[arch-general] Personal note

[David Benfell]

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On 08/15/2012 12:51 PM, mike cloaked wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 8:43 PM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no>
> wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Karol Blazewicz 
>> <karol.blazewicz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Hi guys,
>>>> 
>>>> As most devs have done already, I'm going to change my
>>>> relationship with arch-general.
>>> 
>>> What is the preferred way to contact you or other devs with
>>> questions or suggestions (better wording for an announcement
>>> etc.)?
>> 
>> We don't currently have a satisfactory answer to this question. 
>> Hopefully a solution will present itself soon, I know people are 
>> discussing the problem. After all, we DO want useful feedback,
>> and there IS really good feedback inbeetween all the rest.
>> 
>> I guess important stuff should still be picked up by someone, 
>> alternatively you could cc the relevant dev (who e.g. wrote the
>> news item, etc.).
>> 
> You know I have been watching this really destructive war of
> attrition on this list for quite some time - and it is reminiscent
> of the long flame wars that occurred on the Fedora general list
> that led me to unsubscribe from the Fedora list and start looking
> at Arch as the distribution for my laptops.
> 
And numerous other places. As far as I know, the problem has never
been solved and has laid waste in nearly all of them, with the result
that support has become harder to find.

There is almost always a tension between those who know what they are
doing and those who don't. In my own field, I lose patience with naves
rather quickly, so I'm hardly in a position to lecture anyone about
this. That said, by contrast, there are a few developers out there who
seem gifted at the human relations part of this, are brilliant at the
hand-holding that is sometimes needed, and I think are not so often
recognized. They're also often working on ancillary projects for which
there are easy alternatives rather than core stuff. Distributions,
init, the kernel, even desktop environments I think fall into this
latter category where replacement can mean ripping out a lot of stuff
and building from scratch.

Our (emphasis on the collective) failure to solve this, however, is
debilitating, not only for existing users for whom support is harder
to find, but in terms of attracting future users, not just to Arch but
to the open source community in general.

- -- 
David Benfell
benfell at parts-unknown.org
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