That’s the generalized response to the flawed argument “if you want it, why don’t you make it?” in open source. People specialize at tasks to hopefully increase the total effectiveness of a system to more than it would be if everyone did everything. However, this means that if the only people who have the power to do something unionize, other people can’t get that thing without agreeing to their demands.
You could say in this situation, the core devs of Arch “unionized” to demand either coding help or patience from those who want the feature. I’m not interested enough in this situation to be bothered to research whether this is a reasonable demand. If it is unreasonable, c) is the case, and if it is reasonable, a) or b) is, but that’s as far as I care to investigate.
> Or c) those who want it don’t have
> enough skill to code it, and those who
> have the skill aren’t interested.
Those who want it, but don't have the skill
to code ti, want to demand that someone that
has the skills, spends their leisure time
creating it for free because they don't want
to pay for it.
If it is really that important to you, and
you don't have the skills to do it, you always
have the option of paying someone that *does*
have the skills to do it for you.
If you don't have something you want and I have (the skill to write this patch), instead of bitching and griping, make it worth my while to do it for you.
I don't know that the union argument really works in the Linux distribution realm. After peeing in the community pool Mr. WhinyUser went off to a fork of Arch that supports signatures (for their additions only, which doesn't appear to address his original concerns about Arch repositories, but apparently for some the appearance of "security" is enough). But even if he didn't have that fork to go to, there was nothing stopping him from adopting one of the many Debian offshoots, or Redhat, or ... The Arch maintainer union -- really an odd term for a handful of unpaid volunteers -- have no control over his actions or desires, but there are plenty of Linux distribution alternatives out there.
There is no rational explanation that justify why a really major issue, or for that matter even simply an issue most users want, should not be implemented by the core developers for 6 freaking years. If you are too busy to code, you should step down and leave the position; same thing if you think the bug is not one of your personal priority: you are the maintainer and you have taken up a responsibility towards the users. Abandon if you cannot do it.
I had my own little delusion with nautilus developer, of which I talk here ( http://gilest.ro/2011/patches-for-nautilus-move-to-trash-bug... ). Same attitude there: lots of people want the bug fixed, patches exist, won't fix.
I witnessed rare similar cases of the random guy knocking on Arch's door and raving in about how he knows the world and everything and that we should all bow down before him but it never escalated to the point it has on that precise case.
Sad to see LWN publish an attack without making an effort to get the other side of the story first. If the complainer had made the patch submissions he claimed and that the Arch maintainers deny ever seeing, well it should be pretty easy to sort out before publishing the article -- if you're really interested in journalism, that is.
To me, it seems they are fighting really hard to make Linux a user friendly desktop platform. Even if it leaves behind some ways of working that us older Linux users are accustomed to, I think this is a worthy cause.
However, it's a shit way to do it and tramples on a lot of people... and in the mid to long run can damage a project greatly.
A more constructive way for a user to get a feature in is to either pay for it, or code it. Setting up a 'bounty', or helping to get funding is a better way to try and get these novel writers to help with the project.
Get these passionate writers working for the project by directing their energies towards getting funding. Telling them to shut up and submit a patch won't work... since they are not capable of writing code sometimes. However they do care greatly about the issue, and have time to send off emails and write blog posts.
Notice the dates. The "Arch Bounty" system was born and died while people complained. People who were complaining about this could have asked for a bounty for this feature and paid for it, but they didn't.
Does anyone know of other distros that don't sign their packages?