Hi Mike, [ This mail is meant as a general statement, not focused on the mirror patch which seems to have triggered Mike's mail ] On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 21:20:09 +0300, Mikhail Kolesnik wrote:
On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:19:58 +0200 Mark Rosenstand <mark@borkware.net> wrote:
How about fixing this issue once and for all and mirror all the core/opt distfiles somewhere central and doing wget || in pkgmk, perhaps making the mirror configurable? (Or even better, use a simple user-defined function instead of hardcoding wget + arguments in pkgmk...)
Seems, CRUX's usability suffers sometimes from features unimplemented because of lack of direct interest from main developers. Well, CRUX is developed by this group of people, and in the end, they get to decide what's going in and what's not, because they will have to
[quotation reordered] maintain it. This is how most (if not all?) volunteer projects work. If an idea is well thought out, fixes a general problem and doesn't simply trade in one problem for another, we're certainly willing to discuss it (well, speaking for myself only). However, we only want to change things for the right reasons, not for the sake of change or because $OTHERDISTRO does it that way. Often, omitting features is a design decision, not something we "don't have yet". That said, the presentation of an idea matters a lot, and unfortunately we've been feeling a lot of "us against them" kind of mentality on the mailing lists (yours kinda goes in the same direction, although you probably had only good intentions) and non-constructive complaining, which is rather frustrating for us the (volunteer) developers. At least in my case, this is probably the main reason for the lack of interest in certain people's work; "show no respect, get none in return" holds true in our community just like everywhere else. Counter examples show that things can work well when presented properly: Mark's udev patch which was merged within ~2 weeks, or your networking suggestions which were added to the change list for the next release, and ports for it are already being tested.
I am sure, you've seen the last message in "[crux-devel] CRUX sources" thread. We can find a few more reasons and re-invent a few more patches (algorithms)... However, if a concept has been discussed before, and dismissed as inadequately or better kept as an optional feature, repeating it over and over on crux-devel@ and crux@ without reacting to the concerns usually doesn't help and plainly annoys the developers. You can't talk a feature in, trying to do that usually has the opposite effect.
(This is pretty much what happened in the "CRUX sources" thread you mentioned)
Hope, 'Better team organization' will improve the feature requests/patches submission mechanisms. Independently from the any reorganization, any respected member of the community making modest requests will certainly get a fair discussion about his ideas, especially if he's willing to cooperate; it's been this way in the past, and will be in the future. In exchange, we reserve the right to disagree, and not include a feature if we think it doesn't fit or may as well be optional.
So, that's gotten rather lengthy, however I felt compelled to express this since it's been bothering me for a while already. I hope we can make something positive out of this and, since in the end all we all want is a good linux distribution, right? Regards, Johannes -- Johannes Winkelmann mailto:jw@smts.ch Zurich, Switzerland http://jw.smts.ch