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  • #61
    Originally posted by log0 View Post
    This sounds like appeal to authority. Even if someone has knowledge on the subject, what exactly makes you think that he is more likely to tell you the right thing?
    Because he has knowledge. You wouldn't trust your grandmother on something computer related would you?.

    However in this case its not only one. They are quite a few that came to the position they are not because someone placed them there but because of their merits.

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    • #62
      Originally posted by Fenrin View Post
      +1

      A quote from http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux....26/focus=81281:



      A thread on Google+ about this, started by Lennart Poettering:
      https://plus.google.com/115547683951...ts/dARyF4UbXzf

      Most who responded to the g+ thread above, agree that removing the previous copyright notices is not right.
      Copyright notices remained intact in all commits pushed to any branch in the repository. The issue that gregkh had was that a developer who did not understand how copyright notices worked used a branch to propose the addition of Gentoo Foundation copyright notices to various files. This does not constitute removal.

      If anyone believes that copyright notices were removed, I would like to see solid evidence to collaborate those beliefs. Otherwise, such accusations are nonsense.

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      • #63
        Originally posted by ryao View Post
        Copyright notices remained intact in all commits pushed to any branch in the repository. The issue that gregkh had was that a developer who did not understand how copyright notices worked used a branch to propose the addition of Gentoo Foundation copyright notices to various files. This does not constitute removal.

        If anyone believes that copyright notices were removed, I would like to see solid evidence to collaborate those beliefs. Otherwise, such accusations are nonsense.
        ok fair enough! Some people interpreted his sentence "None of those conditions included keeping the copyright line intact." that some Gentoo developers would like to remove certain Copyright notices. So this was probably a misunderstanding then.

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        • #64
          Originally posted by log0 View Post
          This sounds like appeal to authority. Even if someone has knowledge on the subject, what exactly makes you think that he is more likely to tell you the right thing?
          Appeal to authority is not always a fallacy. Trusting relevant experts on a subject we do not know enough about to make an informed opinion is not a fallacy. See The Fallacy Files entry on the subject.

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          • #65
            Originally posted by TheBlackCat View Post
            Appeal to authority is not always a fallacy. Trusting relevant experts on a subject we do not know enough about to make an informed opinion is not a fallacy. See The Fallacy Files entry on the subject.
            It's basically a domain problem. The concept that 'an appeal to authority is a fallacy' is a concept from the realm of strict logic-based argumentation, the kind of stuff you learn in philosophy class. If you are attempting to have a rigorous logic-based debate about a specific idea or argument with someone, then you can whack them with the 'appeal to authority' bat if they start saying stuff like 'well, Aristotle said X, so it must be true'. In the context in which you're operating, that is a fallacy.

            As you correctly point out, most of us don't actually operate in this domain most of the time. If Dave tells me 'this is how graphics driver development works', it's fine for me to trust Dave. We're not engaged in a strictly logic-based debate about how graphics driver development works, so the concept of 'appeal to authority' just isn't really valid. Unless you spend your entire life trying to ensure that absolutely everything you do has a foundation in rigorous logic-based argumentation, which you probably don't, you should be careful before dismissing things as an 'appeal to authority'.

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            • #66
              Originally posted by ryao View Post
              Would you elaborate on what you mean by working closely with Lennart? Lennart Poettering's first commit occurred in 2006 and his second commit occurred in 2009. His participation seems to be fairly recent given that udev is 9 years old.
              Kay, who maintains udev, works closely with lennart, who maintains systemd, in the areas where the two components overlap.

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              • #67
                Originally posted by log0 View Post
                Oh, come on. It was just a pull request from a dude who did it without understanding the implications. It wasn't even accepted afaik and I don't see how this would make "Gentoo as awhole look bad". All I see is a few dudes being seriously pissed due to the fork and looking for something to bitch at. Which is kinda entertaining on its own.
                the fact of a fork doesn't make Gentoo as a whole look bad, but the fact that it's a fork by a bunch of guys who clearly don't have a clue what they're doing did make Gentoo as a whole look bad for a bit. And probably still does to those who don't understand that it isn't really an official Gentoo-blessed project, just a small group of Gentoo devs.

                I mean, they clearly have no clue about copyright law. They say stuff like:

                "I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you, but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been well defined. Some short term goals have been defined, but I imagine that you are already familiar with them. I suggest asking again after our first tag."

                which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what waterfall and agile actually *are*, and more to the point, boils down to 'we refuse to tell you what our plans for udev are and we don't actually really know ourselves, we're just poking stuff it feels like a good idea to poke'. This doesn't seem like a great maintenance plan for a core infrastructure component.

                And then they commit stuff like https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/comm...4dc81c0589c8cb , which is just...well, Greg explains: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux....26/focus=81281

                A fork of udev in and of itself is not an invalid thing to do. This, however, appears to be a fork maintained by Laurel and Hardy. It is clearly doomed unless it gets taken over by people with clue. I'm not even a developer and I can see that they don't really have any idea what they're doing.

                Comment


                • #68
                  Originally posted by AdamW View Post
                  the fact of a fork doesn't make Gentoo as a whole look bad, but the fact that it's a fork by a bunch of guys who clearly don't have a clue what they're doing did make Gentoo as a whole look bad for a bit. And probably still does to those who don't understand that it isn't really an official Gentoo-blessed project, just a small group of Gentoo devs.

                  I mean, they clearly have no clue about copyright law. They say stuff like:

                  "I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you, but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been well defined. Some short term goals have been defined, but I imagine that you are already familiar with them. I suggest asking again after our first tag."

                  which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what waterfall and agile actually *are*, and more to the point, boils down to 'we refuse to tell you what our plans for udev are and we don't actually really know ourselves, we're just poking stuff it feels like a good idea to poke'. This doesn't seem like a great maintenance plan for a core infrastructure component.

                  And then they commit stuff like https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/comm...4dc81c0589c8cb , which is just...well, Greg explains: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux....26/focus=81281

                  A fork of udev in and of itself is not an invalid thing to do. This, however, appears to be a fork maintained by Laurel and Hardy. It is clearly doomed unless it gets taken over by people with clue. I'm not even a developer and I can see that they don't really have any idea what they're doing.
                  eudev is "an official Gentoo-blessed project", but I do not think that you understand what that means. Unlike developers in other organizations, any Gentoo developer can start a project for any reason. It does not need approval and it is as official as any other project. eudev would have been almost certainly developed behind closed doors for the first few months of its existence had it been a RedHat project. If I recall, your company did that with KVM. Your company also makes it difficult for independent review of changes its makes to GPL code in monolithic patches. If it weren't for Oracle's RedPatch (which is awesome), it would be impossible for most of us to audit your company's changes. When RedHat doesn't provide monolithic patches, we see single line commit messages in pull requests to various projects. The only exception to this that I have seen is Linus' tree, where Linus rejects pull requests containing such commit messages.

                  All of the changes to eudev are developed in the open and none of our work is currently considered production ready. I wrote the commit that you cited because the kmod dependency broke things on Gentoo stable (think RHEL6) and keeping it in HEAD was problematic for development. We have observed situations in systemd where things committed to HEAD in systemd are be non-functional when first committed, only to be fixed with additional patches later. You could claim that it would be natural for things to look like this because of how merges work, but when we snapshotted systemd, we obtained a new builtin called hwdb that was clearly broken. It was later fixed in a slew of commits made before the 196 tag. We believe that new features should be introduced to HEAD in after multiple developers have verified it as working, not before. We are working toward a repository in which that is the case. However, we literally just started. I am currently reworking the kmod builtin in a branch. It will be merged after it has been verified to be working well on all target system configurations.

                  By the way, I see that you are a GNOME developer. Please enlighten us about how the GNOME project would have approached this. I believe that many people would like to know.
                  Last edited by ryao; 22 November 2012, 05:38 AM.

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    Originally posted by ryao View Post
                    eudev is "an official Gentoo-blessed project", but I don't think you understand what that means. Unlike developers in other organizations, any Gentoo developer can start a project for any reason. It does not need approval and it is as official as any other project. eudev would have been almost certainly developed behind closed doors for the first few months of its existence had it been a RedHat project. If I recall, your company did that with KVM. Your company also makes it difficult for independent review of changes its makes to GPL code in monolithic patches. If it weren't for Oracle's RedPatch (which is awesome), it would be impossible for most of us to audit your company's changes. When RedHat doesn't provide monolithic patches, we see single line commit messages in pull requests to various projects. The only exception to this that I have seen is the Linux kernel, where Linus rejects pull requests containing such commits.

                    All of the changes to eudev are developed in the open and none of our work is currently considered production ready. I wrote the commit that you cited because the kmod dependency broke things on Gentoo stable (think RHEL6) and keeping it in HEAD was problematic for development. We have observed many things to be committed to HEAD are non-functional (e.g. hwdb) when first committed, only to be fixed with additional patches later. You could claim that it would be natural for things to look like this because of how merges work, but when we snapshotted systemd, we obtained a new builtin called hwdb that was clearly broken and was later fixed in a slew of commits made before the 196 tag. We believe that new features should be introduced to HEAD in after multiple developers have verified it as working, not before. We are working toward a repository in which that is the case. However, we literally just started. I am currently reworking the kmod builtin in a branch. It will be merged after it has been verified to be working well on all target system configurations.

                    With that said, there is great irony to your comments given that you are a GNOME developer. Linus Torvalds has made terrific comments about the quality of your project's work. In specific, it is an "unholy mess" [1] and "GNOME Are In Total Denial" [2]. Your criticisms of our project would be valid had these commits been part of GNOME, but they are not.

                    1: http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linu...nome-for-xfce/
                    2: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/l...n-total-denial
                    1: You appear to have missed the part where I explicitly said:

                    "And probably still does to those who don't understand that it isn't really an official Gentoo-blessed project, just a small group of Gentoo devs." If a project doesn't require any review and can be started on a whim by any Gentoo dev with no oversight by anyone else, in what sense is it an 'official Gentoo-blessed project', exactly? Does Gentoo apply its name to any project started by anyone who has Gentoo commit privileges, with no review whatsoever of what that project entails? I'm not sure that's a terribly smart policy.

                    2: I am not a GNOME developer. I am a QA engineer. Never written any GNOME code, never written any code, never going to.

                    3: RH developers can certainly create projects in the open and develop them at any point, though they don't typically use RH resources to do so, as it only leads to confusion. As neatly illustrated in the current case. KVM was developed by a separate company called Qumranet, who were then bought by RH, who opened up the code. If you look into RH's history, you will note that this is a consistent pattern: we buy small, relatively closed-development-model companies, and open their code. To the benefit of all.

                    4: I don't have much to say on the kernel patch issue as it's nothing to do with me, but you may note - all of this is entirely public information - that it happened shortly after Oracle started releasing our product, commercially, under a different name and attempting to undercut us on service. For the many years where non-commercial RH clones existed but no commercial clones like Oracle's did, our kernel patches were available in separated form. You may draw your own conclusions.
                    Last edited by AdamW; 22 November 2012, 05:40 AM.

                    Comment


                    • #70
                      Originally posted by AdamW View Post
                      1: You appear to have missed the part where I explicitly said:

                      "And probably still does to those who don't understand that it isn't really an official Gentoo-blessed project, just a small group of Gentoo devs." If a project doesn't require any review and can be started on a whim by any Gentoo dev with no oversight by anyone else, in what sense is it an 'official Gentoo-blessed project', exactly? Does Gentoo apply its name to any project started by anyone who has Gentoo commit privileges, with no review whatsoever of what that project entails? I'm not sure that's a terribly smart policy.

                      2: I am not a GNOME developer. I am a QA engineer. Never written any GNOME code, never written any code, never going to.

                      3: RH developers can certainly create projects in the open and develop them at any point, though they don't typically use RH resources to do so, as it only leads to confusion. As neatly illustrated in the current case. KVM was developed by a separate company called Qumranet, who were then bought by RH, who opened up the code. If you look into RH's history, you will note that this is a consistent pattern: we buy small, relatively closed-development-model companies, and open their code. To the benefit of all.

                      4: I don't have much to say on the kernel patch issue as it's nothing to do with me, but you may note - all of this is entirely public information - that it happened shortly after Oracle started releasing our product, commercially, under a different name and attempting to undercut us on service. For the many years where non-commercial RH clones existed but no commercial clones like Oracle's did, our kernel patches were available in separated form. You may draw your own conclusions.
                      AdamW, thanks for your response. However, I had made some corrections to clarify what I meant, although it looks like your response would have been the same either way.

                      1. My point is that there is no distinction between the two.

                      2. Our QA rules are not yet in full effect. I would appreciate it if you would review our work after our first few tags and then let us know what you think of our commits.

                      3. That does not change the fact that you are openly criticizing our work at a point in time that RedHat's own things would have been developed behind closed doors. It does not seem fair.

                      4. People resell Gentoo under different names and we are okay with that. We do not change how we do things because of them.

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