4/8/2007
Please Don’t Feed the Trolls
Well it looks like Ciaran must be active on the gentoo-dev mailing list again because there’s been yet another wave of developers retiring. I just want to encourage people to focus on one and only one thread on -dev right now, and that’s the one started by Mike Cummings. It’s really starting to get to me how many good developers are leaving the project. We’ve got people like blubb, antarus, pylon, and possibly vapier and christel. These are developers that make the distribution operate on a day to day basis. Sure we’ve got an influx fresh blood but heck, I’m the 5th oldest developer in Gentoo. (Grant, Seemant, Mike F, Jason, and me) And that really shouldn’t be. Sure people retire but it’s nice to have people just stay and are very experienced.
It feels like this experience void and this void of people that are known in the development circle is growing bigger and bigger and swallowing up more and more people. People that I never expect that it would. It just feels like Gentoo is crumbling under it’s own weight.
On a completely unrelated note, in my time spent ignoring the mailing lists and steev’s awesome work on getting HAL 0.5.9 into the tree (it’s masked). I’ve found a bit of development life and have been working on HAL related bits. I know HAL is the package that we all love to hate but I have some ideas I will outline in a blog post that will further the divide of a Gentoo desktop and a Gentoo server. It will make more things “just work” and provide for a better Gentoo desktop experience. It’s going to involve tweaking some base-system packages and some help from the release engineering guys. I won’t bring the ideas to the -dev mailing list and I won’t even address any questions on the mailing list. Stay tuned to your favorite Planet Gentoo feed for more info.
Filed under: One Response to “Please Don’t Feed the Trolls”
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April 9th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Huh, pylon’s retired? Last i checked, he’s still with his thesis and then it’s back into gentoo land (or something large and blunt will hit him
I’m sorry for antarus, blubb et.al. leaving, and it gives me creeps thinking about what they could be doing for gentoo right now
However, i very much agree with the general recommendation: please stay purely technical. The more you feed ciaranm (and all the other trolls), the more you take away from gentoo. Even if you feel the urge to speak up against the (probably) wrong claims and insults, troll baits and what not: please go fix some bugs instead.
Gentoo will thank you