Re: Re: Possible WM Documentation Project

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Alex Perez wrote:

> Whaaa! *hands you a tissue* Excuse me, but when you write a patch and it 
> doesn't get applied for what you highly suspect are purely stupid political 
> hatreds, I think I have every right to be somewhat ticked about it. You have 
> no right to tell me to "get over" it when you have no real understanding of 
> what's actually going on. The WM team has revoked CVS access from people who 
> actually had cvs commit privelages to the wm2 branch who were pro-gnustep. 
> They have a very clearly established track record of stonewalling and also of 
> completely disappearing for months on end and then getting all defensive when 
> people threaten to fork. Since they're back to their same old shenanigans, I 
> suspect you can expect to see a fork by some other folks of some form here in 
> the next six months.
>

Alex,

Unfortunately, you lack pieces of information to have a "real 
understanding of what's actually going on".  The pieces you have are from 
your perspective as a contributor to the GNUstep project.  As the 
individual who has provided the hosting resources for windowmaker.org and 
has acted as the general PR man for the project since 1998, let me set 
share some insights with you.

For the record, your comments and attitude towards the Window 
Maker developers have already gotten you into trouble within the GNUstep 
development team for misrepresenting the GNUstep project.  Your unilateral 
decision to frame Window Maker as not having had any real ties with 
GNUstep was largely unsuccessful.  Window Maker has a lot of history in 
supporting and promoting the GNUstep project.  The Window Maker developers 
have not always agreed with some of the decisions the GNUstep project has 
made and vice-versa, but that is healthy discourse between two open 
source projects with complementary goals.  Why you continue to paint the 
Window Maker project and developers as being anti-GNUstep or having 
"stupid political hatreds" toward GNUstep is beyond any of us.

As for revoking the cvs access to the wm2 branch, yes, we did do that.  It 
was not without explanation to those involved, and it was generally agreed 
upon by all parties.  We encouraged the creation of a wm2 branch instead 
of a fork, because forks are not always the best way to resolve 
differences.  Fragmenting a user base over small things like patch 
submissions, code usefulness, and eye-candy is counter productive. 
Alfredo and Dan set standards for the quality of work that goes into the
project.  The majority of patches that get submitted don't live up to 
that because they're not well thought out and tend to break other parts 
of the code.  Ultimately it's their project, and their perogative to 
decide what goes in or out.  Some perceive that as arrogant, and others 
take it for what it is.

If a group wants to fork the code, it's GPL, and they can do so without 
permission from anyone.  The only thing we're guilty of is asking those 
who would do so to think about the consequences and the real reasons for 
doing it.  Most of the time the real reason is that so and so contributor 
wanted to see a particular feature that scratched their itch, but didn't 
really help anyone else.  The other reason is usually that they're angry 
their patch was rejected because the code was lousy in general at solving 
the problem, or as mentioned above, broke other portions of the code. 
Instead of taking the advice given by Alfredo and Dan on how to improve 
the patch for submission, the first impulse is to give them the 
proverbial finger and fork the code.

Finally, as for "disappearing for months on end", Alfredo and Dan don't 
get paid for this work and they have real jobs.  To date, nobody else has 
proven they have the ability to take on large portions of the code and do 
so in a responsible manner without radically changing the goals of the 
project.  If such a person stepped forward and could devote time to it, 
Alfredo and Dan would be happy to have them onboard.  The other 
misconception is that if the project doesn't release every few weeks, it 
must be dead or the developers must be ignoring everyone.  The fact that 
we waited two years between a release shows the level of commitment by 
the developers to make sure things worked well.  It also shows that 
Window Maker is a mature, stable piece of software that doesn't need every 
little doodad under the sun added to it.  Lots of people like it the way 
it is.

-phillip
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