Markos Chandras wrote: > > I'm really just trying to understand the sense in this. > > -- > > Doug Goldstein > > Your tone is not appropriate for discussion.
Sorry Markos, I disagree with you. Doug makes it abundantly clear that he wants to understand. I think we can all recognize that, in particular since he writes it out plainly. This in turn means that everyone could pretty easily look past how he feels about the status quo, because that is not what the thread is about at all, and focus on the discussion. > bring it to the list with a better attitude I don't think this is very helpful. Please keep in mind that Doug is not criticizing *you*. He is questioning the process that you have been following for a while. You've probably internalized the process by now, you might identify with it, but still keep in mind that Doug is wanting to understand the process, and has written absolutely nothing about you. > pick a fight Seriously, come on Markos, give people more credit than that. Even if you feel attacked that does not mean that they intended to attack you. Please work hard to understand what people intend, when they write things. It doesn't hurt to ask politely if they really intended to offend and/or attack you. It's incredibly helpful to say that you perceive something as hurtful and/or unjust and ask if that was really intended, it is however not helpful at all to deduce that what you perceieved as hurtful and/or unjust *must mean* that someone intended to aggress against you. The end result is that you (too) are perceived as being aggressive. Try to accomplish the opposite instead. Rich Freeman wrote: > I think this is a topic worth discussing, but I think Markos was fair > to point out that starting out with an aggressive post isn't the right > way to go. I do not perceive Doug's email as aggressive. It is obviously inquiring, and as motivation for the inquiry it starts with Doug's attitude to the perceived policy. Surely there must be room on the gentoo-dev mailing list for people to use their attitude to motivate starting a discussion. If there is *not* room for an attitude, then that seems like rather broken communication to me, which I think would be an important issue in itself. > Perhaps the wait time should be increased. Duncan wrote: > And... perhaps that policy in general needs a reexamination. I suggest that we try to think outside the box. I've mentioned Gerrit before. I recommend to study it now if you haven't already used it in any project. If a Gerrit runs in front of gentoo-x86.git (please just call it gentoo.git instead) then the developer role changes a fair bit, and suddenly the whole world can very easily contribute to the tree without requiring any process beyond acquiring an OpenID from anywhere. Going back to Duncan's - admittedly long but still extremely informative - email (thanks Duncan!) it is now clear to me that the only concern, the sole driving factor, for retiring developers is infra security. I think the same level of security could be accomplished with a *significantly* less aggressive retirement policy. Leave the account but simply block access. One example implementation is to move the SSH key to another location, and have a lightweight method to move it back in place, with an absolute minimum of human interaction and required time. Done. If someone has at some point contributed to Gentoo then why not let them keep their user around, should they want to come back. Of course this doesn't work retroactively, but I think it would be a cool tip of the hat to current and future developers. //Peter
