Governance revisited

[Dimi Paun]

On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 12:36 +0900, Dmitry Timoshkov wrote:
> Everyone who complaints about "problems" with patch acceptance policy
> seem to claim that, but my impression is that complaints are going
> from technically incompetent people, who just "feels" that the process
> can be improved, but can't explain it in developer's language (i.e. in
> technical words) how.

One thing to be careful about is the ever growing trend of forming
a very tightly coupled in-group. It is very easy to happen: most
top developers work for the same company, they are extremely competent,
and have the technical argument on their side. It is way too easy to
feel righteous.

This is a big problem, as it elevates the (already high) barrier to
entry to a dangerous altitude. And the feedback is positive, as people
are being put off, the in-group grows tighter, etc.

The net is littered with amazingly smart and competent teams that
killed projects via this process: *BSD, XFree86, etc. The human
aspect of engineering a lively community is still a black art,
so we have to tread carefully.

Now, for the problem at hand: I think people's intuition that something
is off has a seed of truth. And I find it difficult to say that because
I think Alexandre does an amazing job. He is probably by far the person
that had the largest (positive) influence on me from a professional
perspective. 

To my mind, Alexandre is the Roger Federer and Michael Schumacher of
software development. He is never wrong.

And paradoxically, I think this is part of the problem. He is just too
good for mere mortals. And I think a lot of folks get discouraged
because it is just too much work to reach Alexandre's standards. This is
even more difficult when you have to guess Alexandre's ideas about how
you should properly solve the problem :)

IOW, I think we're missing on an important human aspect of development:
the need to compete, and show that you can do it better than the other
guy. I always found it interesting on LKML, how Linus lets in sometimes
dubious code, and that results in an effervescence of work!

It's like bad stuff motivates people to show that things can be done
better. I think Tom Tromey is onto something:
    http://tromey.com/blog/?p=252

So, what is the solution? Let in crappy code? Certainly not. And in all
honesty, how can we ask Alexandre to let in stuff that he know sucks? I
can appreciate how silly and difficult that would be.

Bottom line, I don't know. At most I can say that sometimes I wish
Alexandre would be a bit more impulsive, and just let (a selected few)
things in that people want. Maybe this way we generate more excitement,
and the tiny bit of quality drop we pay with would be worth it. 

YMMV :)

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.