Re: Summary and few tips

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 11:33 +0000, Phil Willoughby wrote:
> Quoting Rogelio Serrano <[email protected]>:
> > How many experienced coders are needed to have regular releases of Y?
> 
> Who cares?

	Only those who want to see Y succeed. Of course they'd do better
actually contributing code, but there's no harm in asking. If Rogelio
didn't have anything to contribute then you can ignore him (man, it
really is easy), but if he is a artistic wizz then you just lost Y a
useful asset. Oh man.

> The following words/phrases are not forces in this project, and any argument
> based explicitly or implicitly on them is invalid:
> 
> + Market share
> + Profit
> + Popularity
> + Competitiveness
> + Time-to-market

	Agreed. However, anyone trying to encourage some kind of response from
the main developers (even using these expressions), for the benefit of Y
is a good thing.

> Personally, I hope that the X.org team is successful in whatever they choose to
> do.  This is not an either/or situation, improvements in X.org do not take
> _anything_ away from Y; nor do improvements to Y take anything away from X.org.

	Erm, I think specific improvements in X.org have lost Y it's main
developer:

> I don't have the time or the inclination to do any significant
> development on Y, and probably won't for a long time.  XRandR finally
> lets me change resolution on my laptop, and it looks like they might
> even crowbar in some semblance of translucency into X.  Bravo to them.
> I still want to replace X: I think Y is a much better way of doing the
> job, but the need is less pressing.	

	I agree that those philosophising about the failure of Y doesn't
contribute anything to the project, but that is not my goal here. I just
want to point out how terrible the organisation of this project was. You
see, a few emails a week asking how development is going is a _tiny_
problem in comparison to those who deliberately put off people
contributing. I saw a few developers with 10 years or more of C
programming experience losing interest instantly when they first
introduced themselves. Complaining about the signal/noise ratio on a
mailing list of 20 email a month is _stupid_. Telling people they have
nothing to contribute the moment they introduce themselves is _stupid_
and _rude_.
	I have contributed chunks of code into Y. I wrote a separate client
library when I realised patches were no longer being accepted into the
core (and considering only by going into the core would code be really
appreciated, I stopped working on it). The reason Y failed is due to bad
management at the centre. It utterly failed to combine the incredible
amount of enthusiasm and talent which was given to them on a plate in
order to create a seriously cool bit of code. Oh well.

-- 
richard <[email protected]>