One reason that I kept rather quiet is that e-mail conversations on mailing lists have a tendency to become flame wars, and I really want to avoid that. It's very easy in public conversations to come across as a jerk, and as a newbie I really wanted to avoid that. I've tried whenever finding myself in unfamiliar social situations to just keep my mouth shut, and listen to what's going on for a while before saying anything.
The thing about communications is that it really doesn't scale. One thing that's nice about the open source model is that you can go into your garage, work on something, and you don't need anyone's permission or to communicate or coordinate with anyone. Coordination is a real pain, and you really want to structure things so that you can minimize coordination. Communication is also a problem. You say one thing, someone replies, pretty soon you have a flame war, and you aren't doing and "real work." The thing that I'm working on in my garage is a linux workstation that is set up for hard-core astrophysics theory. Packaging is a missing piece of scientific software since there are hundreds of scientific software packages that are not packaged. Rather than engage in vaporware, I just need some stable distribution that is very open to adding new items into some "bleeding edge" repository. I ended up with Mageia partly for historical reasons, but partly out of a sense that because it was a community distribution, it would have some easy mechanism for accepting "bleeding edge" packages. Once I got through initial packaging learning, I was planning to add things like a stellar evolution code and hard core CFD code. I'd like to add some professional astronomical telescope tracking software (like IRAF or DS9), and to hard core astrophysics research. My assumption was that as a community driven project, there would be some mechanism for adding new packages to the system, and that I wouldn't have to worry about getting permission, I would just do it. Fedora already has a mechanism for doing that, but sense I was already using Mageia, I had thought that Mageia would be at least as open as Fedora, and that it would be easy to add large numbers of new packages. Now if I'm mistaken about this, and this is not the goal of the Mageia maintainers, then I just need to find some other platform to work on. Again, it makes perfect sense to me not to put cinnamon into Mageia 3 core. It's unstable and buggy and it's going to be a pain in the rear end to get it to work smoothly. The problem is that if it's not possible to put Cinnamon *somewhere* in the Mageia tree so that "bleeding edgers" can work on it, then it's going to be impossible to use Mageia as a distribution mechanism for even more bleeding edge experimental software, and if that's the intent, then I've just got to find another distribution to work on. I'm not trying to be a jerk or to blackmail anyone. It's just that if there is no mechanism for Mageia users to share bleeding edge software with each other, then it's not going to work for what I want to do with it. urpmi and cauldron is a great mechanism for two nuclear physicists to share say the latest nuclear equation of states libraries, and as something that advertises itself as a community distribution, I was hoping that Mageia could be the center of that. One problem that we have here is that everyone wants to copy Apple OSX and Android. The Ipad and MacOS is a slick piece of software. The trouble is that it only lets you do what Apple wants you to do, because if you do something really different you might break the box. This is really, really bad for real hard core, scientific research since what you are trying to do is to push the machine to the point where you are breaking the box, and it's hard to communicate in advance what you are trying to do, since you don't know. If that's not what people want to do with Mageia, then I just have to accept that and move elsewhere.......
