Hi Oswald, > from my experience, people without maintainership ambitions simply adapt > to lower standards.
Such people are fast to discover => you can ban them (it may/should have also a social face, not only sudden change of commit rights or alike) at the very beginning => solved :). > they could already do that, by reviewing each other's work and otherwise > building an active community. they are not. And they did - in the first years when the project was vital. > so you replaced the maintainers by a moderator, and the process is > supposed to be entirely democratic. > well. dream on. Well, not exactly - the point is, it should be possible to make change in the "not-so-stable" branch both way (commit/revert) enough simple, so the whole project (i.e. stable branch maintainers) wouldn't be the only bottleneck from the time perspective. > then maybe you should explain what you meant? thinking it through > properly? I tried, but didn't notice anyone from "those who are still around" to not care. Therefore I was a bit surprised by your view/feeling. > as that's about the time i joined the oss community, i can confirm that > esr's essay is still pretty much spot-on. in fact, it would be kinda > weird if hackers suddenly changed in the last 15 years. They definitely did (of course not suddenly, but slowly throughout those 15 years) - at least they are not only bound to the code and let's say low-level stuff, but also use e.g. smart phones with extremely high-level interfaces and all other bullshit like Web 2.0 etc. which do influence them in the way, they are more willing/open and implicitly expect changes and new features even if they in themselves don't want to. On the other hand, they should be aware of those who stick to the behavior and life(view) described in esr's essay. In mutts trac there are plenty of patches from people who tried the "more agile" variant (propose feature/change or report bug, then expect response, then provide patch or expect someone to provide it, then another response and then finally reject or commit) in a quite short time (let's say 2 or three weeks), but it didn't happen and therefore they left or stopped to be active. 15 years ago, they definitely wouldn't have left in such case. > maybe you just didn't look closely enough, or didn't think very hard > about what you are seeing. or you are in denial and are rationalizing > your observations, which is a pretty common reaction when people are > uncomfortable with the only logical conclusion the evidence allows. Thank you for pointing this out - I'll try to look closely. Regards -- Jan Pacner
