On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 5:07 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@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.