What's the right way to get in touch with devs? arch-general list?

ataraxia · 2010-04-11 01:51:07

tl;dr version: skip to the questions at the bottom

Today I saw an unfortunate thing happen during the Bug Day proceedings. It surprised me to see it, because the knowledge needed to avoid the problem was made available in advance. Bear with me as I tell a story, so I can point out an example of what looks like a communication problem between users and devs.

A while back, I sent mail to arch-general giving advance notice of upcoming releases (within the next two days) for some xiph.org software (libogg, libvorbis, libao, and vorbis-tools). No one responded to it. That's not really a problem - after all, there wasn't any work to be done yet, since the releases weren't finalized yet.

When the releases happened, I flagged them out of date as usual, and provided extra details to avoid difficulty with the upgrades (whether rebuilds were needed, and which upgrades depended on which other upgrades). One package belonged to Snowman, two to Tobias K, and the last (and most difficult) to Hugo D. I knew Hugo was no longer a dev, and later saw that Eric was going inactive also. (I don't know Tobias K's status.) That's probably part of the problem - this info getting lost since it wasn't sent to the same devs who later did the upgrades. (I guess the "multiple owners" feature should help alleviate this problem.)

A few days back, I sent another mail to arch-general. I admit that I was nagging a bit, though I do believe that I was contributing helpful info - mostly the same as I put in the flagging messages. Again, no one responded. Not exactly nice, but again, not wrong either. You'll get to it when you get to it, and I can (and did) do these rebuilds for myself. Note that I'm NOT complaining about a week or two lag in updating packages - that's perfectly reasonable, and I'd be a huge jerk to make noise about that.

Today, bash was doing upgrades to close bugs, with help on IRC from Pierre and wonder. One of those packages was libvorbis, and he wondered if a rebuild would be needed. I knew for sure that it wasn't, and told him so, which he acknowledged with a "thank you". He then went on to duplicate my research, which felt a little odd to me. In the end, this package was upgraded perfectly fine.

The other package he upgraded was vorbis-tools. Unfortunately, building that against the old libao in [extra] generates an incomplete package, missing ogg123. When I saw this problem, I opened a bug, and had it handled exactly as I thought it should have been. The end result was fine.

...

Now, the point here is that I had identified the dependency of the new vorbis-tools on the new libao in several of my previous messages, and reading those could have saved some trouble. It's reasonable that no one working this on IRC today saw my flagging messages, since I understand that those only go to the maintainer. However, my second mail to arch-general was definitely available, and based on what happened today, no one it would have been useful to, actually read it. That's a communication breakdown, and that means somebody did something wrong. It's entirely likely that it was me, and I want to know the solution.

I've always believed that arch-general is the best way for an ordinary user to get in touch with "the devs" as a body. Many devs don't go on IRC, and it's a bit too busy in there most of the time anyway. Many devs also don't hang out here on the forums, and that's easy to understand as well, given how high-volume they are now. The bug tracker generally gets excellent dev responses, in terms of both timeliness and quality, but it's not appropriate for communications that are not bugs. All devs seem to read arch-dev-public, but users like myself of course can't post there.

So arch-general has to be it. In fact, I always thought that was the intended purpose of that list. Until recently, it was a low-volume list. Lately, it's grown quite a bit, and is starting to resemble these forums: general tech support questions (some of them stupid), users plugging their own creations, and just chatter. (There are a small handful of posters accounting for a great deal of the noise.) I keep wanting to tell them to take it to the forums, but restrain myself as I'm not really sure if I'm right about their posts not being appropriate for the list. I'd leave the list, as it now annoys me, but then I can't reply to things posted on arch-dev-public. (Probably what I'll really do if this keeps up is stop using [testing], so I can do away with both of those lists. Oh well.)

Now, the questions here:
- Are devs also dropping out of arch-general because of the increasing noise, and is that why my second mail got lost?
- Are the "noisy" posters abusing the list, and should they be told to go to the forums instead?

- Is arch-general actually intended as the primary way for users to talk to devs?
- If so, how to fix it so it works that way again?
- If not, where should I have been sending messages like the ones I linked to in this post?

Allan · 2010-04-11 02:13:03

I think almost every dev is on arch-general, so that is the place to contact the group in general. Specific points can probably be emailed to the dev involved, if one is identifiable and if the bug tracker is not a better place (bug reports to my email get ignored).

I think the whole problem here is that there is really no dev in charge of that package. So your emails were probably seen then skipped over by all devs thinking not my problem... (I know that is true for me). Then Andrea noticed an "orphan" package that needed updated and went ahead with it without connecting it to your previous emails, which is unfortunate.

Now our maintainer backend is fixed, hopefully we can get all the orphan packages adopted out, or at least know if we need to bring on new people to maintain them. That way, there should always be someone who information about specific packages should be sent to.

skottish · 2010-04-11 02:28:36

ataraxia,

You know this software. Have you considered applying to become a TU?

ataraxia · 2010-04-11 02:49:47

skottish wrote:

ataraxia,
You know this software. Have you considered applying to become a TU?

I have considered it. In this case, it wouldn't have been relevant, since these packages are in [extra].

Aside from that:
- I'm confident that I DO have the skills to do a TU's job.
- I'm NOT confident that I have the motivation to do it for very long. It's very similar to my burnout-inducing day job (sysadmin with customer service responsibilities), and I'd almost certainly become not very responsive in a hurry.
- I'm practically unknown in this community, including to TUs. I doubt my application would be accepted, especially given some others that I've seen rejected. I wonder sometimes if TUs are tougher to join than the actual devs are!

Arch Linux

#1 2010-04-11 01:51:07

What's the right way to get in touch with devs? arch-general list?

#2 2010-04-11 02:13:03

Re: What's the right way to get in touch with devs? arch-general list?

#3 2010-04-11 02:28:36

Re: What's the right way to get in touch with devs? arch-general list?

#4 2010-04-11 02:49:47

Re: What's the right way to get in touch with devs? arch-general list?

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