Now first off, I am a whiner (hi Zac :P). I whine about portage all the time and I rarely submit code and the code I do submit is bug-ridden and sucky. However I still try to add to portage (docstrings and crappy unittests) when I get a chance (and the motivation). So I have been on the whiners side and it’s sometimes irritating when there is something obviously wrong but ignored.

However Gentoo is supposed to be fun and for me it has been these last few days. I’ve been slowly working my way through maintainer-needed; most packages just need a revbump to get their bugs fixed, and closing stuff as I see fit. TreeCleaners got new policy lately, much of this revolved around user complaints at the amount of packages leaving the tree. I then redid how removals work (a vote is now required) and devs are encouraged to fix packages rather than punt them. This is helpful in that ebuilds that didn’t work now do work or are abandoned in favor of new ebuilds from TreeCleaners/Users.

However some users still complain; not about me or TreeCleaners this time, but about other herds and projects. Their complaints are about other packages; ’someone removed cat/foo and they were using it dammit and we should put it back because it was the best package to do bar and there are no replacements!’ Yeah I know it sucks, why would anyone remove a package? However, TreeCleaners were never the end-all of packages removers. Herds and Maintainers always had last call on a package (most of the packages removed by TreeCleaners were both herd and maintainerless).

This brings me back to the whiner section. Someone in #gentoo made a good point that people expect a lot out of open source developers. In a closed source app you file a request and hope it gets written; maybe if you are in a company you can pay extra for the feature or whatnot. For a closed source app you file a bug and hope it gets fixed. But not in FOSS. In FOSS you file a bug and then bitch when it’s not fixed in a week, bitch when kde-3.6.5930 isn’t in the tree yet but it just came out five minutes ago!

So take a chill pill whiners. Remember that in the end the people doing the work are the people in control of things (not even trying to be an arrogant prick here, thats just the way things are). Developers ain’t nothing special (for sure I’m not and I’m a dev!) but we do do the work and it is our work not your own. So when we screw up, sure, file a bug and we will try to fix it. But don’t be personally affronted when something doesn’t get fixed or someone can’t reproduce your bug or god forbid a package you use gets removed from the tree.

Sometimes there are no devs interested in fixing the bug (maintainer-needed was like that for a while, with only a few devs even glancing at them), sometimes a bug is complicated and takes a long time to work on, and sometimes a package just needs a new maintainer. New maintainers are not easy to find, however the new proxy-maint project is there to help the user who wants to maybe maintain one package but not many, who doesn’t want to take the quizzes and be a dev but wants a couple of applications to have good ebuilds (yes this entire entry was an add for proxy-maint!), so join up!