6/3/2005
I’m offended
Cardoe wrote this in the early morning:
Here’s one way to offend me. Touch my ebuilds without telling me anything about it. Especially when I told you personally and PUBLICLY to never ever touch them because you do the wrong things to them. And what do you do? You touch them again. Then I attempt to ping you to speak to you about this and you proceed to ignore me. You’re a new dev. Don’t operate like that, it won’t win you friends.
Filed under: 13 Responses to “I’m offended”
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June 3rd, 2005 at 10:13 am
While I agree with you that you should get in touch with current maintainers before making changes and especially new devs should approach things carefully, I do think that it is out of place to call things “my ebuilds” with the implicit notion of “I, and only I, should make any chances to them”.
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:09 pm
Well, you’ll feel the same way when you suddenly get bug reports on packages that you are listed as the maintainer that were introduced by someone else. It’s annoying when another dev has a different preception of quality than you.
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:25 pm
That is not what I meant nor was it what was said. The only point I am trying to make is that we are in an open source project, and the idea of ownership in a possessive sense seems out of place to me.
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:33 pm
[rant]
I recently had another dev add a cvs snapshot of one my packages without even letting me know about it.
Fixing obvious typoes and other trivial bugs can be okay but devs really should stick to policy and ask the maintainer before trouncing all over their ebuilds.
[/rant]
June 3rd, 2005 at 4:13 pm
[more ranting]
I am with you all on this one (well, all of you that I agree with). I’m getting more than annoyed by devs adding new packages to dev-perl, marking perl herd as their maintainer, ignoring bugs about the packages, and then to boot, not even making a proper ebuilds (missing all deps for instance). If you’re going to commit, fine, but be responsible about it and mark yourself as maintainer. I check the cvs logs to see who the bastage was, but then what? They didn’t care enough when they added the package, and they dont’ care enough to respond to pings or bugs, but the package is out there and heavily in use, and someone has to fix their mess.
BAH.
June 3rd, 2005 at 5:52 pm
I think Gentoo’s portage cvs is way too democratic. In some countries you can be shot and killed for touching someone else’s ebuilds. Of course in these countries they don’t call them ebuilds and they don’t call it cvs.
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:26 pm
First off, I didn’t mean to be anonymous when commenting about the cvs snapshot incident
Second, I think it’s great that all devs can commit to the entire portage tree. I commit fixes to other devs packages. But if it’s non-trivial fixes I always try to contact the maintainer first and when that’s not possible for some reason I make sure they know about my commit as soon as possible.
That’s the way these things are supposed to happen but too many devs either don’t know the policy or plain disregard policy.
Third, I certainly agree with mcummings that devs shouldn’t just dump packages on other devs. Just like dev-perl this happens far too often in dev-python.
Well, too much ranting from my side already - enjoy Gentoo, it’s a great distribution
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:43 pm
My policy for my Gentoo packages is, that everyone is free to make changes to them. As long as the changes make sense and the developer in question is responsible for any breakage he/she causes by his/her commits. If the developer is unsure he/she can mail me or ping me on IRC to make sure.
I often presume this policy for other packages maintained by other developers. I frequently fix tree-wide QA related things like stray digests, broken Manifests and invalid atoms, to name a few. While I’m at it I sometimes fix some other things too that catch my eyes. But getting in touch with every developer would double the time I’m spending on this.
June 4th, 2005 at 8:05 am
Don’t you guys have CCMAIL: ?
KDE has a pretty open commit policy. It works, because if something sucks you can revert it. And lot’s of people are watching the commits. Guess this only works if you release every few months as opposed to constantly.
June 4th, 2005 at 9:06 am
Sven, I consider fixing stray digest, broken Manifests and similar stuff trivial and wouldn’t get in touch with the maintainer in such cases either.
I just get a bit upset when other devs bumps my packages without telling me about it or changes behaviour in my packages. I’m pretty sure you would at least try to the maintainer if you did anything like that.
June 4th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
kloeri, yeah, fixing those mentioned QA issues is hight priority and if some developer moans about me fixing them, then Gentoo is probably the wrong place for them.
But the other changes I wrote about are more than just fixing QA issues. Like an enhancement to the init script, or including a patch that I needed for my own servers. Gentoo is a distribution that is made to fit the needs of our user and developer base. I’m glad that we have no strict commit policy, that stops us from commiting to other packages. In my oppinion we can modify other packages to fit our needs, as long as the needs of other developers and users aren’t limited by the changes.
June 8th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
my issue is that someone changes a package and it does something handy dandy for them and only them or just their architecture and breaks other setups.
Example, a program with a lot of assembly that’s in the process of being converted to work on amd64. If a dev who has amd64 architecture and grabs a patch from upstream mailing list that specifically says breaks x86 support and applies that patch to the stable x86 ebuild….
November 27th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
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