Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
On 9/3/06, Luis Francisco Araujo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Richard Fish wrote: The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really useful milestones for most projects. A release is really significant That is not a problem. That is a feature. A small clarification may be necessary here. I wasn't pointing to a problem with the way Gentoo evolves, but with the idea that releases could be useful milestones for project roadmaps. -Richard -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
On 9/3/06, Chris Gianelloni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I really wish people would take the time to either ask the Release Engineering team, or learn how we work before they go off making accusations against us. There was no accusation there. I picked on X only for its popularity and relative ease of upgrading. But it is fair to say that I have no clue how releng actually works, and how you choose what to put in the snapshot, although I expect that there is much more to it than picking a random date on the calendar. -Richard -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
Richard Fish wrote: I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders, developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision? I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places? The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really useful milestones for most projects. A release is really significant for a few core packages, but what is the real downside for users if Xorg 7.2 is stabilized one week after a release? Outside of the fact that they have to compile it themselves instead of using the GRP package...not much that I see. After using Gentoo for a good while I appreaciate very much the constant development policy, which prevents the need to upgrade my system to new releases. I've seen one Ubuntu user dist-upgrading its installation - it went with some problems, and they were substantially bigger than I'm having doing occasionally emerge -avuD world. But to be honest, stabilization of packages was not my point. ((BTW, stable X.org, KDE or GNOME would IMO delay the release for a week, so users wouldn't need to upgrade in such a short time frame - but that's what I think)) I was rather thinking about bigger, user-visible changes. Obviously a big version bump of widely known and used package would fit this category, too. Good news could include, for example, new stable kernel + udev (with better support for [many-nice-features]), GNOME/KDE/XFCE/etc, even easier installer, Gentoo-branded themes (Grub, splash, gdm theme, wallpaper, icons, colors (?)), stable porthole, improved portage... These are the things people are looking for - better, faster, easier. Opportunistic? Yes. Drugery for developers to come up with such a list and then hold their word in time? Yes. Is it needed at all? IMO, yes. For a distro like Ubuntu, a release is very significant, as it is the platform that users will be running for the next 6-18 months. And for Gentoo it's about 6 next months where new blood, umm.. new users /the beloved newbies ;)/ come to the project based on the reviews in news sites. I, for example, got to know about Gentoo after reading a good review on the site I was visiting quite often (linuxnews.pl). When I took a look at the Handbook by the first time I was sold immediately. I was thinking for a long time about installing LFS and only the time was an issue. Then here came Gentoo and my world changed... for better. Having said that, releases are targeted mostly for new users. Release media become more and more filled with features and are more user-friendly than ever (GNOME running from LiveCD, graphical installer, and so on). Lots of *visible* changes (even though they are minor or trivial) buy new hearts and minds for Gentoo. Do you now see what I've meant? I'm not imposing that Gentoo development should depend on a time-based milestones but new releases of installation media do happen and are needed. It would be easier for journalists, newbies, etc. to compare Gentoo against other distros if some kind of list of features that would-be-nice-to-have before every release existed. Do you think Ubuntu roadmaps would be useful without being tied to a release? Of course not. But that's exactly why people know beforehand that Dapper would contain one list of features and be stable, while Edgy (advertised as developers' dream) can be somewhat rough but most probably will contain another list of new and exciting features. Example [1]. Or could project status reports (as discussed here recently) fit the same bill? Thanks for pointing this out. Need to re-read the archives. With best regards, Wiktor Wandachowicz [1] Upstart in Universe http://www.netsplit.com/blog/work/canonical/upstart.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
Richard Fish wrote: On 9/2/06, Wiktor Wandachowicz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders, developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision? I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places? The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really useful milestones for most projects. A release is really significant for a few core packages, but what is the real downside for users if Xorg 7.2 is stabilized one week after a release? Outside of the fact that they have to compile it themselves instead of using the GRP package...not much that I see. That is not a problem. That is a feature. -- Luis F. Araujo araujo at gentoo.org Gentoo Linux -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 07:15 +, Wiktor Wandachowicz wrote: But to be honest, stabilization of packages was not my point. ((BTW, stable X.org, KDE or GNOME would IMO delay the release for a week, so users wouldn't need to upgrade in such a short time frame - but that's what I think)) People seem to think that the Release Engineering team doesn't talk with the GNOME/X/KDE/kernel teams. We *know* when they're planning on going stable and we work with them. How do we know this? Was *ask* them. Here's a good example. We took our snapshot for 2006.1 *before* GNOME 2.14 went stable on *any* arches. However, we worked with both the arch teams *and* the GNOME team to mark it stable in our snapshot on architectures who wanted to participate. Why did we do this? to avoid this exact situation. I really wish people would take the time to either ask the Release Engineering team, or learn how we work before they go off making accusations against us. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
[gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
Donnie Berkholz wrote: When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on pretty much whatever they feel like. When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen and Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval. While I'm not a developer, I was thinking along similar lines some time ago. Or make it like a year ago? Good leadership is important in many undertakings of the real life, including (but not limited to) open-source projects. After some time spent using Gentoo some comparisons against other known projects naturally came to my mind. Linux kernel, Debian, PCLinuxOS - they were first to think about. From these I concluded that in some brilliant cases a project with a strong leadership, not fearing to make unpopular decisions sometimes, progresses ahead nicely in the long run. From the aforementioned three, Debian with its social contract, goals and the way it is maintained is an exceptional phenomenon. It seems to me that the key to a success lies in a good, respectful leadership, trust and good communication. I'm sure that at least some of you read kerneltrap, but this recent topic concerning NetBSD future (or lack thereof?) has some sad truths in it [1]. While I do not fear end of the Gentoo project (far from it!) I too sense some lack of a general vision of where is it going now. Not delving into philosophical considerations of democracy vs dictatorship I feel that the current democracy approach Gentoo utilizes makes sense. But there are many examples of healthy democracies, where citizens are seriously involved in the process (western Europe countries, in general) as well as weak democracies, where even though the process exists citizens feel powerless (like in some new democracies in eastern Europe countries). I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders, developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision? I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places? And if it doesnt' exist I am convinced that it should be created, say, for 2007.0 release at least. Ubuntu has such plans, for one, so all developers and users are able to learn what to expect from the upcoming release. It also serves as a check list of what the expected goals were and what the outcome was. Maybe I should raise such concerns to the User Representatives first, but the overall flow of ideas was IMO rather worth to be sent to the mailing list in a complete form. If you feel otherwise, I apologize. With best regards, Wiktor Wandachowicz [1] NetBSD: Founder Fears End Of Project http://kerneltrap.org/node/7061 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
On 9/2/06, Wiktor Wandachowicz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders, developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision? I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places? The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really useful milestones for most projects. A release is really significant for a few core packages, but what is the real downside for users if Xorg 7.2 is stabilized one week after a release? Outside of the fact that they have to compile it themselves instead of using the GRP package...not much that I see. For a distro like Ubuntu, a release is very significant, as it is the platform that users will be running for the next 6-18 months. Do you think Ubuntu roadmaps would be useful without being tied to a release? Or could project status reports (as discussed here recently) fit the same bill? Maybe I should raise such concerns to the User Representatives first No, definitely not. The point of user reps (of which I am one) is not to filter communications between devs and users, but to improve the communications between the two camps, among other things. If you want to bring an idea up here directly, nobody should respond with talk to your userrep. -Richard -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
On 2006.08.27 22:37, Duncan wrote: Roy Bamford [EMAIL PROTECTED] posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], [snip] If the council are to undertake the management of Gentoo, its terms of reference need to be drastically altered to allow them to undertake the management process defined above. In short, Gentoo has a top level power vacuum, allowing what amounts to the 'power struggle 'we see today. This is the best reading of the situation I've seen, IMO. Good work! Whether changing the rules to allow the council to manage appropriately is politically doable or not remains an open question, and I'm not even sure I'd back it myself if it is possible, but that's the best description of where we are at that I've seen, which means we've gone along way toward accomplishing the first step in any good debate, a proper definition of the issue. -- 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 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list Changing the councils terms of reference is the easy bit. My understanding is that under the present rules, it needs a GLEP to be approved by the council, However, the rules only permit things to happen. In a volunteer organisation, management is a particularly thankless task, it can't be done with a carrot and a stick, the stick does just not exist and the carrot is a bit small too. Luckily 90% of management decisions can be purely arbitrary - all that matters is that a decision is made. In most of these cases, its fine to allow the recommendation from the teams to prevail, they will be doing the work after all. Its the other 10% that cause all the friction, where some individuals or group are going to be upset whatever decision is made. If the ruling body (Council ?) were a proactive planning body, rather than a reactive adjudication body, many of these things would we seen coming - they would not be the surprises they are today, which is what upsets protagonists. Planning is not really the councils job. I've just convinced myself that what's needed is a new Gentoo wide project - Gentoo Planning that takes input from all the teams as to what they want to do by when and collates it in an attempt to spot potential conflicts. Gentoo Planning can then alert the parties to allow a discussion to take place and refer any failures to agree to the council. Its more admin - and I hate admin ... but to trot out an old adage, if you don't have a plan, then plan to fail is very true. All this proposal amounts to is formalising the communications amongst the teams - maybe a gentoo-planning mailing list would be adequate, to which all teams posted plans and progress reports on a regular basis and which was compulsory reading. Regular being defined by each team from time to time, depending on planned activity. Maybe gentoo-planning is a devrel subproject, since its concernded ? Regards, Roy Bamford -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
Roy Bamford [EMAIL PROTECTED] posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sun, 27 Aug 2006 12:28:04 +0100: I think the problem(s) stem from the way Gentoo is organised now. I'm sure you will shoot me down if I'm wrong. In summary. Gentoo is a loose knit group of packages with individuals belonging to one or more of the herds that maintain them. The herd/team leads are supposed to 'get along' but on occasions, this doesn't happen. Above them is the council. If that's wrong, stop reading here. There are (as usual) details, but from my read, that's pretty close. Lets define Management - its a process of planning, communicating the plan, getting buy in from the team(s) who will execute the plan, gathering feedback on progress and replanning. It looks cyclic but its really a set of concurrent activities. Google PRINCE2 for the details. At the top level, the council, in its present form does not manage Gentoo. It can't, it's pretty much disempowered as a management organisation due to the rules for its agenda setting. An acutely accurate observation, AFAICT. If the council are to undertake the management of Gentoo, its terms of reference need to be drastically altered to allow them to undertake the management process defined above. In short, Gentoo has a top level power vacuum, allowing what amounts to the 'power struggle 'we see today. This is the best reading of the situation I've seen, IMO. Good work! Whether changing the rules to allow the council to manage appropriately is politically doable or not remains an open question, and I'm not even sure I'd back it myself if it is possible, but that's the best description of where we are at that I've seen, which means we've gone along way toward accomplishing the first step in any good debate, a proper definition of the issue. -- 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 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
Wernfried Haas [EMAIL PROTECTED] posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sat, 26 Aug 2006 12:17:03 +0200: Quit assuming I mean anything, you're batting zero for two right now. What's the problem? I wasn't sure how you meant it, so i assumed you meant it that way. As for batting zero for two, i never heard that phrase before and have nfc what it means, but somehow that whole statement doesn't seem very friendly to me. It's an allusion to baseball. I'm /not/ a sports fan, but I do live in the US, where baseball among others is popular sport and this phrase has entered the popular culture from there. The term batting average refers to a statistic in baseball, commonly given as a three or four digit decimal fraction of one (Ty Cobb hit .3664 lifetime average, the record according to Wikipedia, with no pro player hitting a seasonal .400 since 1941, see the reference below), that is the ratio of actual hits to at bats. Batting zero refers to the zero (.000) baseline one gets if they have no hits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batting_(baseball)#Success_in_batting Batting X for Y then refers to the number of hits (X) for a given number of at-bats (Y) in a specific game or season. Within the US culture, then, batting zero for X, where X is an increasingly large number, is a reference to a poor record of successes against tries. Google says there's 11,000 indexed English pages referencing batting zero: http://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_enq=%22batting+zero%22 ... altho only 141 referencing batting zero for: http://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_enq=%22batting+zero+for%22 Taking a look at those will give you an idea of the usage, but here are a three samples from the first page of returns on that 141: * By my count, the Bush administration is batting zero-for-twenty. * There was one stretch where I was batting zero for five on investment banking jobs, * Prior to this trip, United through Chicago was batting zero-for-ten (.000 for baseball fans) with regard to connecting me through O'Hare [airport] That's the cultural context, then. It's simply saying you've tried twice and failed twice. Yes, it's negative, unfortunately so given spyderous' musings in the OP about useless flaming, but not unacceptably so in the generic, particularly as zero for two isn't /so/ bad, compared to the references above (0:3, 0:5, 0:20), or even compared to the original baseball allusion, where 1/3 or .333 isn't all that shabby and you've yet to take your third try. You may however also wish to reference strike out. A batter gets three tries. The third strike without a hit and he's out. (The following reference redirects to strike zone, but that covers it.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_(baseball) Again, I'm not a sports fan, but sports are part of the cultural literacy in much of the world, and baseball is one such sport here in the US, so it's something we know even if we /aren't/ particularly interested in it. -- 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 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
Duncan wrote: Wernfried Haas [EMAIL PROTECTED] posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sat, 26 Aug 2006 12:17:03 +0200: Quit assuming I mean anything, you're batting zero for two right now. What's the problem? I wasn't sure how you meant it, so i assumed you meant it that way. As for batting zero for two, i never heard that phrase before and have nfc what it means, but somehow that whole statement doesn't seem very friendly to me. It's an allusion to baseball. I'm /not/ a sports fan, but I do live in the US, where baseball among others is popular sport and this phrase has entered the popular culture from there. Duncan, these are the kinds of emails that *really* piss everyone off. A simple it's a baseball thing, google it would have sufficed. I know you must be really bored while locked up in your parent's basement with nothing to do but write dissertations on every possible random topic, but please, spare us. -Steve -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
