On 05/10/2012 01:58 PM, Pascal Bleser wrote: [snip]
Where we fail monumentally though, as so many projects, is in communication.
Who has skills and experience in certain domains and can contribute something to a topic ?
How do we keep people informed about the discussions that are happening so they get a change to weigh in if they can contribute something (too many tools, too many lists, unfriendly tone) ?
Yes, I agree, keeping people informed is a problem. There are basically only two options: a.) Develop a plan for feature/change X with people at large b.) Describe the plan for feature/change X after the fact Option a.) - We develop some high level plan of features/changes we want in the project, distribution, tools, etc. and someone writes a rough design and implementation outline, things are rather vague at this point. This then gets posted and people can discuss and sign up to contribute work to the specific feature/change. The plan is developed by a large group of contributors in the open. Option b.) - A contributor or small team of contributors decide what they want to do and then come back and say "this is what I am/we are going to do". The plan is basically complete and is completely developed by the individual contributor or the small team. Input by a large group (community at large) is still valued but a "start from scratch" suggestion would certainly be discarded. I have my own opinion about what could and could not work, but I'll keep that to myself, for now.
That is, how to actually *reach out* for other, qualified people's opinions: if we want the better technical solutions, the better quality then that is what we must do, and what we have to want.
Back to communication, and broadcasting information, and talking/blogging about what you're doing.
Not everyone wants that, some just want to hack whatever they want the way they want, especially if that's how they've always worked (tunnel vision),
This is a big problem for certain parts of the distro and not for other areas. If someone with tunnel vision just works away on keeping so called leaf packages up to date, great. We probably do not need much of a plan or much communication about this. For changes like the introduction of systemd in 12.1, switching to grub2 for 12.2, the Plymouth integration, etc. communication is absolutely necessary and critical. (I am NOT saying there has been no communication for these examples, there has been.) Question is, was there a sufficient plan for these projects or was it more or less adhoc. For projects like these, if we have people with tunnel vision working on the nuts and bolts, we should at least make an effort and try to find a "communicator" to partner with the tunnel vision worker bee.
and if those people in the openSUSE community are just clueless noobs and death-by-bikeshedding trolls, right? (Yes, I'm being ironic.)
Unfortunately we have plenty of bikeshedding even on technical issues, see the systemd discussion from last year, and I think we just have to be more aggressive in trying to suppress it. Going back to the original message that spawned this thread I stick with what I said originally, most of it is a theoretical argument, it is an invitation to bikeshedding, and the message itself should probably not have been posted, at least not in the way it was presented. The blogs by Jos and Andreas send a completely different message than the mail that was sent to this list. The bottom line of the intention could have been summarized in a few sentences and should have not been tied to what's going on downstream in SLE at all. Anyway, yet another communication issue ;) Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org