Kevin Barry <barr...@gmail.com> writes: > Hi David, > > Although you have changed the subject to "Resolving standoffs" your > email reads like an attempt to force a resolution - in your favour - > of one *particular* standoff.
Yes and no. It is foreseeable that with an influx of developers into LilyPond, there will be future situations of comparable kind to resolve and so it makes sense to figure out how we want to approach resolution-finding in that case. > It seems to be more of a protest than an attempt to elicit discussion. A "protest" would imply that my role here is that of being powerless, and that of Han-Wen is to be in power to stop contributions of mine. So the diagnosis of "protest" on its own already makes a statement about the governing structure of LilyPond, and finding out what kind of governing structure should determine how we work on LilyPond is part of what I consider this a good occasion for getting feedback on. > I am both a lurker and not capable of understanding the disagreement > between you and Han Wen, so I can't offer an opinion on it. And > obviously take my view with a grain of salt, but is it not typical for > this development community that, when there is some kind of > irreconcilable disagreement, that the proposal just dies? For better or worse, we have not yet had the situation that irreconcilable disagreement arose over a pure syntactical change that a developer wanted or needed for the sake of moving in an experimental direction. That is: we have had a number of such changes every few years from different people for various reasons, and none of them was ever blocked by other developers without alternative proposal and without any justification other than that the blocking party did not want the other developer to work in a particular direction. So the kind of irreconcilable disagreement we have here is new because there is no alternative proposal or no negative consequence as a counterweighing interest. There basically is just an "I don't want it, and I don't believe that it would be useful for the person proposing it." > I don't know if it's frequent or not, but I saw it happen with many > discussions that arose after the recent in-person meet (they died in > standoffs). It seems to be the norm. Is it only a problem now that it > is holding up something you are advocating? It is a problem now where there is no alternative proposal for enabling long-running work on alternative implementations and no negative impact on the code. It's the first time that we have someone blocking refactoring with a view of future progress because he does not want to believe another developer can make use of it, and not because of actual tangible drawbacks. This refactoring allows strictly more implementation methods than previously. As one terminal option, it is much easier to _revert_ with a script (rather than dealing with merge conflicts from future development when reverting in the version control system) than it is to create it or maintain the conflicts in parallel development branches differing in syntax. Of course, resolving this in a different manner is also a possibility, but the implemented solution here is what more or less came out as the best-liked alternative with least impact on code readability serving this purpose. So a different resolution requires a different proposal, and general agreement that this is also an acceptable way of writing things. -- David Kastrup
