[Sussex] Gentoo forked...

[Geoffrey Teale]

Steve Dobson wrote:
<snippage>

>>While the may cut down on the amount of spam read by the developers (a good
>>thing) it cuts you off from ideas from outside the list (which is bad).
>>Okay so you could post to one of the open forums, but which one?  Which one
>>it the developer I need to target reading (if any)?
>
The developers responsible are available seperately and the information 
on how to contact them is publically available.  There are _other_ more 
general lists and every aspect of Gentoo has a forum on which the 
developers are active.

If you are an accepted Gentoo developer then you will be on the 
developers list anyway.  Just as Debian has a web of trust, so to does 
Gentoo.  What this boils down to is that non-developers can't post their 
ideas on that list - it doesn't meant that their ideas are ignored.


>While this may not be about secrecy but it is censorship, and _all_[1]
>censorship is bad.  The restriction implies that only some developers' views
>are valid or worth reading.  Good ideas can come from anywhere, and by
>blocking
>views in this way Gentoo is restricting itself from "getting the right[tm]
>answer"
>
Steve, I'm afraid that if this is the case then Debian is equally (if 
not more so) at fault (see below).

It implies that _all_ developers view are worth reading, but that the 
communication between developers would be inhibited by constant streams 
of support questions and opion pieces which are better served 
elsewhere.  If you accept that maintenance of the Portage Tree is not 
something that is open to the General public (ie. you have to be a 
"Gentoo Developer" to do this") then why should the administrative 
discussion be open to  public submission?

Apart from anything else how on earth does this mailing lists existence 
differ from the existance of the debian-private mailing list ( 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-private/ ) ?  It covers the same ground 
and if anything is _more_ open than debian-private because the general 
public can at least see what is going on.

-- 
GJT
gteale at cmedltd.com