[arch-general] Fwd: A plea for communication from Arch devs & maintainers

[Sam Mulvey]

> However, what people often do not realise (which is certainly not their fault,
> but probably stems from unfamiliarity with the packaging ecosystem) is that
> bumping the version number in a PKGBUILD is *not* the hard part. What takes
> time is actually building, testing and releasing the updated package.

Since my focus is on communicating a little more than the technical 
things themselves, I will say that this response feels a little 
automatic.   You write later in the post that you understand that I did 
update the PKGBUILD, that I did build it, and that I did (at least some) 
testing, so I'm not completely in the dark here, especially as I'm 
apparently doing my testing much the same way maintainers are.

The automated feel of this response is augmented by the subsequent 
agreement from someone else with an "archlinux.org" address.


>
> This does not mean in any way that external contributions are not welcome!
> Updating and testing an outdated package yourself locally can be a great place
> to start. If you experience any issues, like having to apply patches, test
> suite failures that you need to overcome etc., opening a bug report for these
> is highly welcome!

The details of my experience are somewhat at odds with this very nice 
invitation.
>> If there isn't a problem, trying to organize the stated issues into actual
>> solutions would make that clearer.
> I really struggle to understand what you are trying to say here. Could you
> rephrase or elaborate, please?

Sorry, that was more for other folks in the thread.  If other people 
take a crack at fixing what they consider problems, they might discover 
interesting things.  When one stops writing posts and starts writing 
code, some of the "problems" might turn out to be mirages of one sort or 
another.  This is why when I encounter a problem I try to fix it myself 
first.  Maybe I'm the problem.

As I was the problem here: I was too vague.


>> There are a lot of unspoken rules to the Arch Linux community. More than I'm
>> used to from a volunteer organization and I work 100% in the volunteer
>> space.   Thus far I have been unable to navigate it.   Since Arch continues
>> to make good technical decisions-- even when I disagreed with those
>> decisions-- I decided to keep using it and just keep my trap shut.
> I agree that we could do far better regarding documentation on how to get
> involved. I would not go as far as to call these "unspoken rules", Arch simply
> has far less hard and fast guidelines than other projects, for better or worse.

I wasn't planning on responding again as I felt like I was prevailing 
too much on your time, but this is pretty key.

I'm going to ask you to consider this from the perspective of a person 
with literally no connection to any other Arch user, social or otherwise.

The lack of written hard and fast rules does not preclude the existence 
of hard and fast rules.  Decisions have to be made. Decisions become 
guidelines, guidelines become rules.   If that rule isn't stated 
somewhere, or more likely, said rules are distributed via so many 
communication channels that a single person has difficulty even being 
aware of them let alone keeping up, those rules are going to feel 
"unspoken" or "unwritten" no matter how those who live with them may think.

And those are the rules I appear to run into, time and time again.

This is, unfortunately, where "simplicity" and "KISS" can absolutely 
fail.  Under this model simplicity for you means complexity for me, 
where a little bit of intention could potentially keep it simple for 
everyone.  I'm not going to pretend that's an easy thing to do, but that 
doesn't mean the problem isn't there.


> I completely understand that this can intimidating and sometimes even prohibit
> contribution. Therefore the goal of my last email was explaining possible ways
> to take part in order to lower this barrier. If you have more questions in that
> regard, please do not hesitate to get in touch! The vast majority of team
> members I had the pleasure of interacting with have been welcoming and helpful
> to work with.

I'm going to read between the lines and suspect that I'm taking up too 
much of your time.  :D  Thank you so much for responding to me, it does 
help.

-Sam