Re: [chat] Re: [SLUG] Benefits of source distro(Gentoo)somewhatelusive :-)

[invisible ink <jdub@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stuart Guthrie:

> There is plenty of room for tweaters of all levels in open source
> software.
> 
> I completely disagree with your somewhat lofty view of who contributes and
> how important it is. Maybe compiler tweaking is where this Ulrich (to drop
> a name) guy started.

Well, despite the general good humour of this thread until very recent
posts, there are some serious and not so serious points to be made. Yes,
playing with compiler parameters is fun, but it's not a 'contribution', and
there's very little technical merit involved.

It's worth pointing this out to potential contributors (if they're willing
to accept it), so they don't waste their time being fascinated with stuff
that largely doesn't matter. Perhaps, if Ulrich (who is largely a glibc
hacker) started out on the wrong foot, he wouldn't have had the interest or
inspiration to gain the deeper knowledge required to do something truly
worthwhile.

So, perhaps Ben didn't catch the jokes or intentions behind my posts, and
that's disappointing, because it gets people's hackles up. But regardless of
his interest in compiler optimisations or displeasure in my emails, I hope
he does go off and look into this more deeply. Even if I've ticked him off,
he's learnt something.

It's not like I'm providing further information with intent to harm... :-)

Everyone learns from the SLUG cluebat, because we're all interested / good
at different things. It's good stuff.

- ii

-- 
  Penguinillas Pack GNUzis