I’ve been trying to get my old freedesktop.org CVS account renewed for more than 2 months now. I filed a bug report and kindly and repeatedly asked on IRC. I was told that they have no admin ressources or got no response at all. I’m curious how many of your efforts were already massively slowed down by the lack of clear rules and responsibilities. I’m also perceiving similar problems in GNOME, where lack of time by people in charge who mostly work on distro-specific stuff that has nothing to do with stock GNOME, or lack of clear accountings already proved to scotch many efforts.
Back to freedesktop.org: Nobody seems to care for my bugs and some bugs in the GNOME bugzilla depend on them, like this one (cf. related GNOME bugzilla rant by Erich Schubert). Whoever can arrange that my CVS account works again, he’ll be my very special hero of this weekend and get a free beer.
Update
Eric Anholt deserves beer!
On a sidenote: I always think it’s kind of sad if people get what they want exclusively because of some sort of advantage over others (i.e. some people are not able to rant in blogs), or rather the position they have in a community. Bugzillas are IMHO really meant to work in a socialistic fashion by being polite and treating all bug reports equal.
Pretty sad to say that GNOME and freedesktop.org haven’t been very professional and organized that slow down the pace of GNOME development. We need more dedicated ppl.
All animals are equal, but some are more equal. 🙁
http://print.google.com/print?id=SGAZdjNfruYC&lpg=PA131&pg=PA133&sig=WGHTNmAQLRV-fqi6LfIcAV-CQ9k
Here’s the problem with fd.o as I see it:
It’s basically just a computer. We don’t have any organization to what we do — no decisionmaking process, no policies. There are a small handful of people who have privs for adminning, so it’s just whatever they get around to. When I trawl the bugzilla every week or so for sitewranglers bugs, I look for ones I’m sure should be done. These are usually new accounts with all the information attached, and a comment from the project leader saying “yep, this is legit.”
When I see a request for a new project, I hesitate. I don’t know if it’s really an important project, if the desktop developers think it would be useful, or if the person applying for the new project has the perspective to work well in making an fd.o project. So I usually leave it.
When I see a request to change ssh/gpg, I get really sketched out. We’ve got no mechanism to authenticate this — gpg is the theory, but people lose gpg more than they lose ssh. So I’ll usually drop this on the floor, until I get some other authentication of it, such as a well known character on irc, or in this case a blog on p.g.o. Still not good authentication, but a reasonable indication that the change request is real I think.
Perhaps we should be associating phone numbers or something with users, so we could contact them. It would also be less worrisome if CVS was jailed somewhere so you could only access the repo through CVS, rather than hand-editing. Basically right now getting a user’s fd.o account = being able to silently trojan projects that the user’s a member of.
All of these possible changes are admin time, though, and I usually see admin time as subtracting directly from x.org time (perhaps not exactly true, but close). Sigh.