Ken, sorry to see you go. By all means, prioritizing self care is vital! I've experienced burn out with other libre/free open source endeavors in the past (I stepped away as a contributing editor to undeadly.org for over a decade when my marriage disintegrated and only returned in a volunteer capacity in more recent years). I hope that you are able to find some solace and ideally comfort and support off list and wish there were more I could do to help.
Honestly, this has me wondering back to the January 27th mailing list post from Ryan about seriously considering "permanently banning" Gagan from the project and whether that might be a worthwhile subject to revisit? At the time I was kind of looking on in horror and not really taking an active role. If anything my post about funding to the mailing list the other day was in hopes to maybe redirect attention to endeavors that might be beneficial to MacPorts holistically even if funding and grants are rather orthogonal to the typical modus operandi of the volunteer nature of the project on the whole. Gagan, with regards to, "for those in the audience whom i offended: i apologise" [sic] I am not really feeling as if that is sufficient? Albeit, I am at a loss for what useful reparation steps would be, I am not a mediator by training. You wrote something earlier when this was all transpiring and I was "in the audience" (I hadn't realized I was in a playhouse, there was no box office nor ticket stub provided to me at any rate. Particularly given that I am an active MacPorts maintainer of a handful of Portfiles and previously worked with jkh who was one of the co-founders of MacPorts back when it was known as DarwinPorts) as you phrased it: "where i’m from, you treat others the way they treat you." I have absolutely no idea where you're from, and I am not asking you to volunteer such PII (Personally Identifying Information) but if "you treat others the way they treat you" to me seems as if it is an intractable modus operandi, in practice very similar to the cautionary warning about, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind" in response to Old Testament Biblical references from the Book of Exodus 21:23–27. However, where I am from (California, incarnated as a human in the late 20th century) your slovenly use of the English language, failing to capitalize first words in sentences, or first person pronouns such as "i" [sic] would have earned you failing marks in elementary/grammar school. I do not mean that to be condescending, it's just a matter of fact. However, this isn't a school and I am not an individual with a teaching credential. If anything, as someone who has a B.A. in Language Studies and being a polyglot, I tend to be extremely forgiving of others for whom English is a second language. Moreover as a musician (and certified Hip Hop Kultural Specialist at that), I tend to relish vernacular expressions and slang, so I'm a pretty far cry from the stereotypical grammar nazi who might harp on such things relentlessly, even if I had such individuals as instructors in my educational background. Such affordances aside, based upon what I have read that you have submitted to the macports-dev@ mailing list? Gagan, you would not have been given a modem by anyone with seniority as I was, decades ago as a teenager, when a friend passed along his 1200 baud Hayes modem after he had upgraded to 2400 baud modem. At least when I was younger, getting online was a rite of passage. A privilege, not a given. Consumer based operating systems did not ship with TCP/IP stacks by default until maybe the mid 1990s? So, if you were lucky enough to find a TCP/IP stack compatible with your microcomputer and its OS on a BBS and download it via (again, if you were lucky, something such as ZMODEM, with CRC32 error correction and retransmission capabilities as contrasted with earlier more brittle protocols with limited or no error correction) boot strapping and configuring such a thing was still a very involved process which might take days, even for someone like me. Moreover, I was relatively blessed to have begun formal instruction in programming at the age of six and had been exposed to computers and programming in less formal settings even earlier. To this day the church my parents attended in Menlo Park, shares a parking lot with SRI (Stanford Research Institute) where Doug Engelbart kicked off the NLS (oNLine System, later referred to as the Internet) in the 1960s. I knew Doug personally, and Bill English (the inventor of the computer mouse) personally before they passed away. Not just distant figures in some textbook somewhere. Moreover, should you have managed to make it online in the nascent BBS scene in the 408 area code? You would have had your writings, as you have submitted them to this mailing list in the year 2025 C.E. torn apart mercilessly by more seasoned users who, like me, were already proficient at coding in assembly for multiple different CPU ISAs and maybe, like I had: already written their own linkers and assemblers and were accustomed to interpreters and compilers throwing catastrophic errors for so much as a misplaced semicolon. Honestly, I never even owned a computer of my own until after I was 18! They were prohibitively expensive. I was repeatedly invited to work on and improve systems many places, such as nps.navy.mil (now nps.edu aka The Naval Postgraduate School) as a teenager. Their VR lab had a Silicon Graphics (SGI) Reality Engine² Onyx which I was told cost approximately $250,000.00 USD (circa 1993) that cost more than the mortgage on my parents' home! It was considered a "privilege" just for me to "get time" on such a system. It was unimaginable that I would ever be able to afford to use such a computer at home. My dad's Macintoshes, seemed downright primitive in contrast. In other words, from my vantage, the entire macports-dev@ mailing list has been extremely charitable to allowing your rants against Ken and if we were to actually put things to a vote as far as whom should be permanently banned from the project based on mailing list contributions alone (let alone seniority within the project or merged Pull Requests, and other potential metrics from maintainers and contributors) you have already provided more than sufficient writings, at least from my perspective to have justified a ban. Thankfully, I am not currently in a moderator position! I am a burnt out Senior System Administrator who contributes to MacPorts because it feels as if it is giving back to a community that can use the help. Honestly, despite my decades of expertise, it could use a lot more help than I can currently provide given my own limited resources and current financial and living conditions. Skills only go so far, some things require, time, money, hardware and good will. Gagan, I think you've exhausted Ken's good will and it is really upsetting to see. Dismissing other macports-dev@ readers as "audience" is diminishing as well; this isn't the macports-users@ mailing list, after all. I don't even have the wherewithal to subscribe to that personally at the moment; "I don't have sufficient spoons" for that and as someone who doesn't tend to mince words, the fact that I am taking time out of my hellish existence to even reply now is not a good sign. If you expect me, or others to ever hold you with a shred of respect or esteem, I think you are going to need to do a lot more than that underwhelming apology. As a native American English speaker, here's me being charitably generous to you: we spell the word: "apologize" not "apologise" please consult a lexicon or dictionary and act accordingly. Apple is, like me, based in California. We don't abide by the "King's English" here, monarchies and their colonialism are not to be respected; and if you want to open that can of worms, be ready for a lot more nit picking.
