[arch-general] Fwd: A plea for communication from Arch devs & maintainers

[Sam Mulvey]

On 11/3/21 12:27, Archange wrote:
> Thanks Jonas, you wrote the mail I wanted to sent. :)

Yet you said it again.

It took two people with an official email address to tell me how wrong I 
am.  This is such a perfect example of the problem that it kind of 
hurts.   There's a word I've been trying to avoid using, because it's 
pretty semantically weighted: gatekeeping.

Let me cut out the bits here that communicate it, in order:

> I’d like to emphasize that contributions are welcome
You want my help.

> as long as they are not trivial changes that don’t bring value. 
But only if it meets a vague standard set by individual maintainers.

> this is also a way to get yourself known by dev/TUs
But I also have to *know the right people*.  Yikes.

That said, not all gatekeeping is horrible.   Arch says right on the tin 
that it has technical knowledge requirements to play ball.   I get 
that.  I also run a volunteer organization with technical requirements 
to fully participate.  But what that meant to us is that we had to spend 
a lot of thought avoiding using that gate as a way to support other, 
less worthwhile gates[1].

It doesn't feel like Arch is spending time on that, so:

> All that being said, we certainly do lack human resources

Sometimes I really feel like I should give back, but it looks like a 
damn long walk and I have other things I could do.   So I'm glad for 
(and grateful to) the people who find that walk a lot less onerous than 
I.  I sometimes worry how many other people like me are out there.   If 
it becomes too many, the distribution kind of stops being a 
distribution.   So here I am, managing three packages in AUR and 
blathering about gatekeeping and social domain problems of a Linux 
distribution.


> *: Although quite an extreme example by the amount of changes versus 
> the amount of the maintainer available free time (me), it took me 
> roughly a year to have enough of it to look deeply into vtk9 changes, 
> package the dependencies, solve multiple issues (including several PR 
> in different upstream projects). While a vtk9 package was available in 
> the AUR, it did not provide most of the features, and certainly did 
> not take into account several of the issues we had while rebuilding 
> dependent packages. I was asked several times by people why I did not 
> bump yet, I explained the issue and how people could help, but then it 
> seems people realized this was difficult because I did not get further 
> answers.

I'm really not unsympathetic to this.  GNOME is wacky, audacity is 
broken, blender was stonking huge the last time I had to care about it, 
and packaging python stuff is space magic to me since I don't use it, 
but exactly: extreme example.  For every "my partner needs OBS to do 
horrible thing X" there were a an order of magnitude more packages that 
were done by incrementing a number in vim and then generating new checksums.

Feeling a bit preachy[2] so I'm going to bow out here.   I'll say it 
again: you all do good work, and it is appreciated.   If you'd like to 
talk to me further, I'm pretty easy to find.

-Sam

[1]: I'd love to tell you what we're working on, but we're a project 
that is perforce local so we can do things that an international project 
like Arch would find difficult.

[2]: Which is kind of ironic, really.