Re: more help needed with gcc-4.8 stabilization, chromium starts heavily using C++11

On 11/01/2014 01:18 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> 
> What we can't do is force somebody to contribute.  If somebody says
> that if we don't do multilib their way, they'll stop being the only
> libreoffice maintainer, and nobody else wants to maintain libreoffice,
> then we are left in a hard place (completely contrived scenario).
> 

Someone who doesn't want to contribute shouldn't have commit access in
the first place. And I think that's currently not the case.

However, people who regularly block or even just ignore contribution
processes/channels are a serious problem. More so if they are in
non-trivial positions. Whether they do it on purpose or not is secondary.
But this is definitely not about technicalities (like "should lua have a
pkgconfig file or not").
Every time this gets brought up someone says "oh, but we can't do
anything, because someone might be sad about it and quit gentoo". Uhm,
right. That's already happening, all the time.

What is worse is taking this "argument" as an excuse to not fix our
contribution culture, which is very bad on a lot of fronts. And every
time an incident like this happens... it gets even worse.

To be blunt with you, I think this is a matter of people having so much
respect for someone that they almost tolerate any misbehaviour.
And this behaviour spreads. It's a phenomenon we know from people like
Linus. Because he is smart after all and his insults are pretty funny.

It's not easy to emancipate oneself from the negativity in the
opensource world. It isn't caused by a particular group of people, but
by tolerating certain patterns of behaviour.

But there will be no improvement if we don't take such issues more
seriously. I don't really see that happening. It's something the
oldtimers have more power over than the council.