[Freedombox-discuss] need for concensus or not

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 07:53:39PM +0200, bertagaz wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 06:44:42PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 05:09:15PM +0200, bertagaz wrote: I see little
>>> need for decision making processes.  Most of the tasks, I believe, are not
>>> tied strongly to one another, so there should be plenty of room for
>>> disagreements.
>>>
>>
>> Well, to begin to work I guess we would need to agree on the configuration
>> debate (hack vs debconf) for example. Having a clean decision about that
>> would help to begin to explore how to implement. But maybe I'm too pushy on
>> this, and this project needs more discussions.
>>
>
> If we were hired in a company to reach a common goal, then yes, it really
> would make sense for us to agree ahead on what that common goal was.
>
> We are volunteer hackers, however.  It makes good sense to understand the
> individual goals of each other so as to not step on each others toes, have a
> common language when sharing ideas, and most importantly to avoid duplicated
> work.
>
> But as I see it, if we restrict ourselves not only to a common direction
> but a (too specific) common goal, then what will most likely happen is that
> we loose valuable contributions, as we take the steam out of passionate
> hackers wanting to scratch their own personal itch, not the itch of a
> consensus team.
>
> Specifically about hack vs. debconf (or sysadmin "dirty" hacks vs. distro
> style "clean" hacks, as I feel more accurately frame it), I believe I
> succeeded in raising my concerns (unlike some of my previous attempts at
> other teams). If some of us still favor sysadmin-style dirty hacks on top of
> Debian instead of distro-style clean hacks integrated with Debian, then let
> them do that - the rest of us can cherry-pick from their work in our slower
> pace. :-)
>

I actually quite like your cherry-picking idea. I think it would be very
awesome if someone put together a quick'n'dirty FreedomBox image - something
that might just run in VirtualBox or on a LiveCD - which people could test
and play with and iterate rapidly on features and behavior.  Then when there
is consensus on individual components being "good", the distro gurus could
jump in and help package those components properly in a Debian compatible
way.

There is no reason there has to be only one of these, of course, but just
getting the first one out the door would immediately give people something
to play with.

Does this kind of structure appeal to people? I would be willing to provide
some resources - my company has unused bandwidth on a few lightly loaded
Linodes which I could probably contribute.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, CEO and janitor of the Beanstalks Project.

http://beanstalks-project.net/  ~  http://bre.klaki.net/
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