[om-council] Forwarding email from Ben

rugyada rugyada at gmail.com
Fri May 12 17:03:57 EDT 2017


Forwarding Ben's email.
Sending to Council list and because of the latest issue, to be sure,
to personal email address.

*****>Please don't forget to "reply to all" in your replies (kind
reminder)<*****


=========================================
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ben Bullard <benbullard79 at cox.net>
Date: 2017-05-12 21:49 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: TC-meeting today.
To: Raphaël Jadot <rj at hodo.fr>, OpenMandriva Council
<om-council at ml.openmandriva.org>
Cc: Colin Close <itchka at compuserve.com>, rugyada <rugyada at gmail.com>


Raphael can you or someone please forward this to Council as Mailman
is currently broken? Thanks in advance.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First please know that I try to be aware of and that I do appreciate
everyones contribution, efforts, and hard work. I need to single out
our developer community here and acknowledge that in some ways Y'all
are doing an incredibly good job. Your hard work and efforts are very
much appreciated.

Need to sound off and bounce some serious thoughts off all of you. I'm
aware these are direct challenges to officers of the Association and
to Council. That is intentional.

FWIW-1: Starting to think we have serious governance issues at OMA
and, especially, with the distribution.

1. Decision making process seems utterly broken.

2. The disconnect between developers and rest of Community is so
profound as to be damaging to the Association and the distribution.

FWIW-2: What ever transpired in Hungary has never been disseminated to
the Community still to this day. This goes to both points in FWIW-1.
I'm tired of hearing I cant's and we cant's on issues like this. That
is not an excuse for not communicating with Community. If it's to much
trouble to communicate with Community then Association should
dissolve. If addressing this isn't a more important issue than
switching urpmi to dnf than we go back to FWIW-1.

FWIW-3: I need to get a yes or no decision on the main-testing repo in
ISO's issue. By any measure this is irresponsible. I can't imagine
QA-Team approving something like this. Whatever the cause of this is
we need to address and fix the real problem not resort to, again,
irresponsible practices. This is, to me, embarrassing and holds the
potential for a public relations disaster. For the distro this is a
suicidal decision. If addressing this isn't a more important issue
than switching urpmi to dnf than we go back to FWIW-1.

Two things about this.

 a. It should have been discussed. Was it? If it was I'm not aware of
it. I was blind sided by this. I don't care for being blind sided.

 b. This should have been announced. Was it? As above...

 c. If this was discussed and announced than there may be serious
communications failure.

FWIW-4: The issue of default file system on the ISO's is similar to to
the issue about main-testing repo in the ISO's.

 a. It should have been discussed. Was it? If it was I'm not aware of
it. I was blind sided by this. I don't care for being blind sided.

 b. This should have been announced. Was it? As above...

 c. If this was discussed and announced than there may be serious
communications failure.

Aside: Both of these (FWIW3 and 4) are issues that do affect QA-Team
(and the Community at large) and IMO QA-Team should have been part of
the decision making process. This is disrespectful of our time and
effort. Both of these issues effect far to many people to be decided
by one person or a small group. Besides which such behavior makes the
Association and distro look dictatorial rather than inclusive.

FWIW-5: We need to get our own house in order before we even think of
releasing ISO's for public consumption. This is the responsible course
of action for the Association.

FWIW-6: For those of you who have decided to switch from urpmi to dnf
perhaps it would have been wiser to include more people in the
discussion and decision making process or at least let the Community
know that this is going on. From the outside looking in it appears
that a very small group of people are deciding what is best and the
rest of us can like it or leave. Again this could have been handled
better. The fact that the Community by and large has not stepped up is
not an excuse, you don't engage a Community by not trying. If what we
are doing isn't engaging Community then we need to ask why it isn't
working and correct that.

In summation:

1. We're never going to be able to engage the Community and grow the
distro if we don't even try. And we aren't trying.

2. The way we are currently governing the Association and more
specifically the distribution is exclusionary not inclusive. If we
wish to grow the distro we need to change this 180 degrees.

3. I personally feel on the outside looking in as if "It's OK for
ben79 to do testing but he better keep his nose out of important
stuff".  And bear in mind it doesn't matter if this is literally true
in this instance perception is everything. If there are others feeling
this way imagine the damage that has been done to Association and
distro.

4. Would it be possible that all of us, me included, find a way to
learn how to communicate with and initialize communications with
users, testers, people on forums and mailing lists, publications, ect.
in such a way as to engage and attract participants and grow the
distro? Currently we seem to be doing the opposite. Surely there is
some source of education on this. If developers aren't willing or
inclined to do this then we must have someone to interact with
developers and communicate with the Community and the Linux public at
large on behalf of and in cooperation with our developer community.

Since I'm not privy to Council meetings how or where will I be able to
find answer to these important questions?


Thanks,

Ben Bullard

ben79
--------------------
OpenMandriva-QA Team

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