Re: [Gnu-arch-users] horses and carts

[Miles Bader]

On 2/4/06, Thomas Lord <address@hidden> wrote:
> So far, most of what I have by way of answer to what people think
> of that question is that many people think my job as maintainer
> was to make the project look more like (in superficial terms)
> the handful of projects that are well supported by corporations.

Well personally the #1 thing which I found annoying about arch
"project management" was the perception (and I dunno, maybe it was
more this than a reality) that any change I made would end up just
getting dropped on the floor eventually.   When you're actively
engaged, anarchy might be exhilarating and fertile, but too much of it
just gets depressing.

E.g. (just to state the obvious):

  + Endless bickering over every potential change.  Running the
gauntlet of mailing list opinion is useful if the responders are
clueful and reasonable [see the LKML for an example of this], but
harmful if they are bozos; the arch MLs had some of both (as I guess
is more typical of free software development lists; emacs-devel).  A
maintainer obviously isn't to blame for this, but can keep a handle on
it by making timely decisions to cut short "debate" at some point
(early if it's a stupid bickerfest, late if it's a useful discussion)

  + The lack of a clear canonical source branch.  I was never quite
sure; Tom, you had multiple branches and archives here and there, and
things just sort of drifted around, and there were other people's
branches which at times seemed to be "official" but then later on
turned out not to be, and etc. etc.  Maybe it's now one of Andy's
branches on savannah -- though for whatever reason this archive is
called "address@hidden" instead of using the canonical savannah
arch naming scheme address@hidden, and even _that_ makes me a
bit nervous... :-).

  + Accepting changes in a timely manner.  Things were all over the
place here.  For Tom's branches, much of that was due to personal
issues I guess.

I don't know if these things "look like a corporate project" (well,
who cares?).  It does seem like, unless a project has an unusually
gifted group of developers, it _really_ helps to have a bit of a
benevolent dictator to keep a reign on the chaos.  The problem with
corporations of course is that while they're good at the
"dictatorship" part, they're not always so good at the "benevolent"
part... :-)

-miles
--
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.