Re: my latest blog post

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sat, Jun 09, 2018 at 08:51:59PM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> address@hidden writes:
> > Thank you for taking the time to contribute your thoughts. I am sorry to
> > see you getting so beat up by the responses.  Unfortunately the
> > nit-picking of criticisms and the "we are busy, why don't you dig in and
> > fix it" responses occur too often on the Guix lists.
> >
> > Such responses are fundamentally unhelpful: A defensive response of
> > counter-criticism that spirals out of control buries the original input
> > and alienates potential new contributors. I agree with you that the
> > suggestion that you dig in and fix something you are struggling with is
> > a fundamentally unfriendly response.
> 
> What kind of response would you consider acceptable?
> 
> I suppose the most helpful response would be for one of us to volunteer
> our time to fix the bug, or to implement the feature you desire.
> 
> Are there any other acceptable responses, in your view?
> 
>        Mark

And here we arrive at a fundamental problem that all *complex* free
software projects that have with many users. And these discussions end
up hurting/upsetting everyone involved!

The fact is that only a few people really understand any chosen part
of the project.

And these people tend to have day jobs, families and work on the
project in their spare time. In that spare time (maybe only a few
hours a week) they make choices what to work on - and, yes, it tends
to be what they think most important. Not what others think most
important. The Clojure developers are considered haughty and give
others the cold shoulder.  The Dlang people are very open, and get a
lot of abuse and kranks on their forum in return. You just can't win!!
It is easy to find examples about this. Some projects, notably Elixir,
are exceptionally good at the balancing act. But, it is not for
everyone. If you take Guile, what started this thread, it is really
one core language maintainer. What talent! Nothing to stop you from
jumping in...

I think Guix is a great project. Not only does it scale (ref.
the number of weekly contributors), the maintainers do a good job of
being nice where it matters. Guix had a community day at FOSDEM and out
of that came the recent work on 'guix pull' which is a great
improvement, ultimately asked for by the user community! I think that
is amazingly good.

Mark, indeed, from a contributor perspective the natural response is
to volunteer work on a topic users ask for. Since we write code, we
think in terms of responding in code. But that is not what this thread
is about. Here we have users who want *attention* for their
concern(s). My response to such users is two-fold: (1) dig in and prove
you understand the issue first. A lot of response goes by merit you
acquire. People tend to spend time on people they like/respect. So,
George, it is not a knee-jerk reaction. It is easy to talk, much less
easy to do. And coders and project maintainers know that. And (2)
bring up real issues on the bug tracker and try to fix them. That way
you get attention.

So, yes, dig in and try to fix it ;)

As in chess or football, people who acquire merit get taken seriously.
Not the person shouting on the side-line - unless they are respected
in some other way (maybe by giving money or other resources).

Talk is cheap. Coding is hard. We are always balancing this. I don't
contribute much to Guix at this point (other than talk ;), but we face
the exact same problems in other projects I am involved in. I get most
upset by the sense of entitlement that people have just because they
*use* my  work. Many an E-mail I wrote, but did not send, to users,
just to vent steam. I have a feeling I am not the only one. I.e., it
is not easy running a free software project. We want and like our
users, but not at all cost.

I think we should close this topic unless there are concrete
suggestions on how to improve and scale Guix development. As George
writes, we can encourage new contributors and users more, but I doubt
the route is to take core contributors away from their work. I think
the route is to improve our web presence by tutorials, blogs and
internationalization. And, in fact, those already are priorities.

Pj.