[arch-dev-public] Moving forward [was: Cleanup/Orphans]

[Aaron Griffin]

On 10/2/07, Andreas Radke <a.radke at 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!