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hasufell | 19 Jun 2013 22:18
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On the way Devrel is constituted


While I appreciate devrel being more active in serious situations (I
actually proposed that in another thread), I question the way Devrel
is constituted.

How was devrel formed? Who started it? What's the procedure of getting in?

I have no answer to the first two question, but the last question is
easy: It's like getting into any other project. Speak with them.

And that, is a serious problem. Devrel should not be a regular
project. It holds the power of conflict resolution and of disciplinary
action (and that is a lot of power). Why should anyone trust their
judgement? How can we prevent that people with good intents, but
without the required judgement and social skills, get into devrel?
Simple answer: we can't.

Who controls devrel?
Simple answer: no one.
The only thing that can stop devrel is the council, which has some
kind of veto right. But that is not enough to guarantee that an entity
with that kind of power/authority/responsibility consists of people
who are capable of that task.
It's a self-maintaining project without any logical connection between
the legitimation of the project and the legitimation of the members.
There is no rotation of members which is absolutely crucial for a
position like that.

What is a possible solution?
Let the council elect all members. That way the power still comes from
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Markos Chandras | 19 Jun 2013 19:35
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Temporary DevRel actions for CoC violations


Hi,

It is unfortunate to observe constant bullying, insults and trolling
across our public media. Developers have been warned over and over that
such behaviour is not acceptable and they should try to behave
properly. However, people have ignored such warnings for a very long
time. This ends today.

The DevRel policy states that:
"If the issue is deemed critical, the developer in question may have
his or her access suspended while a vote takes place. In such
situations, the Developer Relations lead may act without a vote of the
remaining Developer Relations team; this power is granted by Council.
Except in critical situations where immediate action is required, such
disciplinary action is determined by members of the Developer Relations
project."[1]

For me, this problem is critical. Devrel is working on formalizing a new
policy, and we will announce news on this soon. In the meantime, to
prevent further escalations,  I will use my lead powers to request
immediate bans whenever I see one of you violate the CoC[2] and ignore
the previous warnings.

My fellow developers, it's time you finally realize that
you are part of a community and you must learn to behave
and respect each other even if you have different technical views.
We are all people sharing a common interest: Gentoo.

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/policy.xml#doc_chap2
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Jeroen Roovers | 19 Jun 2013 00:01
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You have been researched (again)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 David Garcia, Marcelo Serrano Zanetti and Frank Schweitzer
Chair of Systems Design – www.sg.ethz.ch – ETH Zurich

 = Abstract

We analyze the relation between the emotions and the activity of
contributors in the Open Source Software project Gentoo. Our case study
builds on extensive data sets from the project’s bug tracking platform
bugzilla, to quantify the activity of contributors, and its mail
archives, to quantify the emotions of contributors by means of
sentiment analysis. The Gentoo project is known for a considerable drop
in development performance after the sudden retirement of a central
contributor. We analyze how this event correlates with the negative
emotions, both in bilateral email discussions with the central
contributor, and at the level of the whole community of contributors.
We then extend our study to consider the activity patters on Gentoo
contributors in general. We find that contributors are more likely to
become inactive when they express strong positive or negative emotions
in the bug tracker, or when they deviate from the expected value of
emotions in the mailing list. We use these insights to develop a
Bayesian classifier that detects the risk of contributors leaving the
project. Our analysis opens new perspectives for measuring online
contributor motivation by means of sentiment analysis and for real-time
predictions of contributor turnover in Open Source Software projects.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3612

Merry reading,
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hasufell | 17 Jun 2013 20:46
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Questions for Candidates (was: Questioning/Interviewing council nominees)

Ok, so we have a seperate thread for this.

Anybody who cares can pose a question with context to the current
council election.

Candidates don't need to answer.

For the previous quetions/answers see the subthread
"Questioning/Interviewing council nominees" of "Council nominations".
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William Hubbs | 17 Jun 2013 18:09
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Re: Introducing an optional files directory in the Portage tree with an embedded install condition and individual maintainers. (was Re: [gentoo-project] Proposal for add-on file utility (run after emerge update))

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 02:38:00PM +0100, Markos Chandras wrote:
> On 16 June 2013 23:02, Tom Wijsman <TomWij <at> gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:31:10 -0400
> > Rich Freeman <rich0 <at> gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> >> On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Tom Wijsman <TomWij <at> gentoo.org>
> >> wrote:
> >> > Either by denoting USE flags in USE as special _or_ introducing a
> >> > separate OUSE variable.
> >> >
> >> > They don't have to be "openrc", "cron", "systemd" but could be like
> >> > "init-scripts", "cron-files", "systemd-units"; to not collide with
> >> > any existing USE flags, if any.
> >> >
> >> > Do they start to depend on each other? Why?
> >>
> >> Bottom line is that in order to accomplish any of this we need to
> >> expand PMS to specify a syntax, implement this stuff in portage, and
> >> then start modifying all our ebuilds so that heaven-forbid you don't
> >> get an openrc script installed if you don't set USE=openrc.
> >>
> >> I don't think any of this is worth it for a one block text file.
> >
> 
> I believe this proposal aims to workaround the "we can't work
> together" problem than actually providing
> real benefit to the way we maintain packages.

Yes, it sounds that way to me as well. We really need to find ways to
work together/compromise instead of using proposals like this one to get
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Robin H. Johnson | 16 Jun 2013 23:21
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Gentoo: growing pains & the future.

(Please reply on the gentoo-project list, I have set the Reply-To header
for this mail appropriately).

===
TL;DR: 
- Does GLEP39 still serve all the needs of Gentoo? Devrel useful?
- How to improve ourselves as a distribution (technical) and as people
  (personal interactions)?
- Would EVERY developer please start acting professionally in all fora?
===

I would like us to thank (and remember those no longer with us) all of
the past trustees and council members (a near-complete list is included
as footnote [9]), for what they have done to try and grow the
distribution.

Regardless of whoever who decides to run for council and trustees this
year, I would like to ask developers and foundation members to look at
the history of Gentoo, prior councils and prior trustees, and ask
themselves: 
What value does the distribution, Council, and Trustees provide to you?
Why they are voting for any given candidate; is this the best for the
future of Gentoo, or does it really even matter?

Of candidates: Is it because of their technical prowess; ability to
reach compromises; they can manage people well; possibly because you
simply like or respect them; or because they're a hothead and you want
to shake things up?  Regardless of why you pick them, all of the above
are things they may have to do on the council and trustees.
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Alexander Berntsen | 16 Jun 2013 19:16

(unknown)


--

-- 
Alexander
alexander <at> plaimi.net
http://plaimi.net/~alexander
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Ryan Hill | 16 Jun 2013 04:17
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Council nominations

I think nominations are open now, so I will nominate Rich Freeman, Petteri
Räty, Ulrich Mueller, Samuli Suominen, Robin H. Johnson, Mike Frysinger, and
Michał Górny in no particular order.

--

-- 
Ryan Hill                        psn: dirtyepic_sk
   gcc-porting/toolchain/wxwidgets  <at>  gentoo.org

47C3 6D62 4864 0E49 8E9E  7F92 ED38 BD49 957A 8463
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Andreas K. Huettel | 15 Jun 2013 13:50
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Gentoo as a team effort


Is Gentoo really a loose association of individualists who care about nothing 
but their own stuff, and give a $(/%& about users or the distribution as a 
whole?

Because that's the impression I recently get on the mailing list, and I'm not 
really sure if it's worthwhile putting any more effort into it then.

<troll mode>
Maybe we should just discontinue any "Gentoo" branding, focus on the meta-
distribution side, and tell users "Yes there are a lot of excellent 
derivatives of our work, where things actually work together. You should 
install Sabayon, Funtoo, Exherbo, Pentoo, or whatever scratches your itch. 
They are based on (not "our work" but) the excellent work of our developers. 
Gentoo? Nah. That's just the raw package base. Don't use it directly."
</troll mode>

--

-- 

Andreas K. Huettel
Gentoo Linux developer 
dilfridge <at> gentoo.org
http://www.akhuettel.de/
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Rick "Zero_Chaos" Farina | 14 Jun 2013 17:55
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Re: Council: Policy for Systemd units


On 06/14/2013 11:24 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn
> <chithanh <at> gentoo.org> wrote:
>> I was always under the general impression that a maintainer is free to
>> do whatever he likes with his package within policy. When p.mask'ed even
>> outside policy to some degree. If you disagree with how a package is
>> maintained, you are welcome to fork the ebuild and do it better.
> 
> Sure, but there is more than one maintainer - the original one, and
> the one who signed up because the original one was being stubborn.
> They're both welcome to do whatever they want within policy.  However,
> the users don't exactly benefit from daily revision wars.
> 
> Maintainers don't have the right to exclude others from also being
> maintainers, and when they do become maintainers they have all the
> rights the original maintainer had.  Nobody owns a package.

Actually they do.  I've been removed from metadata.xml multiple times
from different packages.  Or was something unfair happening?

Personally I think it's bull, but it seems to be status quo and unless
there is an official policy stating otherwise....

-Zero

> 
> Bottom line is that bad things happen when developers become stubborn
> and don't cooperate.  However, the fact that maintainers aren't
> cooperating isn't a reason to delay progress.  You can't give every
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Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto | 14 Jun 2013 05:33
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Gentoo Council 2013/2014 election


Dear Gentoo Community,

Nominations for the Gentoo Council 2013/2014 will start at 00:00 UTC
2013/06/15 (Saturday) and will remain open for the next two weeks
until 23:59 UTC, 2013/06/28 (Friday).

All nominations must be sent to the gentoo-project mailing list. If you
were nominated and want to run, you have to accept your nomination on
the same mailing list.

Here are the rules:

    * Council elections generally happen once a year
    * The council is composed of seven elected members
    * Nominations are allowed from June 15th 00H00 UTC to June 28th
23H59 UTC
    * Only Gentoo developers may be nominated
    * Anyone can nominate (nominating yourself is OK)
    * Nominees must accept their nomination before voting begins
    * Voting is opened from June 30th 00H00 UTC to July 13th 23H59 UTC
      (there is one day of break between nominations and voting so the
infra team has time to set up everything)
    * Only Gentoo developers may vote
    * The list of Gentoo Developers will be based on active membership
by June 14th, 2013 (the day before the election will be opened)
    * Gentoo uses the Condorcet method of voting
    * Results should be published around July 15th

The page listing all nominations will be available at:
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