[Mesa-dev] Why is www.freedesktop.org/wiki/AccountRequests/ so "complicated"?

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 17 April 2016 at 16:58, ⚛ <0xe2.0x9a.0x9b at gmail.com> wrote:
> Secondly, the content of the wiki page feels overly bureaucratic to me. Not
> in absolute sense, but in relative sense: when compared to services such as
> github.com, the freedesktop.org wiki page feels like a nice example of
> excessive bureaucracy. Why does the wiki page use so many words to describe
> how to make an account request (in year 2016)?
>
> I wouldn't care about the content of the wiki page at all if there existed
> an alternative web page that would make the process of creating an account
> request simpler. "Simpler" web page in my opinion means a web form with just
> a few fields, a single button and several sentences of text. Many account
> registration web pages around the world look like that, because it is less
> time consuming and therefore more efficient/productive.
>
> What is the logic/rationale explaining the content of
> https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/AccountRequests/? I am unable to find an
> explanation for it.

The simple explanation is that our available admin time, and keeping
the infrastructure running, stable, and performant is already
surprisingly time-consuming. The coda to that is that GitHub is open
to everyone as a general-purpose hosting service, where you can put
whatever you want there. On the other hand, fd.o accounts are only
given out to active contributors to a relatively small number of
projects (infinitesmally so, compared to GitHub's 35 million
repositories), and so optimising the account-creation process is not a
particularly high priority compared to other infrastructure work.

That being said, making it easier to create and administer accounts is
on our to-do list, and the infrastructure work to let us do it is
about half-complete.

Not that it seems like it applies to you anyway, since we do require
real names for accounts.

Cheers,
Daniel