Res: Open Letter: Why I, Kevin Kofler, am not rerunning for FESCo

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 07:02:23PM -0700, Henrique Junior wrote:
>    Unfortunately, what I have seen over time is that Fedora is changing to
>    something that worries me and that is getting less fun to contribute. I
>    remember the time when I liked to say that fedora was the "voice of the
>    community".

It's important for individual contributors to have fun, but it's also 
worth remembering that one person's fun can cause inconvenience to 
others.[1] We have rules about ABI breaks because we don't want one 
maintainer to be able to cause distruption that results in several other 
people having to spend time cleaning up after them. Maybe that's less 
fun for the library maintainer, but it means that others have less fun 
overall.

The stable packages work is an extension of this. Even if we, as 
maintainers, have plenty of fun, that's pretty easily wiped out if even 
a small proportion of our users have to spend time fixing a system that 
a stable update has broken. And without users who enjoy using and 
talking about Fedora, the entire exercise is pointless. Fesco isn't 
introducing rules because it wants our developers to become rule-bound 
drones, but because it wants our developers to actually be able to see 
people using what those developers produce and interact with a community 
of people who *use* Fedora, not just people who develop it. Personally, 
I think it's reasonable to ask developers to do slightly more work if it 
means our users have to do significantly less.

[1] And I appreciate that I made a mistake with hal-storage in this 
cycle that caused inconvenience for people maintaining other spins, so 
I'm not going to claim any kind of perfection in this area

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org