Hmmm... okay... a few more days to think about this and analyze things... and I'm not sure I can say I agree anymore with the statement that Jeff Johnson is a fucking idiot. Perhaps he is just not a fucking team player. Perhaps he is more anti-social than idiotic.

See, I still do take issue with the fact that he wants to have complete and total control over a project that should be a community one. I do take issue with the fact that he so cavalierly dismisses the technical criticsms of his peers. I still think the decision to move RPM development to a blog is insanely stupid. I still agree with most of what I said before. Even that this whole thing he is doing is fucking idiotic.... I just don't know if he is specifically a fucking idiot, or just someone doing a fucking idiotic thing at the moment. I hope the latter.

Why this slight change in my assesment? Well, let's look at the facts a bit:

• Jeff No Longer Works for Fucking Red Hat
  I actually can't tell if this is true, but it sure seems to be. In one of his last messages he says "And my time belongs to me now". Also, in a reply to Paul Nasrat he seemed especially curt when it was announced the CVS would be down (or rather, was down). I may be reading more into this (and I could just ask him, but I'd rather just suppose and move on :-) but it sure seems he doesn't work there anymore.
• Jeff seems influenced by Debian things at the moment
  On his webblog he has links to 3 Debian people's weblogs. He is making the RPM headers XML (something that several Debian folk have whined and moaned about for years to be done in RPM). And he apparently is a big Fink user. Not sure what all this means, but given the political seperation between the two camps (RPM & DEB) in the past, and one that he has been known to participate in, it sure is strange.
• Jeff seems to be in a power struggle with Red Hat over RPM
  This is nothing new. Red Hat is notorious for forking and borking RPM, so I wouldn't blame in the least the RPM maintainer taking issue with that and pushing back. Of course, I wouldn't shut myself out from the community, just move the community to an arena I had more control over (e.g., my own source repo, my own mailing lists, my own site, etc.) Note this isn't the same as moving development to a blog... that isn't very friendly to the community... certainly doesn't harbor community involvement like a good mailing list or something else.

Personally, it seems to me that Jeff is actually a decent enough guy that just can't handle much traffic with people. If he had someone who could work as a liason between the community and him (someone to filter the junk and get the important bits to him) it would probably work out well enough.

In other words, what probably needs to happen is the RPM development community should move to some new location (someplace other than the Red Hat controlled and Red Hat neglected RPM.org) where they can have all the things they need for the community to prosper (a wiki, mailing lists, irc, forums, whatever). And then some liason chosen from this RPM community (preferably someone who can work with Jeff and his quirks, my vote would be James Olin Oden) would be the person who worked with Jeff to get stuff from the community into RPM proper.

Some people have suggested just forking RPM and forgetting Jeff and his anti-social nature. I am not so sure that would be prudent. Jeff, like it or not, is currently the most knowledgable person on the planet with respect to this rather difficult to understand code-base. He may not have the experience necessary to take it in some of the directions it needs to go (CGL is what always pops up in my mind), but he certainly is better equipped at understanding how to get new bits into this code base. Some people have even suggested that Red Hat may attempt a fork... man I hope not. There's always been a power struggle between Red Hat and any communities that are associated with the software they use. I'd hate to see RPM get re-absorbed back into the empire that is Red Hat.