User Rel doesn’t work. They were elected via a poll on the forums, but how many of the concerns of the users have resulted in similar polls that User Rel has followed up on and argued for?

One big problem is that there is nobody who oversees things like the trustees and User Rel, so if they all go awol, nothing gets done. Neither the trustees or User Rel polices itself and replaces AWOL/flaky/incompetent people with real people who will do their jobs.

What I’m suggesting is that something like User Rel should exist, but it must have the same amount of power as the dev council, so that each provides checks and balances on the other.

And there also needs to be mechanisms in place to ensure that they actually do their job, and to arbitrate disagreements between them.

Anyway, it’s just a suggestion, but I don’t feel that User Rel has done its job properly. And I don’t think it has enough power that even it actually tried to do what it’s supposed to do, it would be able to do anything except what the devs approve.

If there were such a user council, they would have been on the internal mailing list over the last week or so, and would have been communicating with users, and lots of problems about users feeling ignored over the last week or so would not have occurred.

Yah, I can relate to the whole explanation without detail thing. Personally, I think bugzilla is not the place for clarification, and I’d suggest stepping up and asking the herds directly by e-mailing them, or asking on gentoo-dev. You never know what might happen. Sorry I don’t have a better answer than that.

Here is one tip that will help though, and this isn’t necessarily directed at you, is that in asking questions, try not to be critical of the current situation … instead just state your question and ask for clarification instead of presuming everything is wrong. There’s surely two sides.

That is effectively the job of the User Relations project, and we tried having an intermediate post called User Representatives which really didn’t go anywhere. It just comes back to the same point of we need someone who wants to do the middle-man work on a regular basis.

Plus, how do you even begin to quantify what a majority of users want? My general perspective is that they all want the same thing (fix my ebuild), individiually. Tackling that, finding out what the “issues” are among users is not easy … at least, I can’t think of a good way to highlight what’s wrong. Again, just need someone to have an idea and run with it.

If there were such a user council, then it would be the responsibility of that council’s members to stay in contact with the users, read and respond in the forums, and bring the matters that the users care about to the trustees and the dev council.

Of course, to have a user council would require there to be some position (one or more individuals) higher than the user and dev councils, in order to adjudicate disagreements, in the case that a decision must be made about something that affects both users and devs but the respective councils cannot agree.

Lot’s of users will just stop reporting problems (stop talking to dev’s) or leave Gentoo completely if they are told they are wrong without explanation. I too am hesitant to report a bugs and won’t unless I am absolutely sure it is a real bug (and I am defiantly not an average user ;-)).

Re the documentation, It is probably because the ivtv documentation we wrote on the wiki just rocks

You hit right on the head a number of issues that I specifically want to address. The fact is that for the *intermediate* users (or maybe you’re advanced, I’m guessing here), those that know what they are doing pretty well, need a bit less of the informal help and real answers.

The problem is exactly how you specify it — what you hear from devs is highly detailed stuff, and on the forums / IRC / ML it’s usually more generalized. There’s no real middle ground of details for advanced users.

Anyway, the short answer is to look at bugzilla and to maybe email the herds directly (sound, in the case of glame) to first submit the problem so they can look at it, and second to watch the update status. There is also (in this case) an IRC channel — #gentoo-media. Once again, all that stuff is non-obvious, which could use some clarification.

Personally, I’m fairly resourceful and can usually find a solution via google/forums/brute force. But I don’t think I’d ever consider contacting a dev directly, for a start, to do that, I’d have to determine which dev or group my problem belonged to (this itself can be contentious), second I then have to determine HOW that dev or group wants to be contacted (directly, bugzilla, forums, irc). Then there’s always the fear of being branded a “stupid user”, by raising things in the wrong way, suggesting bad solutions, missing “obvious” information, etc.

But that’s kind of compounded by huge breakages which are “well publicized” - a la the expat issues. User’s don’t have a single place where we can learn about these things in a nice manner, planet gentoo is great (really, I love reading the posts here), but the posts range from obscure conferences I’ll never attend to the finer points of code review, really important messages can get lost in the swell. Mailings lists can be the same. The one place you really would look, http://www.gentoo.org, has only had gwn entries recently (ok, so now I’ve got to read potentially an entire gwn article to find that nothing’s relevant), and most recently, not even the gwn’s. Ebuild notices are similarly less useful. I’ve configured them to send them to me via email, but when I run 3 gentoo machines, doing an automatic daily update, I can get a dozen emails a day, 99% of which will tell me things which are irrelevant or pure duplicates of what was said before. With the duplicates, I’m ashamed to admit that I blindly ran the upgrade scripts for certain versions of openldap for 3 minor version bumps before I realised that the whole script was pre-fixed with a “if you’re upgrading from “. Not only that, but the upgrade scripts were causing me problems …

If I leave it and do 3monthly upgrades, not I’ve got to wade through 300 messages to find perhaps 1 or 2 that are relevant to me. I’ve spent a lot of time automating the upgrade process (for me, specifically), I just can’t automate that part.

That said, the recent upgrade of apache which failed the ebuild because I hadn’t taken the correct update steps was VERY effective, however I had no idea at all that this was happening before the event, and I do read planet quite a lot.

Take another example, I’ve had glame-2.0.1 failing to build every single day since at least 21-nov. It hasn’t really caused any problems and I haven’t really looked into why it fails. I’ve done a quick search on the forums and found nothing. Is this my problem? Is there something I *should* have done but didn’t - like with apache. Is this a bug I should raise? Should I talk to the devs: now I have to go find out who’s responsible for glame and whether they might like to be pinged, but hang on, I really need to look into this deeply first and do a lot of research (like what is glame and why am I building it) before I do this because I don’t want to be pinging a dev about a problem they already know about coz if everyone did that, they’d never get any work done.

Also, I had no idea drobbins was offering “help” until tsunam replied on his blog on planet. I had heard rumours that drobbins came back briefly before, but I have NO IDEA what happened or why he left so quickly apart from bitter mutterings from some devs. You know what, googling daniel robbins doesn’t help there.

It’s a real balancing act. For the apache thing, perhaps I should have been on the “gentoo web servers mailing list” (yes I made it up) - but I only run a webserver incidentally (I believe I’m running a couple of web-apps, not a web-server) and I’m not really interesting in all the minutiae.

So, it’s true, users don’t really know what’s going on with the development of their favourite distro without a disproportionate amount of effort (running the distro already requires a large effort). Users also don’t have any real way of communicating to developers without a disproportionate amount of effort. Really, forums & google is the only viable option for us.

Now, users *can’t* spend that effort on contacting devs over every potentially insignificant thing, and each individual dev *can’t* spend that effort on monitoring what’s happening from a userland perspective, perhaps they need a go-between, and when I first heard about user-rel, that’s kind of what I hoped it would be.

Limited skills and time is pretty much the boat that almost all of us are in … what we really need is people willing to make a committment (and fulfill it), no matter how small.

Thanks for the note about the blog post. I forget that it might be helpful if I write posts more often about what I’m working on in Gentoo stuff, but I always consider it pretty boring, so I don’t … I’ll have to rethink that and maybe post some regular updates instead.

As for communication between users and devs I think a blog post like the one you just wrote is a good step on the way. If nothing else it made me smile to read it and a smile goes a long way towards bridging any gap

All this stuff with drobbins offer have gotten me to read planet.gentoo the last couple of days and I think I might keep that up, so no matter what comes out of all of this stuff, it has certainly done some stirring in the Gentoo community as a whole which hopefully will lead to some good results.

I hope that I have also as a user been taught a bit about acting in a more appropriate way, I guess there are times where I too have been guilty of adding to this gap between users and devs by acting stupidly. Hopefully I am getting wiser and other users also getting wiser like me.

Sorry for the (temporarily) dead link.

Feel free to expand all you want.

As for the ivtv docs, Ive really dropped the ball on that one … mostly because there didn’t seem to be much interest and things are working pretty well as-is, plus it doesn’t seem like it needs docs.

Btw, it’s been down for a few months and is just being revived.

linkie:
http://www.qunu.com

p.s. I added you to my Jabber contacts.

Greets
Sander

PS: I did send you a note on the ivtv documentation you wrote but never got a reply back

p.s. I’ll add you to my Jabber contacts, if you don’t mind :]

I have tried “to get involved” for the third time and again I end up with no success.

Regards

Also my bugs / ebuild submissions generally have been reviewed in a meaningful way, albeit that part was also usually quite slow (takes months to get a new ebuild in, in general)…

Overall, I feel that it is not too hard to get in touch with the Gentoo devs. No idea whether I just got lucky until now or not.

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/support.xml

“1. Support

Gentoo is a volunteer-driven distribution and so are our support options. It is not possible for our developers to provide support (paid or otherwise) because we simply don’t have the time or resources to do so.

We have however a great Gentoo community that tests and helps document many aspects of the Gentoo distribution. We advise you to direct your support questions to the Gentoo Forums, Gentoo Mailinglists or Gentoo Chat Channels. Those are far better suited for support questions as they represent a major part of the “common” knowledge about Gentoo.

Most Gentoo developers frequently visit those community channels and try their best to contribute to the ongoing discussions and questions.”