Pascal, personally I have no frustrations related to opensuse... I would be an hypocrite to say opensuse does not fulfil my needs or fulfils them 100%. The role, I agree minimal, that I have at the moment it is a personal choice, I do not want to be anything I cannot afford to be. My post wanted to be an opener for a serious discussion on the strategy of opensuse. Mainly, a clear separation between feature decision and feature execution. I can give you specifically examples when this separation failed... but I leave it at a general level, as we are not in a witch hunting contest. Meritocracy and professionalism are vague concepts, big words in some philosophical contexts, in practise I am afraid are difficult to define, except environments which are orthogonal with the opensource one. All projects that want to be open, in my opinion should erase from their dictionaries these two... Alin On Fri 12 Nov 2010 00:55:07 you wrote:

On 2010-11-09 11:25:02 (+0000), Alin Marin Elena <alinm.elena@gmail.com> wrote:

...

If we try to differentiate ourselves from other linux distros, in my opinion, we should try to be a real community distro... A place where ideas are assest independent of whom emanetes them... and where coders, packagers lend their skills to the community and they are not the drivers of what goes in...

That sounds quite a bit offensive. What is your gripe here ? You feel underrepresented because you're not a packager ?

"What goes in" seems to specifically target the distribution. Well, a distribution is mostly a set of packages, where packaging represents 80-90% of the work that has to be done to create it in the first place. (then you have testers/reporters, documentation, translations, etc..., of course -- I'd be the last to tone down any contribution, whatever domain it is) And in that perspective, the packagers are doing the packaging and, hence, are influencing what goes into the distro. (the final decision is with Coolo though, luckily :))

On a side note, I don't think you will find any other Linux distribution project where it is as easy to get a packager do the work for you. It has been numerous times where people have come around on #packman, on #suse, on #opensuse-buildservice, or on mailing-lists, have asked whether someone could take care of packaging X or Y, and it was done swiftly.

...

A place where your idea is rubbish cause you never commited code, you never packaged something...

I don't understand why you sound so frustrated. Where did that happen ?

We definitely are a group of people who value contributions, whatever contribution it is, be it packaging, writing software, marketing, serving on the board, running the elections, writing blog posts, artwork, writing documentation, making translations, helping people out on mailing-lists, forums and IRC, etc etc etc ...

And we are very, _very_ unbureaucratic compared to most other major distributions, that's for sure.

But a FOSS project like this one should and will remain a meritocracy. Anything else is doomed to fail, because that is one of the main reasons why people actually spend their free time for 0 bucks on something like this.

You do great stuff (in whatever domain), you spend a lot of energy and time, you deserve credit. It's that simple really. And the complete opposite of corporate environments ;)

cheers -- I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. -- Marcel Duchamp Without Questions there are no Answers!

Alin Marin ELENA Advanced Molecular Simulation Research Laboratory School of Physics, University College Dublin ---- Ardionsamblú Móilíneach Saotharlann Taighde Scoil na Fisice, An Coláiste Ollscoile, Baile Átha Cliath ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Address: Room 318, UCD Engineering and Material Science Centre University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://alin.elenaworld.net alin.elena@ucdconnect.ie, alinm.elena@gmail.com ______________________________________________________________________ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org