dag, axel somefrom from centos, let's please meet on LinuxTag (Re: Log from yesterdays (20070523) EPEL SIG meeting)

Axel Thimm Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
Sun May 27 11:54:03 UTC 2007


On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 11:36:23AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> Further: I'm actually so unhappy with the current situation that I'm
> willing to invest even more work to get repotags in EPEL4 and EPEL5 and
> will leave EPEL if we don't get them.

This contradicts your own actions: It was you who was the main
opponent to repotags. W/o your opposition repotags would had probably
passed (same for no-fedora-usermgmt-in-RHEL). And the outcome of the
repotags fiasco was predicted from the very start months ago: Much
pain to the other repos, a signal of non-cooperation and so on.

So nothing has factually changed, the pain was there, the other repos
strongly disapprove of your choices and methods and were driven
away. Reverting the decision on repotags (which is really dead now,
you killed it) is not going to change that, and is a questionable
method in itself. You either believe in cooexistence and respect the
request by other repos for repotags or not.

I've grown very suspicious of hidden agendas to rule the world. I know
that the fact that EPEL now isolated itself and other projects not
being interested in contributing to EPEL (much like EPEL also never
planned to contribute back to other projects, it won't even cooperate
at a lower level) was not really part of your plan, but it's the
natural outcome if a project doesn't care to coexist with other
projects in the same ecosphere, especially when it simply targets to
walk over them.

So, the rhetorical question is why the change of heart? Because you
really changed your mind on the principal questions of how EPEL should
interact with its peers, or due to people walking away and you would
like to lure them back making some compromises you don't really
believe in? I strongly think that what you expressed about EPEL vs the
rest of the world on rpmfusion lists and here is still valid.

> I'd even go a step further and say now that I'll leave EPEL if we
> don't find a peaceful way of co-existence with Dag and Axel and
> CentOS.

Now, that's a hyperbole, and EPEL is exactly were you drove it to. You
even had yourself crowned president of the project with the sole
rights to issue votes (on the grounds of having such a messy voting
like the repotag issue should not happen again, aka more pain to
whoever tries to issue an unpopular vote like myself), shortcut
decisions and the mission to discuss things off-public. Messing up a
project and threatening to leave it and have others clean it up is not
proper IMO.

> Maybe we can even get back to the drawing boards and find a way to
> cooperate.

Sorry, no more thl-batteries. You used them all up and you know that I
recently canceled myself out of two projects that meant a lot to me. I
was a big believer of EPEL and even more so of rpmfusion, but after
all a project is just made out of the people behind it, and by now I
know that we two completely failed to manage *three* projects counting
the kmdl debacle last year. Not to mention the mass rebuild and
disttag discussions on the pure Fedora side of things. We are really
on 180° different points of views to express it as objective as
possible.

A second chance is always appropriate in the FLOSS world, maybe
sometimes a third as well, but when one starts thinking about a forth
and fifth chance, then something is definitely wrong in the picture.

> Please do not confuse opinions expressed by individuals with a general
> "EPEL mentality". Sure, those people are part of EPEL, but in big groups
> there are alway lot's of different opinions.

That's why there were votes on these issues by the EPEL steering
committee and there were almost unanimously (and in fact you should
take me out of the votes to see the current mindset of the EPEL
committee and you will find that almost all votes *were* unanimous).

> So, as I said, I'm quite unhappy with the current EPEL state -- just as
> Dag, Axel and some others are.
> 
> I'd really like to find a way out of this mess. Dag (you are on LinuxTAG
> afaik) and Axel (are you there or could we meet? maybe in the evenings
> if that's easier for you), can we please meet one or two hours on
> LinuxTag (Wednesday preferred)

Sure, we can meet. I'm less optimistic on whether this will actually
solve any issues, but I'm always open. I think a personal commitment
to something like Tim Jackson's
https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-April/msg00159.html
would had been a grounding stone, but it was just pushed (once again)
away to the board or fesco (this time the fpc was lucky), and EPEL is
in fact far beyond being able to comply to that Repository Community
Collaboration Statement already (and the copy in the wiki was
semantically changed to something else not even the orginal author
agrees with).

FWIW I won't hide the fact, that after the rpmfusion/EPEL fiasco I'm
looking for a new project that I will have ATrpms and my RHEL related
workload to flow into, and there are quite nice offerings.

> and find a way out of this mess that afaics to a big part evolved
> because mail communication sucks.

I don't believe in putting the blame on electronic mail. Yes, it does
allow things to escalate, and does so within a few hours. But these
problems are here over *months*. So there was no space for
miscommunication over that amount of time.

> A real life meeting maybe could get this mess solved. I'd actually
> would like to have someone around that could speak for CentOS,
> too. But not much more people as stuff might get confusing and
> unfruitful otherwise.
> 
> Dag, Axel, what do you think?

Let's meet.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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