Re: Request new Ruby release

[Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@gmail.com>]

On 5 May 2018 at 02:56, Steven Penny <svnpenn@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 5 May 2018 07:27:22, Marco Atzeri wrote:
>>
>> I am still waiting that you show your code.
>
>
> i did, here, i can do it again:
>
> http://github.com/svnpenn
>
>> Jon Yong is doing an hell of job taming a monster program,
>
>
> no one is arguing that, i agree its a tough package to maintain
>
>> and your comments are NOT appropriated.
>
>
> certainly not by you - and probably others on this list. but my arguments do
> have merit. GCC as an example is a fast updating package. and as
> "politically
> incorrect" as it might be, jon could be doing a better job in regards to
> velocity of release - at a minimum we should have test versions for GCC 7
> and
> or 8 already for ALL arches and ALL targets.
>
>> I do not see a huge queue of volunteers,
>
>
> this is a false assumption - no one volunteers because a maintainer is
> already
> in place - thats like applying for a job that is filled - but if he vacated
> and
> corinna or whatever posted an "opening" - i am confident it would be filled
> quickly
>

That is where this is falling down. A lot of maintainers are not going
to step aside because they have had too many experiences of where
someone has said they will help out/take over etc and then disappear
for a million legitimate reasons. Most maintainers in open source
software will step aside when someone has shown they are going to not
just poke and prod but actually are doing things like

'Hey I made a set of builds with gcc8 and rebuilt all this to see what
broke.. can someone else look at things to see how this is going?'

and then after that person has shown that they have kept up with
things for multiple releases, helped out and been helping them and
others, the responsibilities start getting moved over. This isn't
always the case, if there are various leaf packages but if there are
ones with hundreds of dependencies like gcc or ruby.. it isn't
advertised of 'oh I am looking for a maintainer..' because you get
burnt too many times with the people who want to make a name for
themselves but don't have the skill, the people who are looking to
push an agenda (everything from 'I put in this patch which rootkits
everyone' to 'I think all developers should default to -Werror only
ever'), people who would be good but have no clue who to contact in
other groups when problems occur, and maybe someone who does fit into
this.

Which is why most developers end up looking for the people who show
they want to do something by doing it first, asking for help instead
of demanding it, and start showing up in upstream areas looking to fix
things. When I started into this nearly 30 years ago, I thought that
was too slow, too asinine, and too feudal and needed to be shook up.
In the end I learned that the system is the way it is because it works
in good days and bad ones. It isn't ideal but for small volunteer
projects it seems to be the one long term ones go to.

That said, it isn't the only one and if you want to show everyone how
to do it differently.. you are free to set up your own project which
does things the way you need it to. That is how innovation gets
kickstarted when people get too complacent.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

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