[CentOS] How can a company help, officially?

Tue Apr 12 22:03:19 UTC 2011
Brian Mathis <brian.mathis+centos at betteradmin.com>

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 4:07 PM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
> On 04/12/2011 07:53 PM, Radu Gheorghiu wrote:
>> 2. Why do you always have to end with "you must be clueless", "you must
>> be new to CentOS", "you must be new to Open Source".
>> How can you tell? You can tell all this just by reading one email?
>
> thats a good question, I was asking myself the same thing. End of the
> day, it comes down to the fact that I feel we go over the same thing
> again and again all the time. And when people offer to help, I try and
> create a mechanism for them to do so, but there is little or no real
> feedback on that, and traction is even harder to get.


We go over the same things because the issues are clear and the
suggestions seem to fall on deaf ears over and over again.  Most of
the responses rely on logical fallacies or things that can obviously
be resolved with just an ounce of thought, creativity, or discussion.

As for offers of help, I don't see any of the recent offers as offers
of *real* help to get people involved.  Real steps to open things are:
- bug tracker with up to date status of the R6 packages and all
outstanding issues
- git repo with the scripts being used to do things and the patch
files required to be applied to SRPMS
- web pages with procedures on how to do things using those scripts
and anything else that is not/cannot be scripted

All of these need to be done by the dev team first.  Maybe someone can
setup the git repo and have it prepped for the devs to use.  Johnny
mentioned some internal names that can't be released for security
reasons.  This seems dubious, but still can be handled quite easily on
the "trusted" final build servers.


> suspect this is, at least in some part, down to the fact that we don't
> have a wiki or a web page that could perhaps accumulate some/much of
> whats been said already and point people at that - so if they are new to
> the process, they have a single resource to look at and perhaps get
> 'upto speed' as it were.
>
> - KB


"in some part"...?!  I would say that is the ENTIRE part, as everyone
except for the chosen few is "new to the process".  I have seen a few
postings from Devs saying how they helped some other people to build
packages, etc... but how?  From the tone of the messages it seems like
it was either via IRC or personal email, which effectively counts for
zero in this context as we are talking about things that take place in
public.  Those things need to go into the wiki, with updated pages.
Not on blog posts, twitter, or email archives.


// Brian Mathis