On 2011.06.10 07:10, Xiaofan Chen wrote:
The community is very fortunate that he is *able*
Wow, that is great to know.
Peter will be able to understand what I mean...
Yes.
I'm happy for Peter here, and while I apologize for the intrusion as
well as the opinion I am about to provide on matters that are clearly
unrelated to OpenOCD, for those who want some clarification as to what
Xiaofan means above, let me provide some insight with regards to what
has been happening with another project, that Peter is also a maintainer
of.
For those who don't know, Peter has now been the _sole_ maintainer of
the libusb project [1] for about 9 months, a project that is perhaps as
widely used as OpenOCD (if not more), is both experiencing and requiring
new developments, and has been in _critical_ need of a release for about
a year. With very old, well known and non risky fixes still not having
been officialized, the libusb project has been getting complaints from
our users left and right, yet, still no release appears to be on the
horizon and Peter's involvement as a maintainer has mostly been limited
to rebuilding his personal (i.e. non official) git branch every 3 months
or so. Lately the project has even been qualified as "one of the most
disheveled projects (someone) had ever seen". Hardly something a project
maintainer would want to put on their resume, and clearly an indication,
if there was need for one, that action needs to be taken by the
maintainer...
Yet, perusing various mailing lists shows that, whilst Peter seems to
have plenty of time to get actively involved and take on demanding
challenges in other multi-maintainers projects such as coreboot or this
one, where his absence to tend to other matters could be very much
excused, he still somehow manages to neglect the one project where there
actually doesn't exist any other maintainer to take over, and in effect,
and I am carefully weighing my words here, has been condemning the
libusb project to a slow death...
Therefore, it comes as unsurprising that both Xiaofan and I, and most
likely other libusb contributors and users, are a bit flabbergasted by
this latest announcement, since Peter being able to afford the level of
involvement that is expected from a project maintainer has really been
at the crux of the libusb controversy over the past few months...
All I can hope then, while yet again congratulating Peter on his new
maintainer position, is that, unlike what is happening with libusb right
now, he will _genuinely_ be interested in performing his maintainer
activities for OpenOCD, and that his actions, or lack thereof, will not
cause a repeat of the disarray that has befell on the libusb project.
Regards,
/Pete
[1] http://libusb.org/
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