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 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 :))
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 :)
cheers
--
-o) Pascal Bleser