My previous post was about art, drawing and how I was starting. I am a fan of megatokyo’s artist Fred Gallagher, not so much for his artistry (which is awesome) but for his blog posts (which are equally good most days). Fred works on megatokyo and art full time. It is interesting how poeple critique his work. Basically he draws stuff and puts it online for anyone to read. Then people come by and say whether it’s good or not.

I view my Gentoo work (and I think other developers do the same) as just work for me. I enjoy (or used to) working on Gentoo, fixing packages, maintaining stuff. I try to make that enjoyment available by submitted it into CVS, so others can share in the labour. If you want to critique my labor and make suggestions I have no problem with you doing so. There is a bugzilla for this express purpose. However, this is just something I do for fun (or because I’m dedicated to it, during times when it’s not quite so fun). Constructive criticism and suggestions are welcome. But don’t be fooled. This is my project not yours. Gentoo is for the developers first, not the users.

Now a bunch of you are going to go off and go overboard. This isn’t to say we don’t listen or won’t listen. But as always in a project such as this; the people doing the work are the people making the choices. Much of the time contributing a new (and improved) idea is not difficult; if it’s an improvement over the existing system and you can easily show the benefit I think many poeple will be easily convinced. Doubly so for things where you provide patches. However complaining all the time about how much Gentoo sucks or how much thing X in Gentoo sucks just makes you a whiner (in most cases). If you loved xmms and you want to switch to ubuntu over it then go ahead. I doubt anyone is so attached to any specific users that they really care if you leave and tell all your friends. It’s not like Gentoo has a bunch of big customers we have to satisfy; just ourselves.

So, in closing, remember that Gentoo is staffed by volunteers. The Gentoo Foundation pays none of the developers. So if you want something done your choices are primarily ask nicely, implement yourself and ask nicely for someone to include it, or pay someone to implement it and include it. I’ve actually only seen the first two happen, the third most people are too cheap to pay for. In the end we try and make things in Gentoo work well (we are users too, and we don’t enjoy ABI breakages and compiler upgrades either). Sometimes that doesn’t happen and we are sorry we did not do a better job. But sometimes people screw up and it will happen in Gentoo, just as it happens in every organization.

I went a little off topic, but enjoy the rant