Re: communication

On Sun, 2003-03-23 at 17:26, Mark Vojkovich wrote:
> On 23 Mar 2003, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > I think perhaps the term "communication" here is not really representing
> > the real problem. The real problem we've seen is perhaps one of 
> > interest.
> > 
> > In general, beyond Keith and Jim (and to some extent Mark), I've seen
> > very little interest among XFree86 developers in:
> 
>   That's because hardly anybody has these skills.  X developers
> are not a dime-a-dozen.  It's not like XFree86 is a company
> who can just go out and hire people to fill these deficiencies.

Are X architectural issues hard? Certainly. I wouldn't consider
them nearly as interesting as I do if they weren't hard.

But are they harder than kernel scheduling, compilers, 
porting a toolkit designed for X11 to windows, building a 
streaming media architecture, or all the other places where people 
just show up and do amazing things in open source projects?
I don't think so.

[...]

> > But the fact that nobody other than Keith was working on these
> > issues and getting stuff into XFree86 makes one wonder about structural 
> > problems; from my perhaps biased perspective, this stuff is really
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > a lot more interesting than support for flavor-of-the-day of some
> > chipset, so you'd think that interested developers would be 
> 
>    You've got to be kidding.  You think I write drivers because I
> find them boring?  You think everybody finds the stuff that
> you're interested in interesting?  

I certainly don't think that everybody's interest is the same.
But I'm disinclined to believe that drawing API's and 
application performance are fundamentally far less interesting
than dealing with sending commands to a video card. 

> > crawling out of the woodwork. Perhaps the problem is that
> > without current developers around to discuss, and review changes
> > in this area, there is no way for developers to become engaged
> > and eventually trusted.
> 
>    You have features you are concerned about.  Keith has the
> ability to implement them.  That's good.  I don't think that
> the fact that Keith is the only person who is an expert in
> those particular areas indicates a structural problem.  It
> just indicates how valueable and rare Keith's skills are.

This of course leads us to the thing that I think many people
have been trying to avoid saying ... if Keith is in fact the 
only person qualified to look at changes in this area, then it's
an enormous problem if his changes now are gate-kept
by someone else. (*) I'd have to expect that under such conditions
anything other than bug fixes is going to move glacially.
 
Without regard to who-hit-whom-first, one has to hope for a 
project where the qualified people are let work.

Regards,
                                        Owen

(*) I'm a huge fan of peer review, actually. But the first 
    prerequisite for peer review is peers.