Re: Why are we here?

Thomas Lord <[email protected]> writes:

>     Why are we here?
>
> The Arch project has long suffered from a lack of having
> a clear direction -- a "big umbrella" under which all of
> our interests are unified.   In a way, that's because the
> project has long suffered from having too many contradictory
> directions: resume fodder for Tom, keeping Tom alive through
> busking, helping to bootstrap Canonical corporation, making
> real some advances in our understanding of revision control,
> living up to being a part of the GNU project,  serving as the
> "in-house" system used by several projects, defeating Subversion,
> defeating Bitkeeper, winning kernel developers, providing a 
> learning environment, providing a funky project that's fun to
> work on as a hobby, helping to advance Savannah, and on and on...

For me, some of those directions raised my interest in this
project. There is some irony here because some things that 'hooked' me
were singularities like the hackerlab library. I started reading the
good old "Arch meets hello world" tutorial and some of Tom's writings
about revision control systems and arch. Then I became addicted to the
project and started reading the GAU. My feel was that in this
community I would have learned very much. And so it was. This ml,
especially Tom's mails but not only that, changed my mind. I started
using Emacs, learning Scheme and stopped being moved by "IT fashion".

> Maybe part of the problem is that we don't have a clear purpose -- a
> unifying belief in what we are doing.   We don't have a clear statement
> that we can use to recruit new volunteers --- a statement that might
> have the logical form "Join this project if you want to help us do
> _______".   We have only the empty circular way of filling in that
> blank "help the Arch project".

I Agree. For now, I know what I must do, I have some technical
deficiencies and I must work to solve this.  But if you Tom, and some
other very talented people like you draw a direction for the GNU Arch
project, programmers in their learning stage like me canf find a space
here and help this project going on.

Basically I'm asking a TODO list :-)

Andrea.

P.S. sorry for the previous post, I pressed the wrong key
sequence. Ah, and sorry for my english.

-- 
Lisp is a programmable programming language.
     -— John Foderaro