even recall 10 names of people saying reduced manpower (check the number of devels), and I don't recall official info about reduced man power. What's sure is that the active devel/ packages ratio is diminishing, mostly because we have many package and those are increasing =)

Remember that anybody can do a release ANYTIME, we provide the tools and the ingredients =) The fact that 2007.1 slept to 2008.0 because a lots of issue happened on upstream and some real life issues happened to key people isn't a problem at all.



PermalinkPermalink 15 January, 2008 @ 13:08
Comment from: CkION [Visitor] Email


probbly u didn't understand...
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20080112-status-gwn.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20080112-release-status.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20080112-fou ... status.xml
those news posted today and after users demanded to know what is going on...
so... plz....

PermalinkPermalink 15 January, 2008 @ 13:20
Comment from: Luca Barbato [Member] Email


Did you spend some time reading what you linked and what I linked? I think it's quite well explained what is going on and you should not be so afraid. Or, if you are that afraid you may pick a bit of the items lacking in the thread I linked and try to help.

Another alternative is trying one of the many other distributions.

Writing comments on this blog/tsunam blog, attacking people isn't productive at all.
PermalinkPermalink 15 January, 2008 @ 13:31

Fernando J. Pereda a.k.a. ferdy (homepage, stats, bugs)
On tool boxes (January 15, 2008, 10:12 UTC)

Fernando J. Pereda

Apparently, people are bashing Joshua Jackson (a.k.a. tsunam) for posting his opinion (which happens to be shared among lots of us). So just in case someone hasn't read what he said yet, I'm going to link his posts here. Please, do read them:

http://tsunam.org/2008/01/12/in-response/
http://tsunam.org/2008/01/14/clarifications/
http://tsunam.org/2008/01/14/tool-box/

I simply can't trust Daniel Robbins after what he tried to do the last time he tried to come back. Has everybody forgotten that? I hope not.

No love.

- ferdy

Ok, no comments.

[MoonWalker]

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