[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Pierre Chapuis]

Le Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:21:58 +0100,
hollunder <hollunder at lavabit.com> a écrit :

> Maybe the issues are somewhere else? I don't know. One observation I, as
> a stinking normal user, could make is that there are few devs around
> where users hang out. Let's see.. I know of one dev active in #archlinux
> on IRC and about three devs active on this mailinglist, including you,
> Aaron and the IRC-dev. So maybe it's the devs who detached from the
> users and there's simply no-one around who could pass on the knowledge?

What? I have not been on IRC or the forums for a long time because of
the low signal to noise ratio there, but that's just because the number
of users increased, not because the presence of the devs decreased.
Just by reading the MLs or looking at Flyspray you could easily say
that a lot of them are very active and responsive. Not to mention the
TUs...

> One thing is for sure, elitist and cocky behavior will alienate users,
> competent ones as well, and alienated users wont help, they wont write
> patches, they'll switch distro at best.

I'm not sure of that. If by an elitist behavior you mean one that
consists in refusing to add complexity to the system to simplify the
life of users, then I think it will not alienate all the users. I for
one use Arch precisely because of that. You can call it an elitist
attitude, or the Arch Way, as opposed to the Ubuntu Way. Ubuntu is
"Linux for human beings", Arch Linux is Linux for grown-ups who are not
afraid to think, learn and spend some time repairing their mistakes
when they fuck up.

So I'm with Allan here: either the user base has to adapt / change, or
Arch itself has to change. But knowing that the devs are users
themselves and that most of them understand the original Arch Way, I
guess the users who don't like it will have no choice but to adapt,
leave or fork.

-- 
catwell