effective communication and effective free software

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Mon, 2011-06-13 at 13:35 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On 6/13/11 12:18 PM, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> 
> > Sloppy attitude like this is the reason just about any daemon
> > (more and more of which pop up like mushrooms in every new release,
> > I must add) eats at least a few megabytes of RAM.
> 
> I'd have more empathy for your position if you'd made even a cursory 
> investigation into what that memory was being used for.
> 
> To be clear, this is an observation about how you're presenting your 
> argument.  The original post reads mostly as "this looks like it's doing 
> too much, because of these things that I don't understand but I just 
> _know_ they're not necessary,

Yes, this is essentially correct.


> so obviously this is all crap and everyone 
> who's working on it should be ashamed".

To be sure, I reviewed my mail which started the thread.
I didn't say anything like that.


> Would you rather make a good OS, or have internet arguments about why 
> we're making a bad OS?

Well, I would like to do something which will make future Fedora
releases to go into better direction than F15 went.

Of course I want to make a good OS. It's not that easy though, because
OS can't be written by one person, therefore we need to work together,
and different people have different ideas what is good. Worse still,
"computer guys" in general (me included) are not masters of
communication...


> If you approach a project by saying "I've found that we're burning a lot 
> of memory here, and I don't quite understand why, but it seems to be 
> related to the frobnitz component", that's productive.  It shows that 
> you're concerned with quality, and that you've put some effort into 
> understanding how things are already structured, even if you don't have 
> a solution.  It's a sign that you have some skin in the game (apologies 
> if that idiom doesn't translate well).

You are right. However, I can participate in only so much open source
projects before my day stops fitting into 24 hours.

Should I not comment at all on any projects where I don't have time to
become a contributor?


> Instead, when you say things like:
> 
> > It's quite pathetic, really. You can easily tell which software
> > was developed earlier just by looking at its memory usage.
> 
> ... the message is that you're not, in fact, invested, that you're 
> perfectly happy to just switch back to twm because you don't need all 
> that fancy stuff.

I am not really that far in geek field to go back to using software from
1980s. I do think that progress is needed.

How can I express a point "the software becomes more bloated in general
and I think it's wrong"?

The options which you seem to advocate is to spend three weeks digging
in the sources of dozens of projects and present my findings where
exactly it happens. There is a few problems with it:

One, it is far too time-consuming. I do have more useful things to do, I
really do. For one, I can work on fixing one of 40+ open bugs in *my*
project.

Second, no one would listen. I know it *because it was already done*.
My colleague Jaroslav Reznik tells me a story about a guy who spend lots
of time investigating and prepared a presentation "Why KDE is bloated"
where he did exactly that: presented concrete examples where KDE fumbles
badly on memory consumption front. Guess what: a few years later the
presentation is still relevant, because KDE people did not act on the
data.

So yes, you are right that most likely Lennart will simply ignore
everything I say.

I disagree, though, that being extra nice and/or investing more time
into deeply investigating systemd code and trying to become a
co-developer would meaningfully change the outcome. I tried this several
times with various projects. I know when it makes sense to do it, and
this is not such case.

-- 
vda