On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 12:13:03PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On a personal note, in my experience the most effective way of working > with James and Ryan is to trust that they generally know what they're > doing and more or less leave them to get on with making things better on > their own rather than hassling them for status reports or similar. Well, that leave one obvious question then, are they the best people for the job ? because I'd really prefer people that work 10% less, to communicate what they do in the other 90% of their task, so that everyone knows what's going on, and can plan their own job decently. My point is, many tasks in debian depend on what DSA/DAM/... do and especially when. Event if (for the sake of the argument) I admit that things get eventually done, the unknown time part _is_ generating a _lot_ of frustration. > "Just leave them to their own devices" isn't something you'll see > recommended in management books, but when people are doing stuff that > they care about for fun, it's worth considering. This is just handwaving: letting them in their dark corner because they work faster like that, is not related to the issue that is debated: no one says james or ryan are lazy, the problem is almost nobody know what and when they are doing it. > A downside is that it makes it hard to know how to help, We're far beyond trying to help them, at least for me, I just want to have ETA's and communication because this is how people work together. Their work (or absence of, or delays of, or ...) are impacting the work of every single DD out there, and that sucks. Do you want a Simple example ? For almost 4 or 5 months (if not more) there is no Alpha machine available to developers, one being restricted, the other in lock down, waiting for a setup I guess (<-- did you remark the I guess ? I mean I don't know what's going on, and nobody knows afaict). The "problem" is, I'm now helping packaging the glibc, and we have a couple of alpha-only bugs. Things really stupid like headers problems, that would almost take a full minute to be fixed. BUt that bug fix is pending james, Ryan or a local admin work (again I've to guess), and nothing is coming, neither explanation on why no alpha machine is accessible, nor why it takes so long, nor an ETA. So what is _my_ reaction ? that I just don't give a damn about alpha, that bug will rot because: (1) there is nothing that I can do, and (2) and _THAT'S_ the real source of the frustration: I've no fucking clue of when it'll be fixed, and I'm tired polling db.debian.org to know when the fuck this machin will be up again. I've stopped doing so a couple of weeks ago, and I just erased alpha from my head. I understand they cannot communicate about _everything_. But a downtime like that _is_ worth communicating. If they don't understand it, then I for my part don't understand how they are in those critical positions in the first place. There is plenty of people out there that I'm sure have the same set of skills, maybe work 10% slower, but communicate and reduce the project frustration to 0 wrt core teams. So sorry, but I don't buy a single word of your argumentation here. -- ·O· Pierre Habouzit ··O madcoder@debian.org OOO http://www.madism.org
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