Buh, that was dumb of me, I focused on the one part of this mail that belonged in the other thread. Comments inline below.
See. Here's the thing. This isn't a job. This is a hobby. And a lot of us have started treating it like a job. We're all serious and stoic. Acting like we _must_ do things this way, etc etc.
That's not going to cut it. That's the fastest way to defeat if we're not getting any sort of compensation. The compensation is our enjoyment.
We should be having fun here. This shouldn't be a chore. It needs to be rewarding.
I can't express how much I agree with this. Lately I've been feeling a bit bogged down whenever I get a "package x is out of date" message in my inbox - I've been doing this mainly because people are counting on me to update my crap. I'm actually having a better time hanging out with people at my paying job - not only do I get money there, but I get a fun time with easygoing guys. I'd love to get both out of Arch as well, but I'll settle for the latter. ;)
Everyone has daily work. But I need to emphasize something that I feel is overlooked - pacman, devtools, the web site, gerolde maintenance - these are all AS important.
They are absolutely just as important to both the devs and the end users, even though the users may not see the end results of devtools/website/gerolde/pacbuild/etc... work and they simply want their super-new packages, but it's all quite important. Maybe we need some way of showing people's workload aside from a number sitting beside their name on the dashboard? Everyone looks to the dashboard, and people with few packages will get unfairly singled out... I can't think of any good way to remedy this though. I mean, we already have "job descriptions" so to speak on public-facing developers page - maybe we should implement this on the dashboard too? Divide the list into organizational groups? People who are primarily package maintainers vs. people who are primarly pacman devs vs other jobs? Meh, I don't really like that... but I don't have any good ideas. But yeah, some comeraderie between the troops would be cool - it'd be nice to be able to look at this as a bunch of buddies working together toward a common goal, and having fun along the way. -- Travis