On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 5:07 PM, Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw(a)gmail.com> wrote:
To repeat the subject line of this thread: it's a
two-way street. I
acknowledge that the current tensions are a byproduct of certain
crises, and by no means meant to imply that staff members are
practically innocent and that it's all the volunteers' fault. I also
acknowledge that the staff has a part to play in fixing this situation
(I literally said this), but the volunteers have a part to play too.
Okay, I think we mean different things by "staff" here. I generally
mean *all* of staff, while you seem to be thinking of staff developers
in particular. Just to be clear, I don't think there's much that
either staff developers *or* volunteer developers can do here. Since
the problems are systemic, they can only be fixed by the people who
have the ability to fix them. That means staff as opposed to
volunteers, but particularly the ones in charge of staff, like I guess
Danese or Erik. They're the only ones who can make decisions like "we
have to devote more resources toward code review", and those decisions
are the only things that can fix the underlying problems.
I don't blame anything on staff *developers*, and I don't think I ever
criticized them in particular. My suggestions have all been about
ways to change the system so that it lends itself to a more unified
development community. To the extent that staff developers are
collectively not acting as I'd like, it's because of the environment
they're working in, not because of individual personal decisions.
In that sense, then, I do think the volunteer developers have little
role to play here, just like the staff developers -- except for making
their feelings known. It's not a two-way street. It would be most
accurate to say that the decision lies in the hands of just a few
people.
But, to reiterate, I think most of the problem will disappear when we
have regular code deployment again. At this point, it's best to focus
solely on that and forget about all other complaints. If problems
linger for long after everyone's code is getting deployed on a regular
basis, we can talk about that then, and I think everyone will be
talking on much more amicable basis.