WTF?! Another core dev goes..

steveL · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 12:40 pm Post subject: WTF?! Another core dev goes..

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/48164

They discussed this for 9 months without letting him know? Absolutely disgraceful.

psomas · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 1:05 pm Post subject:

i've been using gentoo for only a year,and i subscribed to various gentoo mailing lists a month ago...
from the mailing lists,i understood that gentoo needs active devs willing to help...and now a core dev resigns... :/
i don't know what are the relationships between the devs,and what is going on,but what happened,and all the disaggreements between the devs will just make gentoo worse... :/
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AllenJB · Veteran Joined: 02 Sep 2005 Posts: 1285

Note: The following is the view of a user, based only on my own observations as a user. This is why I'll frequently use words like 'apparent' - I know there's a lot I don't see and I am trying to take that into account.

On the face of it, the apparent lone suspension of Jakub is concerning to me, especially given that he's basically only been trying his best to do a really tough job for the past few years with apparently no support from people like devrel who he should have been able to turn to to help resolve these situations.

But, my guess is that more people than just Jakub have been suspended under the new rules and we as users don't (and may never) know who, how long for and why, since a lot of that goes on on the private -core list.

To pre-empt a possible line of discussion: I don't personally think that suspensions and the like should necessarily be made public. The only reason we know about this one is because the suspended person decided to make it public.

With regards to the whole "9 months of discussion without being informed issue", I'm not going to comment at all. There's possibly a whole lot of back-story here that I don't and probably will never know.

It's disappointing to see another dev go, but at the end of the day it's his choice.

I have personally had concerns about QA in Gentoo (an example I've personally met is a stable package broken in portage for over 24 hours, apparently because no one wanted to digest a file or revert a change until the committing developer could be got hold of, plus various other examples I've seen when browsing bugzilla). I hope that the new CoC and other recent measures will help to improve the overall quality of Gentoo.

anello · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 1:22 pm Post subject:

A huge loss, again! :roll:

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jonnevers · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 2:22 pm Post subject:

aidanjt · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 2:25 pm Post subject:

Yay for devrel!.. still doing a great job hanging onto the main devs there I see! :roll:

jonnevers · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 3:26 pm Post subject:

FYI: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/coc.xml

from one of the latest posts:

Genone · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 5:03 pm Post subject:

Well, I'd hardly call Jakub a "core dev" even though he was a very visible member of the community due to his bugzilla activity. While I haven't been involved in his suspension in any way I can fully understand and support this decision. Jakub has done a very good work with handling the incoming bugs in the majority of cases, however equally he has been a constant source of noise (like half of his posts to -dev were simply noise and in some cases pure FUD) and in several cases definitely overstepped his bounds when dealing with bug reports (not going to look up any numbers). Also when he didn't get his will he easily got rather offensive (which can even be seen in the bugs he referenced).
Yes, it's a major loss to see him go, but definitely not unexpected as several people warned him about his behavior and advised him to take a break to calm down/get some distance months ago.

amne · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 5:34 pm Post subject:

Naib · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 6:24 pm Post subject:

come fetch me when say... Uberlord hands in his notice, that is when there is problems
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j-m · Retired Dev Joined: 31 Oct 2004 Posts: 975

Eh....

- Noone did let me know for months, indeed...
- I really didn't feel any support for what I've been doing from devrel/QA folks lately; pretty much sucks, bugs and their handling is a crucial part of QA
- sorry if I offended some users; everyone makes mistakes; OTOH maintainers are pretty busy w/ handling all the valid issues they get, and noise that's not useful needs to be filtered; there's always a 'reopen bug' feature if people disagree
- our devrel lead has attacked me on more than one occasion, and he should have not taken any part in my suspension, since he's clearly shown his bias against me a couple of times
- oh well, there's life beyond Gentoo, I've not been any core developer. Flameeyes was, and pretty much the same people that have contributed to my resignation have forced him to leave as well. Noone has taken their lesson, unfortunately. We still have the same folks in charge of QA, noone of MIPS folks has been taken to the task for their (total lack of) action for the past years, and devrel still needs to grow some balls to deal with real issues instead of taking the easy way.
- if you want to see things get better, oh well... hard to advise, good luck is all I can say. I've tried hard and have given up now, sorry.

aidanjt · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 11:33 pm Post subject:

G'luck jacub. It's sad to see that the same minority group of devs are still damaging Gentoo and devrel failing to deal with problems yet again.

Conan · Guru Joined: 02 Nov 2004 Posts: 360

steveL, please stop spreading FUD.

Calling jakub a core dev is kind of a stretch.. dontcha think?

All he did was reassign/handle bugs... something that should have been replaced with an improved bug wizard a long time ago.

playfool · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:23 am Post subject:

Conan · Guru Joined: 02 Nov 2004 Posts: 360

I disagree.

The person in the best position to "wrangle" their bugs is the maintainer. They are the most appropriate to judge whether or not a bug is valid or not. By firstly giving the user a list of possible dupes (not that hard) that they need to look through they may realize that someone else has reported it. If it gets through that net it makes more sense for the maintainer, who knows the most about the package, to wrangle his own subset of bugs instead of one person wrangling thousands of bugs, most of which they do not have the background to handle properly.

aidanjt · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:01 am Post subject:

There's a difference between bug wrangling and bug resolution, if you have one person doing both they wont give themselves a kick in the ass for slacking. Jakub did a great job of bug wrangling.

Conan · Guru Joined: 02 Nov 2004 Posts: 360

There is /no need/ for a bug wrangler.

A wizard could determine the maintainer of a given package from the package name. It could assign the bug to that person. That person could then determine if the bug is a duplicate of another bug that they are handling. If it is, then they could mark it as a duplicate. One hundred devs doing their own wrangling is much smarter than one person doing all the wrangling.

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:10 am Post subject:

aidanjt · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:11 am Post subject:

So, you still need a bug wrangler, not only to categorise bugs and mark off dupes, but also to keep check on stagnant bugs, that's something maintainers as wranglers wont fix. So having maintainers doing the job of wrangling isn't in fact smart.

Jokey_ · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 7:19 am Post subject:

j-m · Retired Dev Joined: 31 Oct 2004 Posts: 975

swimmer · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 8:52 am Post subject:

@j-m: You give the strongest argument yourself why you should come back after 2 weeks of a nice & relaxing break Jakub ;-)

You've done a great job and you could just continue with that and a lot of people would be very grateful for that!!!

So please reconsider a comeback with a more relaxed attitude (I know this is easier written than done) ...

Best regards
swimmer

steveL · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 2:28 pm Post subject:

Gergan Penkov · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:00 pm Post subject:

I would like to say one thing - I don't like the tendencies...
Last thing I saw on bugzilla before jacub retired was this bug and I thought what will happen if this holeheads retire spanky or make him leave.
Yes, of course there are other distributions, but I have tried most of them and don't like them...
So please somebody retire the chlory and the spb-clique, before it is too late, I don't care about paludis and mips and I don't care about whitespace QA, but I DO care about packages, which are QA-perfect from QA's POV, but teribly broken in their functionality and about slacker developers that know better
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j-m · Retired Dev Joined: 31 Oct 2004 Posts: 975