Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (930 mails)

[Per Jessen <per@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pascal Bleser wrote:

> On Saturday 19 June 2010 00:51:48 Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Jun 2010, Per Jessen wrote:
> > > Well, the strategy that Novell has been pursuing wrt openSUSE, is
> > > IMHO, "let's throw the baby in the water and see if it swims".
> >
> > I beg to disagree.  Looking at how much Novell is investing into
> > openSUSE this analogy just is not right.  If anything, we jointly
> > want to grow openSUSE (which is far from a baby ;-) and see it
> > develop, and as appropriate float, dive, or fly elegantly. :-)
>
> It certainly wasn't as extreme as Per wrote, by any means (at least
> IMHO), but there is something to that nevertheless.

It certainly was not as extreme as my description, but when you're using
an analogy, likeness is more important than accuracy.
It's probably a moot point now, but to rephrase - the "baby" was not
_intentionally_ throw into the water, it just happened - afterwards
lots of people gathered round to see what was happening, everybody
expecting everybody else to jump in and help the baby.

> It wasn't intentional, but as things went, and as I explained in my
> previous post on the thread, there wasn't much of a mentoring (or call
> it "hand- holding") to prepare especially the
> non-novell-employee-part-of-the-community to take a more active role
> in certain domains (such as helping out with maintenance, maintaining
> factory, with security, testing, build service development, YaST2
> development, etc...). Maybe I'm wrong on certain of those items (I
> know that we planned some sort of team building and mentoring for
> maintenance, we discussed it around a table at the last openSUSE
> conference with Dirk ;D), but I'm sure of at least a few of them.
>
> No blame nor harsh feelings intended. In hindsight, there was a bit of
> a lack of process and organised training/handholding/mentoring in
> order to gain more contributors in certain areas. One cannot just say
> it's open for contributors and "throw" it out without taking care of
> many other things (documentation, architecture description, being
> available (a lot), organise hacking sessions, or even start out the
> whole project in an open discussion and process). Which is why I wrote
> that it's really unfair to say that "the community must step up to the
> plate". (and, of course, it's always easier to see what should/could
> have been done better in hindsight, which is why no one is to blame
> :))

20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing indeed, yes.

> > > Perhaps we're now getting a chance to rectify that.
> > What do you have in mind?
>
> I think we're starting to see more motivation to actively and
> realistically do something to find and involve more contributors in
> certain areas. Most of those are still just merely starting to form,
> but I think we're going to get there. Maybe that's what Per meant :)

Exactly. Thanks for sorting out my ramblings. 



-- 
Per Jessen, Zürich (11.2°C)

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