Re: "Forking is a Feature" reactions?

----- Original Message ----

> From: Eric Evans <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Sent: Wed, September 15, 2010 1:02:17 PM
> Subject: Re: "Forking is a Feature" reactions?
> 
> On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 09:05 -0700, Joe Schaefer wrote:
> > > It is  amazing  how you (and I mean a big y'all of people negating
> > >  distributed SCM along  those last 5 years or so) can keep the
> > >  illusion that a technical solution  (called "centralization" here) 
> >  > can keep an organization together more than a  set of core values 
> > > can.
> > 
> > It comes from experience with dealing with  younger projects in the
> > Incubator that are not so enthralled with svn's  workflows, and the
> > social problems that seem to result from those  attitudes.  Eric is
> > a relatively new committer at Apache and he  still talks about his
> > role as being like a "gatekeeper".  That's  not something he picked
> > up from us. 
> 
> I'm going to work really  hard at not being offended by this.
> 
> I do not view myself as a gatekeeper,  and more importantly, that is not
> a role I desire (for myself or anyone  else).  However, I'm not
> self-deluded enough to believe that because I  aspire to lofty ideals,
> that I somehow do not possess access to a controlled  resource _that
> others do not_.

Then perhaps your portrayal of the typical role for an Apache committer
was "exaggerated for effect".  When the day comes that most of our
patch submissions to jira are git-formatted (and hence incompatible with
svn) I will be far more receptive to the idea that svn is a greater barrier
to community participation than svn is.

> If anything, my interest in a  decentralized version control system is to
> even the playing field, remove  obstacles, and empower contributors.

Sure, but you have to ask yourself why it is that Apache committers tend
to make a *lot* more noise about this than our contributors do.  I suspect
the motivation is more "because git is so powerful" than the more idealistic
notion that "git levels the playing field".  But I commend your idealism
nonetheless.