CentOS docs - Jul 2010 - edit by AlanBartlett

I see this diff:

Subject: centos wiki] u/d  AdditionalResources/Repositories  /RPMForge  by
     AlanBartlett
The following page has been changed by AlanBartlett:
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge?action=diff&rev2=31&rev1=30

The comment on the change is:

No questions should be asked of any author within any article. 
Please use "Info" to determine to whom a particular query 
should be addressed.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   == CentOS 3 =   Does not have protectbase.

- Does have a {{{rpmforge-release}}} package but you don't want it enabled;
QUERY: Why? RPH
+ Does have a {{{rpmforge-release}}} package but you don't want it enabled.

===============================================================
CentOS wiki articles have no ongoing 'owning' author of record 
by design -- they may have an initial author who cares about 
the content of an article.  If so, that author will set a 
monitor on that article on a self-service basis, and read 
diffs, and decide if they still care.  We settled that long 
ago

You know, my initial reaction is to revert this as it is 
still unanswered

I am aware of no 'style guide' to the effect of that commit 
comment, and would not support one to that effect if proposed. 
It breaks agile development.  If you want bureaucracy, Fedora 
awaits

I've made my view in CentOS space (that is: here) quite clear, 
that broken matter needs to stick out to provoke the author or 
champion of it to fix it.  This question has been there since 
2010-05-27, and the question remains unanswered here or there. 
Burying it under a rug does not answer it

This is basic agile development process, and really any non 
top down developmental process:  The principle is:  break
 	loudly and as early as an error is detected, to avoid
 	concealing broken code

agile is of course the refactored 'continuous improvement 
process' child of 'eXtreme Programming' [a somewhat broken 
'early draft'], and uses Ward Cunningham et al's XP tool, the 
wiki

And we are back to where we started.  If a person wants to 
write a book, go write a book.  But as to the edit (which I 
will shortly revert) the venue it is in is still a wiki

-- Russ herrold

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 12:16 PM, R P Herrold <herrold at centos.org>
wrote:
(snip)
> - Does have a {{{rpmforge-release}}} package but you don't want it
enabled; QUERY: Why? RPH
> + Does have a {{{rpmforge-release}}} package but you don't want it
enabled.
(snip)
> I've made my view in CentOS space (that is: here) quite clear,
> that broken matter needs to stick out to provoke the author or
> champion of it to fix it. ?This question has been there since
> 2010-05-27, and the question remains unanswered here or there.
> Burying it under a rug does not answer it
Rather than letting this go into [potentially a heated] debate, let's
take this as a good opportunity to do some positive thinking, shall
we?

Russ, you posted that query on 2009-10-20 (not 2010-05-27) as I can
see it in this diff:

http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge?action=diff&rev2=23&rev1=22

That is, your query went unanswered for 10 months.  I do receive [and
take a look at] every diff mailed to me. But to tell you the truth, I
did not notice that query. It was buried in many changes you happened
to make in that particular edit.  I would imagine other people
(including the original author who put the sentence in) did not see
it, either.

So, here comes the positive thinking part: what would have worked
better if placing the query within the page did not do the job?
'Asking on this mailing list' comes to my mind. That way, chances of
getting attention will be quite good.  Posting here will also be
useful especially if a question is something that is best discussed by
people on the -doc list rather than something the person who wrote the
sentence "decides".

Akemi