Mon, 27 Sep 2004

Weekend was good; good to get away- gave me the energy to deal with mail and play with tinderbox until a very late hour once I got back. Surprisingly, despite only being in Miami for around 33 hours, it still felt like a very good, full weekend- not rushed at all.

I also accomplished some stuff on the plane- wrote a nice satisfying mix of uber-constructive and uber-flame-y emails, and I wrote version 0.1 of ‘why every project needs a bugmaster’, which I’ve placed temporarily here. I’d be sort of curious what others who’ve worked with me or other bugmasters think of it.

Was good to see two build fixes go in today, thanks, jrb and shaunm. And jamesh tipped me off to the use of ‘skip’ in the jhbuildrc, so I will probably be able to build with a ‘pristine’ moduleset shortly. Have to figure out how to build with a fairly recent mozilla without tripling the build time, though.

I may be missing context, but on getting off the plane, it was extremely disappointed to hear that anyone objected to using build-buddy to generate gnome snaps. It had me in a borderline frothy rage, in fact. I now know it was only one person, but… still. While I frequently mock nat’s obsession with ‘stop energy’, it sadly did not surprise me that someone would complain about someone else’s work on a technicality. We’ve got to get better about that. We can’t become a frozen, conservative project- the response to problems has to be ‘how do we fix the problem’, not ‘we can’t do it at all.’ ‘More rules’ is usually a bad answer to ‘how do we fix’, I might note. Mind you, I’ve been bad about both of these in the past, but I’m trying to learn. We’re going in that direction already, and if we keep doing it, it is going to be that, not Windows or KDE or Swing or whatever, that makes us irrelevant.