Archlinux Leadership

adlucem · 2008-05-05 09:23:39

As I understand it, JaDa's analysis is that, in the current state of affairs, it is hard to become a low-volume package manager. Thus Arch is losing some man power that is here, willing to help.
Making up "teams" could fill some of the hole.
He doesn't have an all encompassing solution, but (as I understand it) he thinks that's it's a question of organization, so he calls for a move from phrakture in this direction.

<rant> Besides Allan, who made any constructive contribution in response to the OP ? </rant (I kept it short)>
edit: and Sigi

Last edited by adlucem (2008-05-05 09:28:32)

iphitus · 2008-05-05 10:00:29

adlucem wrote:

As I understand it, JaDa's analysis is that, in the current state of affairs, it is hard to become a low-volume package manager. Thus Arch is losing some man power that is here, willing to help.
Making up "teams" could fill some of the hole.
He doesn't have an all encompassing solution, but (as I understand it) he thinks that's it's a question of organization, so he calls for a move from phrakture in this direction.

"teams" of who.

Making magical "teams" won't increase our manpower. Sounds like great fancy organisational theory, but it doesn't apply in the real world. Teams have been attempted/considered in the past with varying levels of success. These teams have to be made of people you know, and teaming existing developers won't magically increase their capabilities.

Further, how would these magical teams ensure that more packages are up to date? The concepts for these teams given have been "gnome team, kernel team, kde team, early boot team" -- all those areas are already maintained solidly. ClamAV and Wine still don't fit that model.

Like Cactus, im sick of seeing this stuff on the forums, especially as it's pretty much a load of crap.

I've been looking at some statistics of "outdated packages". The percentage of packages needing update idles around 10 percent, give or take a few percent.

Reading that number, consider:
* Large "groups" of packages like locales or gstreamer that tend to get marked and updated in a group and thus bloat the statistic
* Incorrectly marked out of date packages (users seem to like posting bug reports via the out of date facility, or marking things out of date even when they're not)
* Package updates intentionally withheld yet still marked (KDE3->4, buggy releases, kernel, unsuitable releases)
* Lower priority minor version bumps of packages

So the actual statistic is well and truly under 10%. Remember that the system is rolling, packages get updated daily, and packages get marked daily, and that's a pretty awesome statistic when you have > 2000 packages and 20 developers.

The system works. Sometimes packages creep through, but that's inevitable with any system.

Last edited by iphitus (2008-05-05 10:05:32)

finferflu · 2008-05-05 10:10:00

I've been around here for about 1 year. From what I can see, Arch has always been like that, nothing has changed lately, apart from a quite big influx of new users in the last few months. I believe what is changing is the perception of how the system works. But the system is not changing, it's steady and keeps going at the same pace as always.
Another thing that I perceive is a high level of generalisation: since some users find a couple of packages that are out of date, they argue that ALL packages need more maintenance. The effect is general panic and FUD, as far as I can see.

Things have been working fine in the past, and are still working fine (and are going in the right direction). The above stats seem to prove that. Usually by adding unnecessary complicacies one ends up destroying what was already good enough.

bangkok_manouel · 2008-05-05 10:15:44

iphitus wrote:

"teams" of who.

Teams of usmers of course.

Why would one want to make constructive posts here seriously, took three (3) pages to _guess_ what OP meant and then what? Questioning leadership for out-of-date packages, pffff... Yes I should ignore this thread as advised previously but I just can't, that's too much, really. Leave my Arch!

tomk · 2008-05-05 10:19:36

Jada - if you have a considered proposal to make regarding the structure of Arch, pleased write it up in your own language and have it translated. This is not to discriminate against you, but to allow others to respond appropriately to your suggestions. Some translation options include asking an English-speaking friend, posting it to the 'Other Languages' board here, or posting it to a language-specific Arch forum e.g. archlinux.de, if one exists for your language.

Everyone else - as phrakture has already said, we won't be locking this thread, but I would urge restraint in any further posts. In fact, I would strongly recommend an early demise for this thread. We can look forward to a more constructive atmosphere when JaDa formulates his thoughts in a more dispassionate way.

dolby · 2008-05-05 11:23:31

"Lack of manpower." Indeed that is very true.
IMO that is the problem mostly cause many/most/all the developers are mainly packagers. And that is for a reason.
Wine is out of date, 1000 people bitch about it in the forum. KDE 4 is out, 100000 people start 1000000000 posts and send 100000000000 emails about it.
Fact is most people around get motivated only when something goes wrong or when they want someone else to do a job for them.
IMO developers should do less packaging work. Writing down a PKGBUILD for most packages is a trivial task & moreover updating the one in SVN. With namcap finding out the dependencies is also very easy. Of course there are exceptions to the above, and quite a lot of them.
I admit i flag packages out of date all the time, but only cause they are actually are out of date. I dont consider that as a way of demanding the update.
I am not suggesting anything other than that IMO developers should do less packaging stuff.

Last edited by dolby (2008-05-05 11:25:10)

dschauer · 2008-05-05 13:48:43

JaDa wrote:

Leadership, you can not run a business/company/organization if you are not in front of them. The leader and the developers are responsible for Archlinux.

If one is going to use the model of a business or company, where do the users of Archlinux fall into that? Are they paying customers? Stockholders? Or are they the common employees of the company?

If they are customers, than if they have a problem, they can take their "money" elsewhere. Apart from those who donate, what money?

If they are stockholders, what have they done to invest in Archlinux, apart from just using the product for free? Taking the time to install, setup, and use archlinux is not an investment in the Archlinux community. Helping people out in the forums is somewhat of an investment, but no one is forcing people or paying them to do so.

If the users are common employees of the company then hmmm... Seems like most of them are dead weight, including me.

If you are going to use the business/company/organization model, then I'd say that the leader, developers, and to some extent the trusted users and forum moderators, are the CEO, president, stockholders, board of directors, oversight committee, and the common employees and the boundaries of said organization really stop there. Any users donating money or pitching into help from the outside (forums, patches, mailing list answers, etc) are not really part of the said organization, and while useful to the rest of the Archlinux community, they are really still just volunteer advocates of the "company's" product. In all reality the company still owes them nothing apart from maybe an occasional thank you.

Last edited by dschauer (2008-05-05 14:36:39)

Redroar · 2008-05-05 15:37:15

Phew, made it through the thread.

IMO, the devs are doing an excellent job, considering the manpower they have. I mean, think about it, Arch is my favorite distro, and yet it's team is a tiny fraction of what other distros dev teams are. I think that having this smaller, more responsive team helps keep the focus intact and makes them think twice before doing a major upheaval that could slow things down for months. Having a cautious dev team that communicates within itself, and with the community is excellent.

Though, I think that elevating more of the active AUR contributors to TUs could be helpful. I think that this would assist in the problem of the few packages that slip through the cracks, and ease the load on the devs for maintaining packages. But personally, I am quite happy with how well the packages are maintained right now. They are still very up-to-date and stable compared to most distros, and ABS/AUR fills almost every void that may exist in it.

Certainly it takes more effort to argue in a forum than to make a decent PKGBUILD and add it to the AUR.

phrakture · 2008-05-05 22:06:59

I want to apologize for locking this thread after I claimed I would not. I thought it was simmering, clicked the "lock" later on, but had missed about 6 or 7 follow up posts.

Sorry to tomk, and the other moderators - my fault here

stojic · 2008-05-06 05:06:08

I am relatively new to Arch (started using it about 5 months ago after some library hell on Slackware), so I don't know how things were going before that, but it seems to me that Arch is rolling quite nicely. I didn't notice any slowdowns with package updates - I think that 250 updated packages in the last 17 days is a pretty impressive number. There were also no breakages in that period.

I often see devs complaining that they lack manpower (don't get me wrong - they complain only in response to threads like this one), so I can only imagine what would Arch be like with adequate manpower - even more bleeding edge, more stable, with new infrastructure faster in place.

I don't see any fundamental organizational problems with it, nor do I see anything wrong whatsoever so threads like these really do look like spreading FUD or blowing up minor issues to me. Arch makes scratching any itch easy and users are encouraged/supposed to get in and scratch it. Arch makes it really easy to participate, there is no rigid "political" system such as Debian's, no corporation behind it that tends to look after its big customers first and it's not a one man show like Slackware - it's a bunch of people doing good job in following the vision described in the Arch Way, with the leader in place to keep watch on the big picture.

That said, I think the problem lies in the greater separation between developers and users - from what I understand there has been an influx of new users lately, and it seems to me that some of these new users don't get the Arch Way all the way, or don't understand what Arch is supposed to be so they complain. I think that this is where the pressure for Arch to change comes from - not from its shortcomings, but from the perceived shortcomings in the eyes of some users.

Don't change, just keep rolling .

syd · 2008-05-06 05:53:51

stojic wrote:

That said, I think the problem lies in the greater separation between developers and users - from what I understand there has been an influx of new users lately, and it seems to me that some of these new users don't get the Arch Way all the way, or don't understand what Arch is supposed to be so they complain. I think that this is where the pressure for Arch to change comes from - not from its shortcomings, but from the perceived shortcomings in the eyes of some users.

Exactly People need to do some research before using arch.
Arch DOES NOT hold your hand. And how hard is it to build your own package.
Arch is running along fine.

The only time i have found it hard is after -beyond was discontinued and i had to start compiling my own kernel.
But hey Arch is about learning and maintaing your own system.

All the tools are there why not learn how to use them or check out ubuntu.com.

Cheers Arch Development team.

sweiss · 2008-05-06 08:27:42

syd wrote:

...But hey Arch is about learning and maintaing your own system.

Where did you get that idea?
I like and use Arch because of its low maintanance costs.
You set it up and forget about it.

If I wanted to maintain something, I would have used Gentoo.

syd · 2008-05-06 08:44:55

Don't you edit you config files after upgrades sometimes??

Edit. Low maintance

Last edited by syd (2008-05-06 08:45:31)

k.mandla · 2008-05-06 13:26:20

I wasn't going to respond to this thread, but I think I will.

I, for one, am overjoyed with the way Arch is designed, handled and managed. It's the perfect distro for me, and I don't want a single thing altered. I occasionally dally at the extremes, reinstalling Ubuntu or wrangling with Crux, but Arch is by far the best.

Please don't change anything. You're all doing a great job, just as you are.

dschauer · 2008-05-06 13:38:57

sweiss wrote:

syd wrote:
...But hey Arch is about learning and maintaing your own system.
Where did you get that idea?
I like and use Arch because of its low maintanance costs.
You set it up and forget about it.
If I wanted to maintain something, I would have used Gentoo.

Agreed.

k.mandla wrote:

I wasn't going to respond to this thread, but I think I will.
I, for one, am overjoyed with the way Arch is designed, handled and managed. It's the perfect distro for me, and I don't want a single thing altered. I occasionally dally at the extremes, reinstalling Ubuntu or wrangling with Crux, but Arch is by far the best.
Please don't change anything. You're all doing a great job, just as you are.

Yes, don't change the way things are done! I don't want arch to become a gentoo or an ubuntu.

I thought this thread was locked?

Bapman · 2008-05-06 15:35:47

dschauer wrote:

I thought this thread was locked?

Apparently not !!!

Yeah, I am kind of new here, but I also get bored by such threads. Compared to Ubuntu, which I come from, packages are much more up-to-date. The philosophy behind those two distros is totally different, so I guess it is normal. But still, dedication of devs still amazes me : so many up-to-date packages for so little manpower !!!

In fact, I really fear that devs, maintainers or useful posters on the forum get really bored by posts like this. When I saw people on this thread telling that they don't like the forum anymore and they will step away from it, it really broke my heart...

I know that my opinion doesn't count much, but I think I speak in the name of most Archers when I say that we love this distro and we love what it represents. Its community is so helpful and open-minded. IMHO, Arch is one of the best success of open-source model.
So don't get disgusted people, we love Arch the way it is and keep up the good work !

This thread made me realize how useless I am. I'd really like to contribute and I think I will, but I still miss some development skills and... time !

adlucem · 2008-05-06 15:42:09

dschauer wrote:

I thought this thread was locked?

The answer was 6 posts back.

Last edited by adlucem (2008-05-06 15:43:16)

Cerebral · 2008-05-06 15:51:38

Waitaminute... ArchLinux has a _NEW_ leader?!

SINCE WHEN?!

*shock*

kensai · 2008-05-06 15:57:21

Why bring up the leadership thing? Here is why:

When Judd Vinet was the leader things weren't that different either, some packages were outdated some times, since this is something that will always happen. The thing is not to let it be outdated for too much time. But now, Aaron Griffin is the new leader, so now we have someone to blame for everything, since Judd was the founder and leader, everything he made no one had made before, now since there is a second Leader we have to blame him for anything that goes wrong?

But, on the other hand when Judd was the leader there were some times heated debates, I even remember me being involved and creating debates about the lack of development of pacman 3 I remember how my threads were locked, but, I realize that was in my immaturity time. So go figure out what I'm telling you, whiners.

Now, I use Arch Linux as my main and only OS, and I'm happier than ever. I like the direction Arch Linux is heading, and now is more KISS than ever.

Last edited by kensai (2008-05-06 15:58:14)

finferflu · 2008-05-06 15:58:18

Cerebral wrote:

Waitaminute... ArchLinux has a _NEW_ leader?!
SINCE WHEN?!
*shock*

I also heard he got hacked

iBertus · 2008-05-06 16:03:43

finferflu wrote:

Cerebral wrote:
Waitaminute... ArchLinux has a _NEW_ leader?!
SINCE WHEN?!
*shock*
I also heard he got hacked

Getting hacked it his hobby. You can't blame someone for enjoying their hobby, can you?

phrakture · 2008-05-06 16:12:33

finferflu wrote:

Cerebral wrote:
Waitaminute... ArchLinux has a _NEW_ leader?!
SINCE WHEN?!
*shock*
I also heard he got hacked

Hey this is kensai. I just hacked phrakture's account.

EDIT: admin hax are funnier (simo is awesome)

finferflu · 2008-05-06 16:25:55

phrakture wrote:

Hey this is kensai. I just hacked phrakture's account.

Ahahahhaha!

kensai · 2008-05-06 16:53:45

Now, be afraid, be very afraid, cause I'm an 1337 Hax0r. And you might be next.

Oh, right, Jada don't want us to have fun on his thread, Apologies man.

Last edited by kensai (2008-05-06 16:54:52)

_Marco_ · 2008-05-06 17:01:22

kensai wrote:

Oh, right, Jada don't want us to have fun on his thread, Apologies man.

lol, this is merciless

Arch Linux

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Re: Archlinux Leadership

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