At 06:29 PM 12/7/2005 -0800, Heikki Toivonen wrote:
pje said that if we had better tools and possibly organizational changes, sheriff wouldn't be needed, but he did not seem to deny the need currently.
That's because I'm not in a position to reasonably argue that you and Bear don't need or want something you've said you need or want. :) I'm more than willing to do my time as sheriff, but that's not quite the same thing as saying we *need* one.
To be honest, I think we'd achieve more progress if, when somebody complains about the build being broken, you or Bear simply pointed them to whoever caused the problem. From there, we could simply let the forces of natural selection and social pressure take over. :)
Putting a sheriff between the offenders and the offendees just enables the offenders' dysfunctional behavior - it allows people in the current case to blame the sheriff instead of themselves, and to perhaps ignore the impact on other people. If they are directly subjected to the complaints, however, then they can't hide behind the idea that it's just you and Bear being picky or something.
The rotation seems like a nice theory to solve the same issue, but in practice it seems unlikely that any given sheriff-of-the-day is going to be particularly enthusiastic about confronting such issues. After all, why argue today when you can let it slide till tomorrow? This will just further exacerbate the problem of a lack of social pressure and continue to enable the idea that this is just bureaucracy or whatever excuses are being used.
My take, then, is that we need not a rotating "build sheriff" but a rotating "tinderbox wrangler". The difference being that the former is expected to enforce rules, and the latter is a co-ordinator for various technical issues and a temporary replacement for better monitoring tools in certain areas. I don't mind being a tinderbox wrangler, but I really don't want to be a sheriff.
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