Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Time based retirements

2012-12-21 Thread Markos Chandras
On 21 December 2012 06:09, Duncan 1i5t5.dun...@cox.net wrote:
 Rich Freeman posted on Thu, 20 Dec 2012 22:33:55 -0500 as excerpted:

 On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 10:21 PM, Doug Goldstein car...@gentoo.org
 wrote:
 I could MAYBE understand it if they're consuming some valuable resource
 that we need to free up by retiring them. But instead they get a
 nasty-gram about their impending retirement and decide if that's how
 they are to be treated that they can be retired.

 Could anybody post the text of one of these nasty grams?

 I can understand the sense in just checking in to make sure a developer
 still is interested in Gentoo and wants to retain cvs access.  However,
 I think the bar for keeping access should be kept low - they shouldn't
 be forced to go find some trivial change to make just to get their name
 in the logs.

 Sure, sometimes real life gets busy, but if a dev still runs Gentoo and
 has interest they're fairly likely to return when life settles down.

 Obviously I can't post the text of one of these nasty grams, but I was
 around when the idea was first discussed and then implemented, by
 undertakers and infra, with the blessing of either council or whatever it
 was that came before (I was young in gentoo back then and didn't have a
 clear understanding of how it all worked, but when I started, drobbins
 was still around, but in the process of setting up the foundation and etc
 so he could leave gentoo in good shape when he did retire, and IIRC/
 AFAIK, he had turned things over to some sort of interrim executive
 committee... and I don't recall whether the events here predated what we
 call council today, or not).


Sorry, this e-mail is huge for a topic like this. Please consider
breaking your thoughts into logical chunks.

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2



Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Time based retirements

2012-12-21 Thread Peter Stuge
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



Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Time based retirements

2012-12-21 Thread Diego Elio Pettenò
On 21/12/2012 17:16, Peter Stuge wrote:
 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.

I love how people always suggest 5-minutes fixes without understanding
anything behind what they would like to fix/improve.

Hint: Gentoo Infra does not use ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

It's not to say that the proposal to limit access doesn't make sense,
but ...

 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.

... the users generally are kept, and locked, but also one of the things
that is done is archiving their home directory on dev.g.o as it might be
taking quite an amount of space.

But besides, as others said, one of the main concern is making sure that
the developers are up to speed with current procedures, which is why
they are requested to go through the quizzes again — although this
usually ends up being quite simple.

I get to speak about that as somebody who retired, and was then
re-instated. Going through the cycles was less bothersome than just
growing the motivation to get back to Gentoo, so I can't see the point.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flamee...@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/