The discussion period for graysky's application is over. It's time for the TUs to vote: https://aur.archlinux.org/tu/?id=68

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:

Xyne wrote:

...

The discussion period for graysky's application is over. It's time for the TUs to vote: https://aur.archlinux.org/tu/?id=68

The voting period has ended. The finally tally was

yes: 12 no: 14 abstain: 4

Quorum has been met. I am sorry to announce that the application has been rejected.

Thanks for supporting the application, Xyne, and to those who participated in the subsequent discussion. I was really happy to have read the kind words from some of the the non-TUs who posted in support of me as well. Thanks guys! I'll continue to be an active member of the community albeit as a mere mortal :p

Op zaterdag 23 maart 2013 17:51:42 schreef Xyne:

Xyne wrote:

...

The discussion period for graysky's application is over. It's time for the TUs to vote: https://aur.archlinux.org/tu/?id=68

The voting period has ended. The finally tally was

yes: 12 no: 14 abstain: 4

Quorum has been met. I am sorry to announce that the application has been rejected.

@graysky I am genuinely surprised and disappointed by these results. I think that you have demonstrated skills beyond several previously successful candidates and your contributions are valued by many in the community. I hope that this result will not leave a bad impression. You may apply again after 3 months if you choose.

@TUs Voting "no" rather than abstaining indicates that you have reasons to reject the candidate. These should have been brought up during the discussion period. If they are valid then other TUs should be made aware of them and take them into account. If they are not then they should be addressed. In either case they should be discussed.

The discussion period for this application was relatively short with very few participating TUs. The only real objections were raised by Dave (who even admitted that he may be "old and grumpy") and they were addressed without any further replies from Dave or anyone else. I simply do not understand how so many of you could vote no without raising issues during the discussion. Looking back through previous votes there is no other vote with this level of participation that has been split this close down the middle.

There is no point in raising your objections now but I hope that you do so next time. Voting is not an expression of personal opinion. It is a means of quality control and I would say that it is your obligation to participate in the discussion if you have opinions one way or the other.

Then the only thing i can say is: I'm sorry i did not participate in the discussion. I only had a positive idea about graysky, nothing more nothing less. I'm also surprised he did not make it in. I'm also sorry for that. There is nothing else to say now: better luck next time, i will be happy to see you (graysky) re-apply for TU. Please do.

tl;dr: wtf?

Regards, Xyne

-- Ike ps: for all the thunderbird users out there, i know my signature will not be valid. please use something that works like mutt, claws mail, kmail, whatever.

On 23 March 2013 17:51, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:

@TUs Voting "no" rather than abstaining indicates that you have reasons to reject the candidate. These should have been brought up during the discussion period. If they are valid then other TUs should be made aware of them and take them into account. If they are not then they should be addressed. In either case they should be discussed.

What about adding some field where TU can (anonymously) express why they chose "No"? IMO it doesn't make much sense to have such field for "Yes" and "Abstain" though, as that would be just annoying with no value added. Such field could introduce valuable insight to what other TU's think is wrong with the application. I think it can also help the newly accepted TU's, as they can learn what can be improved (unless it's something stupid like "I don't like your silly T-shirt"). Hopefully more TU's who voted "No" would express their opinions there, as that would be anonymous while the discussions on the mailing list are not. Lukas

On 24 March 2013 04:42, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:

If a TU has an objection that he cannot support publicly then something is very wrong. The application process should not be some mysterious black box of negative, baseless opinions. If a TU would rather keep an objection to himself than risk offending the candidate by expressing it then either the objection itself is without merit or the TU is more concerned about his own popularity than the quality of the distribution.

I completely agree with you. But as we have just seen, it doesn't always work like that. In such case, a black box which can tell you some of the reasons why people voted "No" is an improvement over knowing absolutely nothing.

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 6:51 PM, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:

Xyne wrote: @TUs The discussion period for this application was relatively short with very few participating TUs. The only real objections were raised by Dave (who even admitted that he may be "old and grumpy") and they were addressed without any further replies from Dave or anyone else. I simply do not understand how so many of you could vote no without raising issues during the discussion. Looking back through previous votes there is no other vote with this level of participation that has been split this close down the middle.

I was denied the first time I applied. I never heard strong arguments about why from any TU. The reason I found, is like here, an active TU express a tough opinion (from a misunderstanding on awesome in my case). I guess the team wants to be united and will not elect someone which was strongly denied by one of us. Now I see this as positive and only require to be solved before next application.

There is no point in raising your objections now but I hope that you do so next time. There were objections! You consider them not sufficient to leads to this result. Everything that needed to be said has been said. After the voters have made up their minds.

@graysky: Please keep going and convince every TU that you have to be aboard and reapply. Cheers, -- Sébastien "Seblu" Luttringer https://www.seblu.net GPG: 0x2072D77A

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/23/2013 10:23 PM, Don deJuan wrote:

From a non TU's perspective D.R. was the only one who could publicly state why greysky should not be a TU, and the rest of the sheeple just followed the "old and grumpy" man, at least that is "public" appearance of this whole thing. As been stated already there have been some TU's I have seen fly through that do not even appear as active as greysky is as a non TU. To me and maybe I just love a good story, but there seems more behind the denial than was publicly discussed.

There's another way of interpreting this--and I'm not saying it's right, either morally or factually. I'm just throwing it out as a possibility. One way of group decision-making is by majority vote. Another is by super-majority, meaning that the proportion needed to approve is higher than 50%. Finally, there is consensus, in which everyone must agree--or at least acquiesce. As I read this, it sounds like the written rules might call for a majority vote, but that an unwritten rule calls for consensus. It's perfectly legitimate to organize based on a consensus requirement. But if that's the case, my thought is that it should be stated as such, and time ought to be allocated to allow for extended consensus-building (which can be an arduous process). I don't know what voting mechanism is used. I was guessing--without looking--that trusted users were indicating their votes by email, hardly an anonymous process. If that's the case, then asking the reason for a particular vote may seem legitimate. If, however, the votes are anonymous, asking reasons can actually serve to compromise that anonymity, since voters may unwittingly or unwillingly compromise themselves with an open-ended response. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJRTrCbAAoJELJhbl/uPb4SRaAQALicnDel2CbuikOfifs0OcFs Dh/76+oVMhGxmsWkzWk0Te0AjqtaOP5ETr8VTK3/OXDGvLbYMuhwTsugFdHpxukn Rsd1Z3ohf+ErSug/dhaYx6VGx0fTOeU46SRViDryu/Q7uF954OalQvdcWWF5T8gY hNeFmasbe0d1Ja81Xy5C5zxNQ2CyiO//M7wHjWQukEPEmqFbNFEBRcN6J5rNFlND NffyqgkEEXZNXCPtjxWNXzsEFtDOLy5bsO+bO1SLx87ElOX4NiaVGX6CeTRzOy5r sp4V269UIlud0B0k4dY9kxBjrDw5zw2mrjY7ABZZ82N6xA94F0QTFXQqg+F5sTbm AAfvsGlK13ZmW5fQ9HDPGeUXlkHrLpY+nu5YUJ4oJYt5U52bpZd7mhum7hJuhUau hvDjEbtavB19VA5DzCKRkPrZRVzceiErldGW/XsfQ782MPNzG2aUgNT9hTn7nBHB f+MbZmYmCdD4ifAyVJamKBvTbTk4z9F5rhCRGzqdDKdooIPccuepK9q8mDx7ZMfE RXNteZVCeYrgaGZtnuY8HKgsUSc5uoLCIceSH7qoBv6hSIYrR2eDlShj5k1q+bfb itsIaYZcvT8nXTvZtdZky9IQLpUtsN5PY8wV69cNIupkugB1JAzh/8SmV0wzvFUW VD5OrWqSGjLGDTwydCgR =els0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:

Don deJuan wrote:

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There were objections! You consider them not sufficient to leads to this result. Everything that needed to be said has been said. After the voters have made up their minds.

Objections were raised and then countered with arguments. If anyone felt that the objections were still valid after that then they should have replied with their reasons. That is the point of the discussion period: to discuss the issues and reconsider them in the light of the evolving conversation. It gives the candidate the chance to respond and adapt as well. If anyone felt that my reply to Dave failed to address the issues then they should have stated why. No one did. You explain again your former opinion. It's not because you are the last one to answer that you convince everyone. It's not because I will not give arguments to refute what you say that you convince me or others readers.

I think I have said all that I have to say on this issue. I remain disappointed by how this played out and I am not alone. 12 TU are disappointed. 14 not. This is a result of a tight vote.

Please, don't says the whole system is crap because graysky was not elected. We can vote no, otherwise we no longer vote. -- Sébastien "Seblu" Luttringer https://www.seblu.net GPG: 0x2072D77A

On 25 March 2013 03:30, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:

Sébastien Luttringer wrote:

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...

Objections were raised and then countered with arguments. If anyone felt that the objections were still valid after that then they should have replied with their reasons. That is the point of the discussion period: to discuss the issues and reconsider them in the light of the evolving conversation. It gives the candidate the chance to respond and adapt as well. If anyone felt that my reply to Dave failed to address the issues then they should have stated why. No one did. You explain again your former opinion. It's not because you are the last one to answer that you convince everyone. It's not because I will not give arguments to refute what you say that you convince me or others readers.

I think we have different definitions of "discussion".

I would also say that if you have no arguments to support an opinion then it is baseless and should be re-examined.

Well, whatever the case, we know that: 1. Sébastien (seblu?) is the best example of a TU who was rejected at one time 2. Dave (falconindy) is _not_ to "blame" (he did the right thing by being transparent) 3. Those who silently thought Dave must be right need a change of attitude The current (majority) voting system is fine -- making decisions based on consensus agreement is not a suitable method for the TU selection process (it would needlessly raise the bar for something that is not a matter of public safety). Voting systems should eliminate bias, and in this case it did not favour any one particular outcome (mixed opinions), so it in fact worked pretty well. If an opinion was influential, then so be it. You can't disregard the result just because you did not expect it (I didn't either). However, all these indicate that grasky is good to go for the next round (after three months), so let us all not worry and continue what we were doing. I'd personally like him to reapply when that time comes. Til next time, then ;) -- GPG/PGP ID: C0711BF1

I have tried to stay out of this in that I am not a TU and my input carries no official weight. I am, however, a moderator on the forums and a professional with significant experience in the field of trust, so I hope you give me some creed. I find your argument to have no basis in fact and to be borderline libel. I have, throughout my career, had positions of trust with my government backed by sundry clearances. At present, I am in the credit card processing business, which has its only level of trust. I have watched Graysky for months. I have been an practicing engineer for more than 25 years, and have no reason to question his ability; If you do, so be it. His technical ability notwithstanding, I find your calling his trustworthiness in to question to be inappropriate and suspect it to be a red herring. I assert you should provide evidence for your lack of trust in him, or you should apologize publicly.. Eric Waller On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Daniel Micay <danielmicay@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 4:29 PM, Rashif Ray Rahman <schiv@archlinux.org> wrote:

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The current (majority) voting system is fine -- making decisions based on consensus agreement is not a suitable method for the TU selection process (it would needlessly raise the bar for something that is not a matter of public safety).

Trusting someone with the ability to push binary packages out to every Arch user seems like something that should have a pretty high bar. It's not just trust that they won't do anything malicious, it's trust that they'll look after their key and won't allow a situation where someone else would have access. They need to be able to work with the rest of the team and take responsibility for any mistakes they make.

On 24/03/13 12:30 PM, Xyne wrote:

Sébastien Luttringer wrote:

...

...

Objections were raised and then countered with arguments. If anyone felt that the objections were still valid after that then they should have replied with their reasons. That is the point of the discussion period: to discuss the issues and reconsider them in the light of the evolving conversation. It gives the candidate the chance to respond and adapt as well. If anyone felt that my reply to Dave failed to address the issues then they should have stated why. No one did. You explain again your former opinion. It's not because you are the last one to answer that you convince everyone. It's not because I will not give arguments to refute what you say that you convince me or others readers. I think we have different definitions of "discussion".

I would also say that if you have no arguments to support an opinion then it is baseless and should be re-examined.

If everyone who voted "No" was required to post, this list would be cluttered with messages that basically say "I still agree with Dave." Dave is one of the most active Arch users and he is known for being very direct. Even though I voted "Yes", getting rejected by Dave and then immediately sending a TU application that leaves out this details seems like trying to pull a fast one. The number of "No" votes does not surprise me because this point was adequately discussed.

Dave Reisner wrote: I'd like to address a few points.

I'm replying to the rest of this with full disclosure: graysky asked me to sponsor him first, and I've declined based on a lack of skill and what I feel isn't necessarily the correct attitude for an Arch TU.

I was not aware of this and I admit that my enthusiasm for the application was slightly diminished, but I stand by my sponsorship.

I have strong feelings against even the concept of profile-sync-daemon, and transitively (although moreso), anything-sync-daemon.

1) You, as a user, cannot possibly manage memory more effectively than the kernel. Do not intentionally thwart the page cache. 2) To claim that you're saving your precious SSD "unnecessary writes" is advanced silliness. Recent controllers don't have nearly the same problems early SSDs had.

Phrases such as "advanced silliness" have no place in a serious technical discussion and only ratchet up tensions. Please avoid them. I expect that there are many older SSDs out there (although that is debatable as early adopters of SSDs are likely people who update often, but maybe not). Even if you have a newer SSD that will likely never reach its read-write death, some people simply like knowing that they are squeezing everything they can out of their disks. Call them whatever name you want, but please realize that simply because you see no value in something it does not follow that the thing must have no value. Given the popularity of these apps there are clearly users who think differently than you do.

3) The only conceivable "benefit" is to move the startup time to bootup, rather than to when you first run the program.

Again, subjective value. For someone who doesn't sit around in front of the screen while the system boots up, there is a clear value.

4) Shell is inherently dangerous. If you're bent on writing something dangerous, you'd better know all the pitfalls of shell and what will eventually go wrong in your script. To wit, reading the bbs threads about these daemons will show at least 1 user who has suffered data loss simply by upgrading the profile-sync-daemon package.

How does an apparently one-off upstream mistake have any bearing on his ability to package software? They are two different things. If your argument is that he lacks skill then I could dig up quite a few examples of respected developers who have released software with bugs. It happens and each incident should be considered on its own to determine if the dev was just lazy or if it was a mistake that others would likely make.

...and in some cases, the program you're running this on top of is simply misconfigured for your needs. Firefox, for example, can be forced to use more RAM before switching to disk cache.

...

https://github.com/graysky2/profile-cleaner https://github.com/graysky2/backdrop-randomizer *Active contributor to Arch bugs.

Again, subjective.

I find that your bug reports routinely lack effort on your part in deciphering the root of the problem leading to the bugs eventually being discarded. I'd expect a lot more effort from someone interested in being more than just an end user. Examples:

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24850 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/26394

Posted in 2011, with ample information and active replies.

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/29182

Reporting bugs for critical system packages while running [testing]... and you're complaining about what exactly?

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/30131

Fair enough, could have done more research.

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/34080

The internal compiler errors may be obvious to C/C++ coders but not to everyone else. Most users likely expect that running makepkg on ABS PKGBUILDs will compile the package. I agree that he should have done more research here, but I doubt that he is likely to repeat this mistake.

And some your feature requests are fairly misguided, often going against Arch's patching policy:

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31187

Difference of opinion. He came to the conclusion that there was an overall benefit to most users and recommended changing package configuration options because of it. I do not see how that it misguided simply because you subjectively disagree with the evaluation of the purported benefit. (I honestly have no opinion about the proposed change.)

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/32204

Proposing the incorporation of a patch that has been submitted upstream and that might avoid data loss is not misguided. I also find it contradictory that you would consider this misguided yet cite one user's data loss due to a bug in his software as a real concern, because here he is attempting to prevent data loss for even a small set of users

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/33688

This was a trivial request that could have waited for upstream, but I am under the impression that Arch does accept patches that have been accepted upstream, so it wasn't completely misguided. But yeah, this was obviously a case for ABS and just a bit of noise on the bug tracker.

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/33974

In this case upstream broke something, realized it and reversed itself but due to an apparently slow release cycle it was going to take time to get back to the users. I don't see how submitting a patch is misguided in this case.

In short, this isn't the kind of attitude or skill level I'd expect from a trusted user.

I think we have different interpretations of his attitude and skill level. For the former I see someone who is enthusiastic about Arch and who actively tries to contribute. He replies are always cordial and responsive on the bug tracker and forum. I admit that he sometimes is a bit quick to open a ticket and I understand that it just creates unnecessary noise for you, but overall I think you are interpreting his actions with unmerited negativity. As far as skill goes, he maintains the linux-ck repo and many AUR packages. I have not found anything to indicate a lack of packaging skills there. He is also able to fix bugs in upstream software and will hopefully direct his patches there in the future. Considering his overall activity in the community I think he wants to do more than just "maintain a few packages", but I cannot speak for him on that point. In summary, I think he has what it take to be a good TU despite a few rough edges. But yeah, it would have been nice to get a full disclosure directly.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 10:08 PM, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:

...

2) To claim that you're saving your precious SSD "unnecessary writes" is advanced silliness. Recent controllers don't have nearly the same problems early SSDs had.

Phrases such as "advanced silliness" have no place in a serious technical discussion and only ratchet up tensions. Please avoid them.

I expect that there are many older SSDs out there (although that is debatable as early adopters of SSDs are likely people who update often, but maybe not). Even if you have a newer SSD that will likely never reach its read-write death, some people simply like knowing that they are squeezing everything they can out of their disks. Call them whatever name you want, but please realize that simply because you see no value in something it does not follow that the thing must have no value. Given the popularity of these apps there are clearly users who think differently than you do.

Well put, Xyne. Actually, I am glad that Dave brought this up, because the discussion I quoted above reminded me to mention some additional experience I have recently gained in the topic of packaging: interest in psd from the Ubuntu community and actually a lack of active maintenance there caused me to take on maintaining an Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint deb myself which I host out of my launchpad repo (https://launchpad.net/~graysky). I checked the stats, and v5.28-1 has over 1,500 downloads which is cool: % ppastats --release quantal --arch i386 graysky utils Name Version Release/Arch Count profile-cleaner 2.01-3 quantal/i386 82 profile-sync-daemon 5.28-1 quantal/i386 1504 I also learned how to package it for Fedora, and learned some basic operation of koji so that I, and others can use it on our Linux boxes at work. I have submitted to have psd included in the official fedora repos which is pending approval (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=912878). In the process of learning the Debian Way and the Fedora Way for packaging served to deepen my appreciation for makepkg/PKGBUILD files. So simplistic by comparison ;)

If my opinion as a mere arch user counts for anything in this thread, I'd like to express my gratitude towards graysky for his linux-ck repository and AUR packages. I'm running that kernel without any problem since 2011-04-10 (from my pacman.log). Honestly when I saw his email about applying as a TU my heart jumped, because I really want to see someone who is maintaining the only kernel I use bound to the arch dev community much closer. This is a good sign for me that he plans to stay with archlinux for long, and that is a good thing for us. I know this is not a criteria for someone to become a TU but a very good indication of his positive attitude. So, thanks graysky.

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Bartłomiej Piotrowski <b@bpiotrowski.pl> wrote:

I'm not sure if I should take part in the discussion, as my application also hasn't specified anything besides packages I want to maintain, but…

As long as I understand (not only) your need of privacy, I would like to know a bit more about you. Where do you live and what are you doing when not working on Arch stuff? You don't have to be very precise, I'm just curious.

I did read though some past TU apps in the archives, but ultimately elected to keep mine short and sweet. To answer your questions, I currently live on the boarder of Illinois and Indiana and work in the medical field. I love to travel and spend time in the outdoors. Tropical destinations are on the top of my list of favorite places on Earth with the US VI, the Caribbean, and Jamaica being top picks. Snorkeling has always been one of my favorite things to do. I keep flirting with the idea of getting certified for SCUBA but never pulled the trigger on it yet. I grew up playing piano and did so seriously when I was younger and before discovering the guitar. You'd be surprised how many metal guitarists started out classically trained. I played in a bands all though high school and most of college. Mostly metal and entirely cover tunes.

Why do you think that e.g. monitorix will be good addition to [community]? It doesn't look very different from munin or collectd; I haven't encountered it in other distributions. Fine, it's all about willingness to maintain yet another package, but 53 votes doesn't indicate anything.

I like the way the data are displayed with monitorix. Been using it off-and-on since version 1 was released. I can't comment on the other two you mentioned having never used them.

Among pointless bug reports such as executable bit on icon file, you helped me at least once (sorry, I have bad memory. :p) with ufw.service, so I can assume you are active not only on our bugtracker. Additionally I had kernel26-ck on my desktop for some time; modprobed_db was useful too (while it's quite ugly solution).

Ha, thanks. The source to it and really all my stuff is on my github. Pull requests are welcomed; always interested to learn another way to do things.

Dave Reisner wrote:

I'm replying to the rest of this thread with full disclosure: graysky asked me to sponsor him first, and I've declined based on a lack of skill and what I feel isn't necessary the correct attitude for an Arch TU.

I don't understand the sudden scrutiny about skill level. What about the newest TU? He was putting out these kinds of PKGBUILDs [1] as of Feb 6, 2013. He was accepted as a TU on Feb 26, 2013, just a few weeks after thinking that a package should start with pkgrel=0, that it should provide and replace itself, that it should manually extract its source for no reason, etc. My 2 cents: - If that's the kind of skill level that makes the cut these days, then graysky seems to far exceed it. - If that level of skill shouldn't have made the cut, then Arch's TU voting process needs to be refined so that it's based more on tangible qualifications than fleeting popularity. [1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1227993#p1227993 -- AWC On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Felix Yan <felixonmars@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd been using linux-ck for more than one year since I installed Arch for the first time (was using zen-kernel in Ubuntu before, mainly for BFS). I got rapid replies from graysky on the AUR comments (before I apply for a TU) and really helpful.

Although I'm not using -ck patchset for months due to worse responsive when running boinc, I'm still very glad to see graysky becoming a TU, so a +1 from me and good luck :)

Felix Yan Twitter: @felixonmars Wiki: http://felixc.at

Alexander Rødseth wrote:

While not handling spaces in directory names is kinda bad

+1 *glares at certain makepkg devs* :P