Hi David, On 02/16/2011 12:50 PM, David Sommerseth wrote: > Exactly! Supporters who could most probably do even more, than just to sit > here idle waiting for the next release - if we only knew what the issues > are they are facing. So what happened in the early days of when EL6 came out - we asked people to help, there were many threads on how people could get involved ( on the centos-devel list, which is - I am sure you will agree, the appropriate place ). Nothing happened, not one person beyond the usual-people actually did anything. After a few weeks, when people started getting antsy about the fact that they cant see progress (I dont know why they would care, given they dont want to help) more noise started getting made about how we ( and i mean the people doing the work ) were being difficult and not open. So the process of asking for help started again in mid/late December. A few people did get involved and we did see some level of open involvement. Even at the cost of not doing anything ourselves, but spending all of our open source time on helping people get into the right mindset and educating them to get into helpful situations. Things tapered off again with near zero momentum. Now the bit that really cheeses me off is that we cant go through the same loop again and again everytime someone new comes along and cant be bothered to see what has happened in the past. I am not saying you did this, its possible you didnt know about the existence of these threads on centos-devel etc. To cut a long story short - lots of people who use centos dont understand what the project is about, what we do, why we do it and how they can help. On the other hand, we also seem unable to hold people's attention ( and i mean people at large, not just the centos community ) in order to get them thinking about the project ( and not the distro, remember project != distro, needs of the hour are trivial, needs for the project to sustain and exist are more important ). We can try to solve these problems now, or we can get the distro's out - then goto solving these issues. As many have suggested, and I partially buy into - solving the problems while there is a need for the distro is likely to get a better and wider reception. On the other hand, getting the distro's out gets more urgent with every package release upstream and app release side-stream / internet / inhouse etc. The problems can be solved. Of all similar projects I know of and have had the privilege to be a part of, none come close to the maturity and pragmatic thought levels that the CentOS community has. On the other hand, the drive-by posters and people with random fluff to not-really-contribute are always going to an issue. I guess its reasonable to expect them around as well, serves as a nice reminder as to what the extreme sets are. For now, as was really decided on the centos-devel list, lets just do things the way centos has in the past. lets get the distro's out - and then look at solving specific issues. The whole idea that people cant help is just noise, hopefully the website ver2 project will make that visible a bit more than has been so far. I do know that once the distro's are out; the number of people wanting to 'help' is also going to fall drastically. On the other hand, the ones who do stick around are all people who really do want to help! Regards, - KB