[Sussex] Gentoo forked...

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff

On 27 June 2003 at 14:22 Geoffrey Teale wrote:
> >>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.

So the developers still trawl through public lists - no reduction of spam
reading.  That makes it an elitest policy to create a two class system:
the Gentoo developers and rest of us mortals.

<snap>

> >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?

But the value of a view is not known until you have read it.  You may
suspect
that a posting my "A Moron" isn't worth reading but you don't _know_ until
you read it.

What if one of the Debian developers monitored that list and saw a thread on
something that was already handled within Debian.  He can't post saying what
worked and didn't work.  He can help Gentoo avoid the Debian pitfalls.  As a
non-Gentoo developer he doesn't want to change Gentoo code, but that doesn't
mean that there shouldn't be cross polination of ideas between the two
distros.
Linux and FreeBSD often cross post!  What works well for FFS also helps
ext2/3.

> 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.

There are almost no technical discussions on that list.  95% of the postings
are: "I'm off to xxx on holiday - please maintain my package in my absence".
I wouldn't want to post that to a public list.  If some one does start a
technical discussion it is soon bounced to debian-devel.  Of course, as
you're not on that list you'll just have to take my word for it.

Steve