Begining of the end

After watching people fight some more in #gentoo-dev this afternoon, the question “Why the fuck do I bother to waste my time with a distribution that only wastes my time?” popped into my mind. I haven’t been able to find an answer yet. Sadly, this indicates the beginning of the end for me. I’m losing interest in anything gentoo at a fast rate. Just the thought of reading public gentoo mailing lists makes me physically ill. I want to vomit.

I still believe that most gentoo developers are good people. There are a lot of examples that can be pointed to to show that teamwork really does work. Unfortunately, people are now using trolling tactics to push their agenda. The recent “Paludis and Profiles” thread on the gentoo-dev mailing list is a perfect example.

So, to my fellow gentoo devs, I have the following 2 things to say:
1. Grow up. Fighting never solves anything.
2. Speak out about what you think is wrong. Don’t allow others to bully you around into accepting something that you don’t think is best for gentoo. You won’t always win your argument, but in the end gentoo will be a better place.

9 thoughts on “Begining of the end”

  1. From the guy who wanted to have the UK’s largest cable ISP banned from Gentoo infrastructure, that’s rather funny.

  2. Mike, I quite feel the same. I’m absent at the moment because I don’t have time to work on gentoo, but if I really wanted to, I could always squeeze a few minutes for gentoo…
    But thanks for writing this – there are just to many good people here to let this distribution fall apart

  3. Hi Mike… your words are just like mine i begin to feel a bit tired of this crap and every week is a new flamewar. My advice to those people is: get a life and have fun.

  4. I’m feeling the same way too but for some different reasons. I’m not a developer, but I’ve been trying to help out as much as I can. This weekend, I opened a bug report for an issue with a certain package only to have it closed with a comment to search and a reference to another package with a similar issue. While the referenced ticket still didn’t contain a solution, I decided not to reopen the bug and instead email the developer, only to be told NEVER TO EMAIL A DEVELOPER DIRECTLY FOR A BUG IN BUGZILLA and to search for a specific term.

    Make a long story short, I searched for the term, which found a couple of bugs related to my issue, all of which were closed with “Not a Gentoo issue” or referencing a ticket with a solution “This is a local problem. Not a Gentoo Issue”. In one bug, the developer actually put, something along the lines of It’s outside the scope of bug to explain why this is not a Gentoo issue.

    In any case, I’m feeling fedup also 🙁

  5. The developer may have been right, given that we don’t have time to diagnose all user errors — we don’t even have enough time to handle real bugs, and it is sometimes obvious when the user has filed a bug which is clearly a problem at the user end and not a bug. However if you are demotivated by their tone you should contact user relations to get this resolved.

  6. Maybe it’s time we remove the requirement that all devs need to be subscribed to the gentoo-dev mailing list. We have archives these days. I to usually lose my sanity when having to go anywhere near the dev mailing list and more so when a few special people are in anyway related to a given topic. None the less please hang in there bud, you are a good developer and I enjoy working with you.

  7. heh…

    I think we should have a mandatory personality test for developers to weed out abrasive personalities… employers do it… so should we.

  8. Heh… been considering moving to opensuse lately… might take more to join the community, but I feel like i’ve wasted years of my time lately… it really is bullshit

Comments are closed.