Re: The FreeRDP fork

Hi Peter,

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 2:49 AM, Peter Åstrand <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Mar 2011, Marc-André Moreau wrote:
>
>  Keyboard handling was the reason why I started working on my own set of
>> patches for rdesktop. I don't want to re-open the two year old discussion on
>> the matter, but since FreeRDP was started, we often got
>>
>
> Yes, I remember the discussion we had. You have to forgive me for being a
> developer: I have an opinion on how it should be done; which technical
> solution is the best. You claimed that your solution was better, I
> disagreed. No consensus was reached and no majority pushed your solution.
> Matt didn't step in. The existing implementation stayed.
>

Personally, I don't care. I was just saying that in practice, my solution
brought us more users, for the simple reason that your solution failed. I'm
not saying my solution is flawless, because it has its own flaws, just like
yours has. I took the time to document it here:
http://www.freerdp.com/wiki/doku.php?id=keyboard

>
> I don't see any particular strange about this process, it happens all the
> time in the open source community. Did you really expect me to remove my
> keyboard implementation and replace it with yours even though I did not
> think it was better?
>

Yes, there was something strange: you didn't seem to truly understand the
subject. Maybe you did, but you really failed to show it. Keyboard input is
a very complex topic that can become confusing very quickly, I agree, but
from the discussion we had I don't see how you were proving your point,
really. I'm not saying you should use my code, because if you wanted to use
it you should have done it two years ago, all I'm saying is that even though
this is long behind me people still thank me today for fixing their keyboard
problems. Maybe that's a hint that it's not a bad idea after all.

>
> Now, if you believed that your implementation really was/is better, you
> could have maintained it even though we did not initially accept the patch.
> If I remember correctly, we even offered you a separate Subversion branch.
> If users really preferred that implementation, it would sooner or later get
> enough supporters so that we could replace the existing one with yours.


First, I was not offered a separate subversion branch. The problem with
every contributor maintaining their own set of patches is that it really
slows down development efforts. Instead, I got that email from Jay saying
that he liked my idea of forking, which I did. If you can consider me
starting my own fork being "maintaining my own implementation, that would
sooner or later get enough supporters", well, that's what happened. We
forked. People liked it, and ditched rdesktop to work on FreeRDP instead.
I'm sorry to be proving you wrong here, but FreeRDP is nothing of a one-man
show: there's no way it would have gotten this far without all the efforts
from the FreeRDP developers that joined after me.

Actually, Peter, I am very thankful: for the last couple of years, there was
a lot of interest in developing an RDP client, but rdesktop failed to
properly receive those contributors. All it took was a fork to get all those
contributors willing to spend all their time working on a good RDP client.
You've simply made my life awesome by keeping all those people from being
fully accepted until I open my door wide open for them to come in and
contribute. What else can I say? You can justify yourself all that you want,
just look at freerdp-devel and rdesktop-devel daily activity: one of them is
filled with discussions, and the other one with feature or bug requests half
the time. I let you guess which one is which.

>
>
>
> Rgds, ---
> Peter Åstrand           ThinLinc Chief Developer
> Cendio AB               http://www.cendio.com
> Wallenbergs gata 4
> 583 30 Linköping        Phone: <%2B46-13-21%2046%2000>+46-13-21 46 00
>

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