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Postings from July 2000
Simon Cozens <simon@brecon.co.uk> writes: > Yuh. I think we're *again* in grave danger of throwing the baby out with > the bathwater. There's nothing wrong with the single-list model; look at > Linux, or the GIMP (or the other GNOME projects), or practically every > other large Open Source project out there. Apart from Python, > interestingly, which seems to be taking the Special Interest Group path > we're suggesting. I wonder if that's significant. Let me point at another project that uses the single list approach, and which I think is one of the best-managed projects out there: gcc. Most of the *really* good ideas about project management I've learned from watching the gcc list, and they too use this model. (Well, actually they have two lists, gcc and gcc-patches. But the second is largely due to the fact that there's a requirement that everything checked into the repository is also sent to the mailing list as a patch. Something that I think is *wonderful* as someone watching the project from outside, although I realize that it's a bit hard to get to the point where you're in the habit of doing that.) > Single-list models work, but p5p didn't work. What didn't work about it, > and how can we fix it? Maybe I'm alone in the wilderness here, but p5p worked great for me. I've always been a little bit mystified at why people were so upset with it; I guess I understand a little bit, but overall I just didn't mind it that much. I agree that the tone could be a problem, though. Looking at other development lists that I follow, what would normally happen is that as soon as things started to get a little heated, one of the package maintainers would jump in and go "hey folks, this is completely inappropriate here; please take it somewhere else." And it worked. I'm not sure why this didn't work with p5p; I think it may be related to the fact that Larry practically never did that and a few personality conflicts got out of control, and then once that happens it's very hard to ever get things back to a presumption of civility. But there are innumerable other projects out there with just as many hard-headed and quick-tempered people working on them, and they manage not to bite each other's heads off. It's *got* to be possible for us to find some way of behaving the same. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>Thread Previous | Thread Next