On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Thomas Goirand wrote:
On 11/25/2012 02:19 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:I really wish people would stop having this debate. It is completely pointless for us to argue here over whether or not the fork will be successful. The outcome of that argument is completely irrelevant to the world: even if we all decide that the fork will be successful or all decide that the fork will be unsuccessful, it will not have the slightest effect on reality. Meanwhile, it will become obvious (or at least much more obvious) whether the fork is successful if we just wait and see what happens. All that debating its possible success is doing is hardening everyone's positions (about something for which there's no point in having a position!) and creating hard feelings. For those of us who are not directly involved in upstream kernel development or other affected upstream projects, the *only* thing that anyone has to worry about at this very, very early stage is whether you, personally, want to go help with the fork.I probably would have like to at least contribute a bit what I can (I don't think I could have helped a lot with major core stuff on a udev fork, but I'm sure there are other areas where help would be welcome). But if everyone in Debian already rejects it before we have anything to show, then I wont waste my time.In fact, seeing how this discussion turns out, I probably even regret even the few hours I spent on a Sunday, few months ago, trying to build OpenRC on Debian.
It is not "everyone in Debian" who rejects the fork before it has anything to show. It is just some people in a thread.
(As an aside: I generally read my Debian mail a day or a week behind "real-time," so that I can digest it faster and threads appear fully-formed. If I need to comment, I can have the perspective of a whole day's discussion. I happen to be in the middle of changing my email configuration, so I'm seeing these with less delay.)
So I'll tell you, and the rest of debian-devel:I, for one, think the fork is interesting. I think it faces some technical challenges, but all software projects face technical challenges. It also faces some social challenges. But since I am not one of the ones "doing the work" there, at best I can attempt to provide helpful advice from the sidelines.
So Thomas, if you want to "do the work" and actually participate there, I encourage you to do that! And to find out yourself what the project needs and has, and if it's going to be helpful for Debian users in the long run.
I'm glad you compiled OpenRC, and I'd love to hear how it worked out for you (probably in a separate thread) I'm glad you're interested in contributing to the eudev project. It sounds like there is plenty of work to do.
If you are interested in my attempts at helpful advice from the sidelines, I would suggest making a checklist of what it takes for the project to be ready for a first release, with the criteria as objective as possible.
Additionally, it would seem useful to have a project goals statement as soon as possible so people know what they're trying to do. That should be done before the release criteria, I'd say.
That sort of exercise has been very useful in collaborative endeavors in my experience. If you think it could get traction with other eudev contributors, and you are willing to spearhead it, I could totally spend some time working on it with you.
Cheers, and happy hacking, -- Asheesh.