[Mageia-dev] A little attention please

[Michael Scherer]

Hi,

First, let me present myself. My name is Michael Scherer, and for those
that do not already know me, I am a member of the Mandriva packaging
community, and one of the 4 zarb.org admins. I am also involved in the
launch of the Mageia project since the start some months ago.

I just went back from FUDCON 2010 Zurich yesterday evening and I have
been quite overhelmed by the amount of discussion that is going on at
the moment, and I must confess that I feel more than stressed by
everything that is going on, to the point I still didn't connect to irc
yet. 

Of course, we are all happy of the tremendous support of the community,
but more than 500 messages in 2 days is a little bit too much for me to
digest, and so I would like to share a few points :

- please try to avoid sending emails like "i would like to help to
$FOO". While we are quite happy to see such mails, they are not very
helpful at the moment since we have to sort everything, and we cannot
accept help on $FOO yet. We have started to think about how we can
manage this, and we will likely soon setup a temporary wiki so people
can add their name ( likely tomorrow, once we have sorted the really
urgent stuff ), but in the mean time, I think people should wait a
little. I would also like to remind you that you can also wait for us to
ask for help, ie once we will need it. Let's say someone want to
translate the distribution in french. If you want to do it, do not say
"I want to translate". Just wait until we have something to translate
when we will ask for help, and then sent the email. Or add your name on
the wiki once it will be set up and announced. By acting this way, we
will be more efficient as we will not have to search back in the
archives to see who offered what, and have less mails to read
( especially when we are very very busy ). 

- please try to not start long discussions about technical details
( like the thread about kernel-libre, about server component ). While of
course we need to have technical discussions as every technical project,
I must remind everybody that we do have any kind of infrastructure for
the moment, so this is a little bit early to start. And discussing it
now when we have nothing to commit or anything is IMHO distracting us
from our priorities, and a source of future frustration for people, as
we shouldn't make any decision in a hurry.

- please do not forget there is some priorities in setting up. As
someone who boast of having non existant skills in website on his blog,
I am quite delighted to see people are eager to do the work, but I think
we should first have a server to host the website before discussing of
the logo. And so one. The same goes for codename, flickr account or
others. So will I am happy to see that people are doing stuff that I
will never be able to do properly, I think they need to realize that we
are not ready to get contributions yet, and so that it will take time,
and waiting can be frustrating, so please cope with us.

- in the same idea, while it is wonderful to see that people want to
start user groups in various country, I must remind the harsh reality
that we have nothing to use yet. So there is no hurry yet. If people are
really interested, I think it would be wiser to plan a little bit more
the creation of the and try to get information on what is needed to
manage a community, by reading books like "The opensource way", or "the
art of community". I have plenty of ressources on the subject for those
that want it, and I think it can take some time to digest.


and, as a more personal note, please do not register every possible
variation of the domain name. One of the few problems we faced while
searching for a name was that a good part of all names were already
used. And we painfully discovered that good names are a scarce
ressource. So in order to be good netizens, I think we should act
responsibly, and let others people use names even if not related to the
project.

Now, I must be clea, I do not ask to people to stop all discussions, far
from it. You can discuss everything you want, but I would like to remind
everybody to think a little bit of those that will read all the emails
( like me ), and how much time this will cost to them. If I spend 1
minute on every mail since the start ( as I need to get them from the
web interface ), and since there was 520 mails in 2 days, this make 8
hours to read everything properly ( without counting the 15 mails that
appeared in the mean time.

And while I will be reading this, I will not be setting the
infrastructure or anything. 

Thanks for reading my boring mail and I hope to be back on you soon with
more interesting news.
-- 
Michael Scherer