Nathan L. Adams posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Sat, 20 Aug 2005 11:31:30 -0400:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote: >> On Sat, 20 Aug 2005 10:03:18 -0400 "Nathan L. Adams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> wrote: >> | Ciaran McCreesh wrote: >> | > No, I'm saying that having a 'team lead' throw some arbitrary stamp >> | > of approval upon bug closures is worthless. >> | >> | So you're problem isn't with the peer review I'm proposing but instead >> | quality of work of the team leads? >> >> Not at all. I'm saying that a) most 'team leads' will not do proper >> checks because they don't have time to and b) the limited time that >> 'team leads' have is better spent elsewhere. > > I really am curious here: > > a) What are the team leads spending most of their time on? > b) What is more important than improving the code? Not to sound harsh, but... I think what many users lose sight of is the fact that 100% of the Gentoo developer team, INCLUDING the team leads, are unpaid volunteers. What most of the team leads, and what everyone else involved, spend most of their time on, therefore, is *REAL* *LIFE*! A wife, a husband, kids, THOSE are "more important" (or /should/ be) than "improving the code". A job, good grades at the uni, THOSE are more important than "improving the code". Are you a Mark Shuttleworth? Do you have a few million dollars sitting around to fund your little distribution? If so, go to it, but it's not going to be Gentoo, because Gentoo is a community distribution. Part of what makes it what it is, is the volunteer efforts of all that pitch in. If you changed that by sponsoring it, paying for development, it would cease to be the Gentoo most of us know and love. (Look up the Zynot fork for more on that.) If you don't have that few million, then perhaps a bit more understanding of the nature of volunteer efforts is in order. This is /not/ to say there isn't room in the open source community for the Ubuntus of the world, because obviously there is. However, Ubuntu is /not/ Gentoo; Gentoo is /not/ Ubuntu. Again, that's been tried before. Go take a look at Zynot. So... we are left with a situation in which every contributor is a volunteer, taking a bit of time here, a bit of time there, to pitch in and make their little corner of Gentoo better. One characteristic of working with volunteers is that the volunteers get to decide what they spend time on. Most of the developers, it would seem, choose to spend their time directly involved with the code, developing and doing primary testing, sure, but the QA testing is left to the ~arch users such as myself, and to the bug system, depending on users to file bugs, then check them and reopen them if necessary. Even if we were to find a number of volunteers that wanted to spend all or most of their Gentoo time on QA peer reviewing the work of others, who's to say the ones actually doing the work would find that situation satisfactory? Keep in mind, once again, that it's volunteers doing the work. They only do it as long as it remains satisfying for them to continue doing it. Fortunately or unfortunately, the types of people that would find constantly peer reviewing the work of others satisfying enough to continue to do it on a volunteer basis, are not generally the types of people that the volunteers actually doing the coding are likely to find it pleasant enough working with to continue to volunteer their own time. Pretty quickly, it would seem too much like a job -- one they aren't getting paid to do -- and too little like the sort of fun that continues to draw them into volunteering. Very likely, it wouldn't be long until it'd all be peer reviewers, with nothing to do, because all the folks doing the work to be peer reviewed had gotten tired of it, and found other "more important" things to do with their time! That would appear to me to be the dynamic that's the problem with your solution, in addition to the fact that Gentoo is constantly "understaffed", that is, there is always more work to be done than there are folks with time to do it. That of course, pretty much by definition, is the nature of a volunteer project. The closer it gets to stasis, the closer it gets to having enough man-hours to match the work available, the less important what is left becomes, so the more likely it becomes for those that /would/ volunteer, to again, find other "more important" things to do with their time. For that reason alone, in addition to the one above, it's relatively unlikely such a QA/peer review system will ever be set up. Why? Because by definition, that's less important than actually having the code there to use or peer review in the first place, and by the time there are enough folks actually doing the coding to make that less urgent than the peer review process, we are down the relative importance levels far enough that other things will by definition be more important than that last little bit of coding OR the peer review stuff, so it'll never get done. My personal view, FWIW as a simple Gentoo user (NOT a dev). That said, it's one way to explain the resistance to your argument, in any case, regardless of whether it's the direct viewpoint of any dev, or not. The devs are volunteers, resulting in a situation rather different than if they were paid to do it. However, if they were paid to do it, it wouldn't be Gentoo as we know it, but something far different, anyway. I personally don't happen to believe that something different would be anywhere close to as good, because, by definition, it would then lose that unique community dynamic that is so much a part of what makes Gentoo what it is today. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
