seth vidal wrote:
It does? Who do I represent? I think I am a member of 'the community'?
I think Jeremy and Bill and Elliot are too.
I think they're members of the contributing community.
Agreed.
It's not elitistism it's based on listening to the people who are doingI feel this model assumes that maintainership is the only meritorious activity in fedora. I think that other meritorious activities such as useful analysis of plans and the occasional proposal of alternative solutions also is meritorious. Im not talking about backseat coding here but rather offering an alternative perspective to create a well-rounded view of the goal and the bumps in the path to get there as well as some suggestions to traverse the trail efficiently. If it is the position of redhat that this isnt the case i understand but i think it is a mistake to limit input to that one group.
the work. In large projects if you listen to everyone you can never get
any work done. So you listen to the people are contributing. I don't
think that's particularly crazy. Show me an open source project that is
NOT like that. This is not a democracy - I hope it's a meritocracy - but
in reality it's something more like 'those people who do the work get
listened to'-ocracy.
My best suggestion is to open the "new dev list" (aka maintainers) to people that serve other valuable roles or who routinely inject intelligent ideas into conversation on fedora-devel. Essentially i like the idea of a moderated list because i grow weary of a thread with 512 msgs (slimfast slimfest) because it takes half my morning to weed through it and very few users read it and end up asking the same questions elsewhere in the list.Then tell me how else you do it? How to cull the signal from the noise?
show me a better way and we'll get there lickety-damn-split.
My only argument is that i think that people provide value in other ways than simply maintainership. Admit users to the list contingent on their behavior and ability to keep "noises off". If you find they are habitual flamers and dont contribute enough to justify the noise warn them, if it doesnt improve then thank them for the input and show them the door politely. If you start small with the whitelist and add users slowly it will be easy to manage and should maintain equilibrium without much influence. not to mention improve the level of decorum with which users treat each other on a smaller list with more accountability.
I think we should be honest and mention that it is unlikely that the devel list will maintain the same level of importance with the introduction of a new "working list". I dont fault anyone for this but there are only so many hours in the day and the S:N ratio will be so much lower on devel when everyone bails to maintainer that it will increasingly become more like "fedora-list" and justifiably less worth reading. I read lists in order of importance (based on time constraints) and fedora devel will drop way lower with the advent of maintainers.
-mf
