Re: Re: about your concept

On Thursday 22 July 2004 06:27, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > > It is
> > > significant that none of these people have done so.
> >
> > If you insist on measuring merit by lines of code alone, then yes.
> > OTOH if you first ignore all contributed code then complain nobody
> > contributes code anymore, is nobody to blame for not doing so?
>
> Congratulations, you've managed to miss the point quite
> stunningly. They *didn't* write any code. That means they didn't care.
*I* wrote code, i submitted patches, i tried to start and promote discussions, 
but i was completely ignored.  There was no explanation given, or even a "we 
saw this and didnt like," it was just like talking into the ether.  And I 
wasnt the only person: plenty of people wrote in willing to submit code, or 
do other things (some ran binary package repositories, took in 3rd party 
patches that were getting ignored or lost on the list, or just alleviated the 
slashdotting by helping answer the deluge of questions that were completely 
off-topic to this list).

And then *you* used the fact that you knew the head developer to merge in a 
complete reworking of the network protocol without a sentence of discussion 
on the mailing list until *after* you had merged the code in.  At which point 
you called anybody who thought there was a better or different way "stupid" 
and "insane" and refused to listen to anybody else's opinion.

Now i *dont* contribute code, and its mostly because i assumed that this list 
was for people to discuss changes to the project, and that there would be 
some sort of review process for getting code put into the main tree, not just 
"people who know mark in real life get in automatically, people who dont, 
good luck".  You have probably lost many smart and talented contributers to 
the project because you a) ignored them completely, or b) called them idiots 
as soon as you see what *might* be a better way to do something, or just 
didnt feel like looking at their code.

In order for such a large project to succeed, there needs to be a large and 
receptive group of core developers who can lead intelligent discussions and 
make fair decisions about what to put into the code, or provide good 
explanations as to why something *doesnt* end up in.  What I see is one 
person who doesnt have time to lead the project due to work (certainly not 
his fault, and i dont blame him for it, but it still seems to be the reality 
of the situation) and another person who is completely unwilling to look at 
anybody else's code or listen to anybody else's opinion.

Thomas Stephens
[email protected]