On 11/3/21 12:27, Archange wrote:
Thanks Jonas, you wrote the mail I wanted to sent. :)
Yet you said it again.
It took two people with an official email address to tell me how wrong I
am. This is such a perfect example of the problem that it kind of
hurts. There's a word I've been trying to avoid using, because it's
pretty semantically weighted: gatekeeping.
Let me cut out the bits here that communicate it, in order:
I’d like to emphasize that contributions are welcome
You want my help.
as long as they are not trivial changes that don’t bring value.
But only if it meets a vague standard set by individual maintainers.
this is also a way to get yourself known by dev/TUs
But I also have to *know the right people*. Yikes.
That said, not all gatekeeping is horrible. Arch says right on the tin
that it has technical knowledge requirements to play ball. I get
that. I also run a volunteer organization with technical requirements
to fully participate. But what that meant to us is that we had to spend
a lot of thought avoiding using that gate as a way to support other,
less worthwhile gates[1].
It doesn't feel like Arch is spending time on that, so:
All that being said, we certainly do lack human resources
Sometimes I really feel like I should give back, but it looks like a
damn long walk and I have other things I could do. So I'm glad for
(and grateful to) the people who find that walk a lot less onerous than
I. I sometimes worry how many other people like me are out there. If
it becomes too many, the distribution kind of stops being a
distribution. So here I am, managing three packages in AUR and
blathering about gatekeeping and social domain problems of a Linux
distribution.
*: Although quite an extreme example by the amount of changes versus
the amount of the maintainer available free time (me), it took me
roughly a year to have enough of it to look deeply into vtk9 changes,
package the dependencies, solve multiple issues (including several PR
in different upstream projects). While a vtk9 package was available in
the AUR, it did not provide most of the features, and certainly did
not take into account several of the issues we had while rebuilding
dependent packages. I was asked several times by people why I did not
bump yet, I explained the issue and how people could help, but then it
seems people realized this was difficult because I did not get further
answers.
I'm really not unsympathetic to this. GNOME is wacky, audacity is
broken, blender was stonking huge the last time I had to care about it,
and packaging python stuff is space magic to me since I don't use it,
but exactly: extreme example. For every "my partner needs OBS to do
horrible thing X" there were a an order of magnitude more packages that
were done by incrementing a number in vim and then generating new checksums.
Feeling a bit preachy[2] so I'm going to bow out here. I'll say it
again: you all do good work, and it is appreciated. If you'd like to
talk to me further, I'm pretty easy to find.
-Sam
[1]: I'd love to tell you what we're working on, but we're a project
that is perforce local so we can do things that an international project
like Arch would find difficult.
[2]: Which is kind of ironic, really.
