Re: Re: about your concept

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 08:23:37AM -0500, Thomas wrote:
> 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.

I see a few odd patches sent to the mailing list and not followed
up. None of them interested me, so I ignored them. Mark doesn't
habitually keep a list of patches, rather assuming that people will
remind him if it's important.

> 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.

I very much doubt that it was significantly affected by the fact that
I've known Mark for a while, and rather more by the fact that I
provided an arch archive and something Mark was interested in.

I don't see why you think the mailing list had anything to do with
it. It is a discussion forum, nothing more. I can talk to people
without using it quite easily. Not that there was much to discuss; we
both knew more or less what needed to be done.

> 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.

Fiction.

> 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

All of those things are accurate, but it seems like you have little
experience with free software development. The review process is Mark
(and occasionally me) looking at the code, and not every discussion
about the project happens on this list. Not least because of all the
people who chime in with ill-educated opinions.

> 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.

I rather doubt that. We've lost a fair amount of dead weight though.

> 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.

No. I don't know where you got that idea. Quite the opposite really -
for a large project to succeed, you need a (small) group of
gatekeepers whose primary task is to say "no". That's the hallmark of
every successful large free software project (Larry Wall gives a
rather good talk on the subject).

This isn't a large project anyway.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

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