Looking at my environment, global warming seems to get more and more noticeable. Not only because we had one of the warmest autumns this year, where you could actually still go (sun-)bathing, but also because people seem to be everything else but cool.
When I joined Gentoo, I was shocked how many arguments there were between Gentoo developers on the -core mailing list. One told me that it always was like that and that it’s hard to ever change that. “You’ll get used to it.” some embittered devs told me. They were right, i got used to it. But still, after a bit more than a year, I’m shocked how fast people can get aggressive, how little is needed to make everybody throw slum at each other. Instead of beeing technical, people get personal, instead of staying on-topic, they start to discuss absolutely unrelated things like how one does have to understand the terms ‘open source’ and what the difference is between free software and open source software.
I’ve never posted much to -core, as I always hated it. Sometimes more, sometimes less. At the moment, there’s nothing I could think of which I hate more, except drip coffee. When reading -core, it rather reminds me of a talk show than of a mailing list where technical issues are discussed in an appropriate manner.
What I find very irritating is, that on other mailing lists, devs usually are friendly, stay on-topic and don’t get personal. Why is this? Is it because -core isn’t public? It looks like some people do know what good manners are, but only use them in public. I really wonder whether these people fart when eating at home too, just because there’s nobody looking at them.
There is evidence that Gentoo is slowly falling apart. If you don’t think so, just have a look at the project listing. Gentoo is cut apart in all kinds of projects, which don’t really interact. To be honest, I know nearly nothing about other projects and their environment.
Another point is, that we can’t trust each other anymore. Gentoo is far too big to be a family, it’s probably rather a corporate group. None of both is bad per-se, but it’s definitively bad when you want to be a big family, but are a corporate group. What can we do about it? First, people should probably ask themselves “do I really care?” when replying to a thread. Second, people should ask themselves “do I know the context of the problem?” If both questions can be answered with ‘yes’ without hesitation, then go send your mail. I think that would massively improve the signal/noise ratio on lists like -core or -dev.
Another, probably easier solution would be to split the general mailing lists. That way, people would have to subscribe themselves to a specific mailing list, before suggesting ideas that don’t affect themselves but do affect other people. I still can’t understand why MIPS devs ‘ask that the amd64 and x86 keywords are merged to improve the quality of the x86 tree’ on a huge mailing list without first talking to the people will have to bear the consequences afterwards. Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t find this very smart.
The above is just one example out of thousands. Are we unable to communicate accurate? It seems so. What can we do about it? I don’t know, beside stopping to communicate at all.
Interestingly, the same problem seems to affect user<->developer communication as well. A very nice example is this one: http://gentoo-stats.org/. But that’s by far not the only one. Again, just one example out of thousands.
Before writing this blog entry I thought about retiring as a dev. But still, I don’t feel bitter enough to do so. So I just continue to try to ignore all these problems, since I don’t know a solution to them.
