On Monday, 9 January 2017 10:40 Richard Brown wrote:
We've seen this for years Coolo, and it leads to serious problems; Paralysis while willing contributors wait for a decision that may never come; Potential contributors scared away from contributing because they think they need to ask permission or gather a broad consensus from lots of scary established contributors like us; These are not problems we can afford to ignore.
I'm afraid the problem of openSUSE is exactly the opposite these days. People pushing controversial changes without asking anyone and in fact even encouraged to do so as anyone opposing the change is labelled an enemy of the progress and silenced with "those who do, decide".
But the mindset that consensus must come first is toxic to the long term health of a project like openSUSE.
I don't agree. That mindset is what would be necessary to avoid the chaos and constant breaking of things in the name of "progress". Not every change is good and not every change is progress.
Someone "doing" and then someone else "undoing" is, by definition, contributors pushing in two different directions. In such cases, yes, I agree with you. Consensus is important and discussion is absolutely necessary.
That doesn't really happen. Under current project mindset, "undoing" would be automatically (with exception of fixes for obvious regressions) seen as going against the evolution and frown upon. Most often, people don't even dare to revert the changes as they see it as futile in the environment we ended up with and mindset you helped to establish (the one you advocate for here).
We need people to feel they are empowered to contribute, and do so with as few barriers in the way. Getting broad support for their change is one such barrier, and most of the time other people don't care about the new contributors change anyway. As a mature project we have enough checks and balances to ensure it doesn't decend into anarchy.
I wanted to write this in response to your previous mail but then I discarded the mail instead to avoid another flame. Now I feel it needs to be said even if it contradicts current openSUSE development doctrine: when changing important things, first question should always be "if", not "when", "how" or "who".
When discussion is needed, in any venue, but particularly the mailinglists there is also the additional issue of the "peanut gallery" [1] We have lots of non-contributors who have an opinion and are very happy to share it, but they are not willing or able to do anything to turn their opinion into reality. Their opinions are not necessarily invalid and shouldn't necessarily be ignored, but they often include strongly held concerns based on theory and speculation rather than reality.
And fear of that brought us to environment where voice of users who do not contribute enough is called a noise and ignored as not worthy taking seriously. To distribution of "contributors for themselves" type with user base reflecting this attitude. I don't say that every voice should have the same weight; but simply dismissing majority of users as "peanut gallery" and their opinions as not worthy considering, that's something I would call toxic. Anyway I'm definitely one of those who do not contribute enough so feel free to dismiss this as well. Michal Kubeček -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org