Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Why are we here?

[Andy Tai]

Tom, it is much easier to hook few mind-alike horses together and make
them move rather than tying many together to get them move  in the
same direction.  So in light of the shortcomings of the current
implementation that even you agree with (such as for the storage format
that you now think the git approach is more correct) my goal of keeping
Arch 1 alive is an rather easy task.  

Yes, there is much more potential in wiring up more horses, but in a
way that is up to you... for example, for the documentation part,
whether the efforts should be spent on the 2.0 version or the 1.x
version.

And if there are new volunteers, what do they do?  Work on 2.0? 

If you want to see a push for 2.0, you may need to be more active in
advancing the 2.0 implementation further to make it easier for other
people to contribute.  You did that for 1.x so it become easy for
other people to contribute, to take it and run (and fork... etc.)

Also the horses will always run in different directions, and you cannot
expect them to run all in one direction.  The best thing is that
you can extract maximum energy from the horses on the direction you
want to go; but you always need to expect degrees of chaos.

So the question really needs to be partly answered by you, and you need
to make it share much in common with the purposes of the people with
all different kinds of goals as you listed.

On 2/3/06, Thomas Lord <address@hidden> wrote:

On the other hand, the horses can be tied scatter-shot to the carriage
so that they pull in multiple contradictory directions at once.  In this
case we make only random progress, at best, and more likely just rip
the carriage to pieces.   This is more or less the state we arrived at
recently.

Andy is doing very well, imo.  He's hooked some of those horses up to
one of the fragments of the cart and is making progress for the GNU
project and for a few who like to use the GNU releases.  My perception,
though, is that the potential is far greater than what we are
experiencing.   A good example is how the recent discussions about
fixing up the documentation pretty much died as soon as the suggestion
to organize volunteers in that direction came up.

Maybe part of the problem is that we don't have a clear purpose -- a
unifying belief in what we are doing.   We don't have a clear statement
that we can use to recruit new volunteers --- a statement that might
have the logical form "Join this project if you want to help us do
_______".   We have only the empty circular way of filling in that
blank "help the Arch project".

If we were a corporation rather than a public project this question
would still be important but it would be far easier to answer.  We
would have a charter, a legal structure, a governance structure, a
budget, and objective metrics by which to measure key elements of
success.

But we are in new territory and part of a new mode of social
organization.   We are at the bleeding edge (and wounded) of
free software development and open source public projects.

There is no law here, in this new territory.   Just us folks.
Shall we civilize?   I ask again:

        Why are we here?

Thoughts?

-t




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