Perception is a funny thing. It causes a lot of misunderstandings as the recent events within Gentoo have shown quite clearly. Many are quite clearly developers failing to get information out there. I have failed in various ways that I’ve stated in past entries and have begun or hope to have begun to fix many of those.

However, I’m seeing an issue that I’d like to discuss as well. There is currently a lot of passion for Gentoo and I want to grab onto it and bring more people into working with the sphere that encompasses the project as a whole. Which is actually an ideal time because people have that little bit of extra motivation. For that I need your help, yes I’m saying you..and you and yes even you in the back hiding under the cat ears, as you need to want to help out directly to affect the changes that you want to see within the project. We’re not just going to know what it is you want without explaining what it is.

An example that came up today. A user was having an issue with one of our bug wranglers and came into User Relations to discuss it. One of the issues brought up, the wrangler in my opinion was correct in closing the bug, but was overly terse and didn’t give a adequate explanation of why it was closed. This obviously perturbed the user and as they explained that they had no clue why it had been closed. In the case of this bug it was in fact a feature of many applications and not a bug. The item in question was about the fact that during configure and consequently during builds the application was using /usr/local/lib for the source of a library instead of /usr/lib. As you might know this is not an unusual occurrence to find configure looking in multiple spots for a library. Had this been explained it’d of not been an issue but was dismissed out of hand.

While the immediate issue was of course explaining the reason why and why the developer would say the same thing as I had attempted to explain. It also became a thought for me of how things could be improved. The immediate first thought contrary to what might of been thought was that we have far more bugs then wranglers and an obvious and simple solution would be to possibly find some more people who’d have the perseverance to help out others in this very direct way. Many of you do it on the forums and would to me make sense to be a perfect transition to continue helping out in another way for the benefit of the entire community. It’d also lighten the load of those staff who deal directly with the bugs day in and day out for any and every package. There is however one catch. You need to be staff as far as I’m aware currently to be a bug wrangler. For that you need to pass the staff quiz, which really is not a horrible quiz if you look it over. I know many of the staff would appreciate the help.

One area that has disappointed me however is that I’ve had one total request for things to write about that involve Gentoo. That being the discussion about the GLEP-55 proposal which I’m happy to say a few people in #gentoo have even linked to as explaining even the basics of what that means. I’d like to absolutely write more as long as people have topics they’d like to know about. I have no problem doing research about it if need be. I just need your help in what you want to know more about. This goes as well for User Relations. I’ve seen one suggestion coming into our mailboxes with suggestions of the ways to improve matters. I know there are a lot of people out there with idea’s and I’m more then willing to read any suggestion that you might have, big or small and discuss it with you as well. If we get the response I would hope we would get, I’d been inundated for at least a week and having a direct interaction with you the end user.

I’ve certainly heard your unified voice, now let me hear you individually.