[arch-dev-public] Moving forward [was: Cleanup/Orphans]
On 10/2/07, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de> wrote:
Hm. Your words are sounding more polite. True.
But don't you get the same feeling that some of our developers lost their interest/time in maintaining packages? Some were even hired to do other jobs. Who else should do it? We had a decision to not give away the packaging process to the community. So we have too do it our best.
Oh yes, don't get me wrong, I agree with you. But I think _demanding_ the drive back is not the right way to do it. In fact, while you criticized me (us?) for it - I strongly feel that the thread discussing what we do in our free time is _critical_ to us moving forward. 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 just don't want to fall back into the time when Jan, Tobias and me were doing the majority of packaging almost alone again. And now we have to take about two architectures. Let's spread it over all our shoulders.
See now again, it's important to point out that everyone has other duties here. Writing code is just as time intensive as packaging. And in the end, it's beneficial to _you_ too. If someone improves our packaging tools, streamlines the process, it makes everyone's job easier.
Let's improve our infrastructure step by step but don't forget our daily work of packaging. We have become famous for our good compromise of bleading edge and quality. We should try to keep this alive.
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.
One possible way it to force a dev to also maintain all dependencies for his packages. But what about the rest?
I actually like this idea, and I will use it to autoassign packages at the end of the week - if you maintain a package and one of the dependencies is an orphan, I'll assign that to you - it just makes sense that way. Thanks Andy!
Tuesday 02 October 2007, Aaron Griffin wrote: | > One possible way it to force a dev to also maintain all | > dependencies for his packages. But what about the rest? | | I actually like this idea, and I will use it to autoassign | packages at the end of the week - if you maintain a package and | one of the dependencies is an orphan, I'll assign that to you - it | just makes sense that way. i like this idea too in some cases, it will cause people being quite "assigned" to lots of things... hi hi... gcc will be having 15 maintainers - D -- .·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´ ° ° ° ° ° ° ><((((º> ° ° ° ° ° <º)))>< <º)))><
On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 15:41:53 -0500 "Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
I actually like this idea, and I will use it to autoassign packages at the end of the week - if you maintain a package and one of the dependencies is an orphan, I'll assign that to you - it just makes sense that way.
Yeah, sounds good. Some of those big-name packages I'm timid to pick up (bash, kernels, etc...) in fear I'd screw something up with them. However, over the next couple of days I'll scan my packages for their deps, and ensure none of them are orphaned. If they are, I'll pick them up. Package maintenance is essentially all I do for Arch at the moment, aside from forum-lurking; I suppose I could stand to carry a bit more of it. -- Travis
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
participants (3)
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Aaron Griffin
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Damir Perisa
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Travis Willard