This is going OT, considering my comments are limited to the specific problem. Anyway, you asked and I'll reply. My contributions in the past are out there: I report bugs regularly, I translated two releases and I'm involved on suseitalia. Currently I have two active proposals, one almost completed (Geeko wants you!), which can't be completed because no team sent me a single line containing tasks to add to the web page. What is present on that page is extracted by the previous task page, with one single addition done by the GNOME team. Honestly, I cannot invent the activities to fill the pages. If Novell wants help, they should work with us. It takes one email and ten minutes of time. The other initiative is the creation of the testing team, which is waiting an answer from Novell to know in detail what the existing infrastructure is. So I would not say I only complain, but that I complain a lot, and the reason is simple: I'm interested in having a good openSUSE. If the price to pay is being unpopular because I point the finger where I think there is a problem, well, it's not that bad. To go back to the discussion on contributions, if you expect people to contribute, you need to empower them to do so, at all levels. You need to fix defined goals, and create an environment where these goals can be reached. And you need to be transparent, and stop taking decisions that affects the community behind closed doors. Novell has to fix a direction for the project, and to provide the tools for others to contribute. Once this is done, and only then, Novell will have the right to judge our contributions. You cannot really expect these things to be done automagically by the community itself, with the too abused answer "do it yourself". OpenSUSE community is intrinsically different from other communities: we don't use distributions like Debian for a reason. But this doesn't mean we don't want to contribute, if contributing means investing a reasonable amount of time and effort to help and enjoy the results. If the results do not come, with rushed releases as it happened in the past, and hopefully won't happen in the future thanks to the new release schedules, if the amount of time and effort we invest is wasted in following procedures and using tools not suitable for community use, in waiting for answers that don't come for various reasons, or in trying to build something which is of no interests for others and nobody simply says that in all honesty, well, you won't see many contributions. To conclude, this is constructive criticism. Solutions were proposed for many of the problems we have, some by me, some by others. Some were also discussed in endless threads on the mailing lists, but not much changed, and we are always here, with the _same_ complaints and the same problems. Specifically on the XEN issue, I don't see what kind of constructive criticism you can expect when you say that Novell implemented something "too new" to work on Amazon EC2, when other distributions, with less resources than Novell are actually making it work. My original point is quite simple: why didn't Novell keep working verision of Xen for that application, while developing and implementing the newest one as other did? It doesn't seem such horrible and unconstructive criticism to me, but a simple and rational consideration. Regards, A. Il giorno mar, 31/03/2009 alle 10.28 -0600, Stephen Shaw ha scritto:
What are you doing to help? Other than complaining? There is a difference between constructive criticism and just being annoying.
Stephen
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