Rails and a Community Question.
April 4th, 2006The first thing I’m going to write about is the wordpress issue. It has been resolved with help from westi (thanks) for now but I’m still looking at alternatives. Typo has however been a bit of a problem. More I think due to ruby on rails being less of the miracle application framework and being a general pain in my booty. Diego, I owe you a beating for directing me to typo when I see you next * wink *.
In ways I think I’ve been spoiled by gentoo with the wonderful documentation that we have here, and when I run into something that, not to say half baked, but less then the quality I am used to is another story. Normally this wouldn’t be a issue if the install process was at least in my opinion somewhat logical, however compared to what I’ve grown used to with LAMP, Ruby on Rails applications are a spiders web of issues. I’ve spent a couple of hours with documentation on both typo and ruby on rails to no avail. Every doc I’ve read just glorifies how easy ruby on rails actually is. Naturally, reading that and struggling the way I have been has gotten me frusterated and grumpy. I’m also stubborn and refuse to give up till I get it working. So I’ll keep fighting it and hope I get something other then the wonderful Welcome message or a 500 internal server message because the application can’t find a file in the same directory.
In other less grumpy(ranting) writings, I’d like to ask the users of gentoo a question. One that I hope will either spawn some discussion on the irc channels or on the forums, or heck even in the comments section. The question was actually brought up in the #-dev channel on irc and I’d like to get a clear perception of what the actual view is from the community side. I’d also like to keep in touch with a few people and or direct them to who will hopefully be directing efforts in the direction I’ll be asking about.
The question is this: What do you feel the relationship is between the developers and the user community? How can we improve the relationship and is there any area’s that people really want to help but either don’t know how to go about it or feel intimidated to try for some reason?
Also please note that the x86 team is still looking for people who want to become Arch Testers. Please feel free to drop in on #gentoo-x86 and talk to Hparker, Halyc0n, or myself if you are curious about what is involved. Email will also work.
April 5th, 2006 at 1:28 am
I submit a fair few ebuilds but they often get left behind, sometimes because no one wants to maintain them. I wouldn’t mind maintaining them myself but I don’t have time to take on the full responsibilities of a dev. I realise that a lot of shoddy ebuilds get submitted and I still make the odd mistake (even after you’ve read the dev guide, there’s a lot to remember) but I think there should still be a place for people like me. Some kind of half-way point between a proper dev and a regular user.
April 5th, 2006 at 1:52 am
James, currently there is one half-way point. That is becoming a Arch Tester. Its helping out in a more direct route without having the full responibilities of a dev.
As far as ebuilds being left behind, its quite true. There’s really no good way to handle the requests+submissions in bugzilla right now. The addition of Maintainer-wanted has made it easier to search but there’s ~1850 of those currently. Just even going through and seeing which are still alive projects and which arn’t would be a task in itself.
April 5th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
To me, the user-dev relations center around the gentoo-dev list. In most other locations, either there aren’t enough devs to matter, or users are marginalized.
The place we have the most room for improvement is Bugzilla. We need to start treating people who report bugs as people who are actively trying to help improve Gentoo, not whiny asses who waste our time on meaningless issues.
Secondary are the #gentoo IRC channel, forums and gentoo-user lists, all of which are fairly low in dev population. Raising the number of devs participating in these forums could also help. They’re all generally quite courteous already so the interaction standard is high.