[Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
Dear Savannah hackers, My name is Ivan Zaigralin, and my email is melik...@melikamp.com. I am using this gmail account because messages sent to this list from my own domain seem to disappear into a black hole. I am currently in the process of submitting a project to the non-GNU part of Savannah. I seem to have hit an unexpected barrier: unexpected to me, but may be that's just because my expectations were out of line with reality, so I hope you can help me to resolve this issue. What I submitted was ~ 120 KiB of bash code + licensing information. To my surprise, my submission is not being accepted, and the reasons stated I will simply quote: "These are person-specific scripts" "It doesn't seem to me that they could be generally useful." "Yes, this is my opinion that doesn't coincide with yours." "All this makes sense for personal scripts, but not for general use. They are just not written with such use in mind." "I don't think there are real objective criteria for things like e.g. simplistic package. We have to use our judgement." I want to draw your attention specifically to the fact that the reviewer is using nothing but his subjective judgment in order to decide whether my submission is "generally useful". I also want to make it absolutely clear, I have no complaints about this particular reviewer, and nothing in this post should be interpreted as a criticism of that person or any of his actions so far. The reason I find this surprising is this: FSF endorses Savannah as a "hosting service": "There are many services that will host your project's source code" "Savannah is a community project, providing code hosting for your free software project" This endorsement is explicit in claiming that Savannah will host *my* project, which I understand as me preserving the creative control over the code I submit. To contrast, the GNU project does and should make subjective calls as to what constitutes useful GNU software, just as the KDE project members make subjective calls as to what constitutes contributions useful to KDE. This makes sense because these are software projects, and when I submit code to them from the outside, it is implied that they have the creative control (or at least a greater share of it), and will make subjective calls in line with their unique and subjective vision of what their project should be and how it should get there. Most such projects also have very detailed descriptions of their subjective visions; for example, KDE is defined as "advanced graphical desktop, a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment and a platform to easily build new applications upon", and much much much more, which really narrows down the scope of the project, and makes it perfectly clear that only the code implementing that vision will be accepted. There is also absolutely no surprise when senior members of the KDE team, who share the creative control over their project, reject code based on their personal and subjective notions of quality and/or usability. So I was taken aback, to be frank, when I was told by the reviewer that my project is not accepted based on nothing but personal and subjective criteria having to do with general usefulness. After a lengthy inquiry, I still cannot locate any official Savannah description of any usefulness tests applied to submissions. I was fully expecting objective criteria (besides licensing), such minimal & maximal size in bytes, but I cannot find any listed anywhere. Indeed, I cannot even find any official subjective criteria, which would make sense if Savannah was in fact a software project. So it looks to me like my submission is being held up based on a personal subjective usefulness test which was applied to my project only, effectively singling it out. So with the information I have now, the only way to interpret what is happening is that Savannah is de facto a software project, whereas Savannah hackers assume a share of creative control right from the start, from the moment of submission. Just like any community project, Savannah is fully entitled to make the rules, but as an FSF member I see an issue with endorsing Savannah as a "hosting service", unless it actually is a hosting service in a manner I described above, which brings me to my questions for the Savannah community: Does or does not the Savannah project demand, allow, or abide by filtering/censoring/rejecting projects based solely on subjective opinions of its members (Savannah hackers)? If yes, what is the goal for such practice? If no, does the Savannah project expressly forbid such practices internally? Thanks for your time :) References: FSF endorsement: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/savannah My Savannah submission: https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?14370
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
I am not at all against discussing my submission, which is linked upthread, but for now I want to concentrate on one a single aspect of it, and it's not the code. In my view, and by the admission of the reviewer, https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?14370 is an example of a submission being held up and not accepted based solely on personal and subjective opinions of the reviewer. With my inquiry here I am only trying to figure out whether Savannah project demands, allows, or abides by filtering/censoring/rejecting projects based solely on subjective opinions of its members (Savannah hackers). If yes, what is the goal for such practice? If no, does the Savannah project expressly forbid such practice internally? Questions you've asked would be more suitable in a discussion pertaining to the development of my project, and if you are interested in joining the project and contributing ideas and code, please email the project leader: melik...@melikamp.com This mailing list is, ostensibly, for discussing general questions of interest to all Savannah users, just like the questions I stated above, and I feel that discussing the nitty-gritty of my code here would be completely off-topic. If, however, you see something in the submitted code that contradicts the assertions and claims I've made so far, then by all means, please point it out. On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 5:32 AM, "André Z. D. A." wrote: > I am just someone giving some questions and a few words or ideas from what > I have discovered in the last few minutes, by reading your message and > examining your code a bit. > > What your project does? > > Why would I want to install it? > > How do I install it? What will happen in my system when I install it? > > Does it depend on specific programs or packages? Which? Why? > > Does it depend on any libraries? > > Does it depend on specific versions of some software? > > Where is the documentation for it? > > What each script do? > > What each script assume? > > What are the limitations of each script? > > What would I possibly want to add to your project? I have some nice > scripts too. > > > > > Em 28-02-2017 22:57, john smith escreveu: > >> Dear Savannah hackers, >> >> My name is Ivan Zaigralin, and my email is melik...@melikamp.com. I am >> using this gmail >> account because messages sent to this list from my own domain seem to >> disappear into >> a black hole. >> >> I am currently in the process of submitting a project to the non-GNU part >> of Savannah. I seem >> to have hit an unexpected barrier: unexpected to me, but may be that's >> just >> because my >> expectations were out of line with reality, so I hope you can help me to >> resolve this issue. >> >> What I submitted was ~ 120 KiB of bash code + licensing information. To my >> surprise, my >> submission is not being accepted, and the reasons stated I will simply >> quote: >> >> "These are person-specific scripts" >> >> "It doesn't seem to me that they could be generally useful." >> >> "Yes, this is my opinion that doesn't coincide with yours." >> >> "All this makes sense for personal scripts, but not for general use. They >> are just not written with >> such use in mind." >> >> "I don't think there are real objective criteria for things like e.g. >> simplistic package. We have to >> use our judgement." >> >> I want to draw your attention specifically to the fact that the reviewer >> is >> using nothing but his >> subjective judgment in order to decide whether my submission is "generally >> useful". I also want >> to make it absolutely clear, I have no complaints about this particular >> reviewer, and nothing in >> this post should be interpreted as a criticism of that person or any of >> his >> actions so far. >> >> The reason I find this surprising is this: FSF endorses Savannah as a >> "hosting service": >> >> "There are many services that will host your project's source code" >> >> "Savannah is a community project, providing code hosting for your free >> software project" >> >> This endorsement is explicit in claiming that Savannah will host *my* >> project, which I >> understand as me preserving the creative control over the code I submit. >> >> To contrast, the GNU project does and should make subjective calls as to >> what constitutes >> useful GNU software, just as the KDE project members make subjective calls >> as to what >> constitute
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
Dear Thomas Harding, I would like to address your concerns, but in order to give a meaningful reply I first need you to clarify one thing for me: Are you a mere *user* of the Savannah hosting, using it as a platform to share your own projects, such as "PHP code128 barcode", or are you a contributor to the Savannah project proper? In other words, are you affiliated with the Savannah project? Yet another way to answer my question is to see if you can answer "yes" to any of the following: Do you have access to the Savannah project infrastructure which is above that of a mere user? Are you responsible for any part of day-to-day operations of the Savannah hosting service? Are you responsible for any part of the code review process, which results in decisions to accept/reject/suspend/revoke hosted projects? Are you responsible for the design and implementation of Savannah project policies, or the overall vision for the Savannah project? On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 6:10 AM, Thomas Harding wrote: > > You should split your project by tasks, as most likely no one would > /another/ bunch script set especially for sysadmin task. > > And wonder for each one if it is /generally/ useful, flexibile enough, etc. > > If you look at any administrative interface, she most likely rely on one > distribution and depends on a programs/versions set. It have to be > integrated. > > > > > Le 1 mars 2017 02:57:03 GMT+01:00, john smith > a écrit : > >Dear Savannah hackers, > > > >My name is Ivan Zaigralin, and my email is melik...@melikamp.com. I am > >using this gmail > >account because messages sent to this list from my own domain seem to > >disappear into > >a black hole. > > > >I am currently in the process of submitting a project to the non-GNU > >part > >of Savannah. I seem > >to have hit an unexpected barrier: unexpected to me, but may be that's > >just > >because my > >expectations were out of line with reality, so I hope you can help me > >to > >resolve this issue. > > > >What I submitted was ~ 120 KiB of bash code + licensing information. To > >my > >surprise, my > >submission is not being accepted, and the reasons stated I will simply > >quote: > > > >"These are person-specific scripts" > > > >"It doesn't seem to me that they could be generally useful." > > > >"Yes, this is my opinion that doesn't coincide with yours." > > > >"All this makes sense for personal scripts, but not for general use. > >They > >are just not written with > >such use in mind." > > > >"I don't think there are real objective criteria for things like e.g. > >simplistic package. We have to > >use our judgement." > > > >I want to draw your attention specifically to the fact that the > >reviewer is > >using nothing but his > >subjective judgment in order to decide whether my submission is > >"generally > >useful". I also want > >to make it absolutely clear, I have no complaints about this particular > >reviewer, and nothing in > >this post should be interpreted as a criticism of that person or any of > >his > >actions so far. > > > >The reason I find this surprising is this: FSF endorses Savannah as a > >"hosting service": > > > >"There are many services that will host your project's source code" > > > >"Savannah is a community project, providing code hosting for your free > >software project" > > > >This endorsement is explicit in claiming that Savannah will host *my* > >project, which I > >understand as me preserving the creative control over the code I > >submit. > > > >To contrast, the GNU project does and should make subjective calls as > >to > >what constitutes > >useful GNU software, just as the KDE project members make subjective > >calls > >as to what > >constitutes contributions useful to KDE. This makes sense because these > >are > >software > >projects, and when I submit code to them from the outside, it is > >implied > >that they have the > >creative control (or at least a greater share of it), and will make > >subjective calls in line with their > >unique and subjective vision of what their project should be and how it > >should get there. Most > >such projects also have very detailed descriptions of their subjective > >visions; for example, KDE > >is defined as "advanced graphical desktop, a wide variety of > >applications > >for communication, > &
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
> Answer is : no to all. Having only 2 projets hosteds for approximately 10 years. Great, so we can actually discuss my code without me suspecting a conflict of interest. > You should split your project by tasks, By making this suggestion you indicate you would like to contribute some ideas to my project, and I really appreciate it. But I must ask you to move this topic into a private channel; best of all, email me: melik...@melikamp.com (john smith is merely a workaround for a spam asassin somewhere). Not only the in-depth discussion of my code is completely out of place in this forum, but I am also afraid that it would distract us from discussing pretty much the only question I posed to the Savannah project team, and which went completely unanswered so far. I want to take this opportunity to clarify one more time that the purpose of this inquiry is *not* to get my project accepted, even thought accepting it would change the course of this discussion. The purpose of my questions to this forum is to get some statements about the apparent Savannah project policy whereas submissions are judged and not accepted/rejected by individual members of the Savannah team based solely on their personal and subjective opinions. My submission is merely an example of such a thing going on, and that is a fact we can all verify. Nothing people said about my code so far has been at all relevant to the questions I am asking or the claims I am making. In particular, I am not claiming that the Savannah project should accept my submission; I am not even claiming that the Savannah project must stick to objective criteria for rejecting submissions. All of this is entirely within the purview of the Savannah project, and I am definitely not a part of it in any way. All I want is a policy statement about applying subjective tests to submissions, or at least some opinions from the members of the Savannah other than my reviewer. To this I believe I am entitled as an FSF member, since we are endorsing the Savannah project as a "hosting service". Being a hosting service, I presumed, should automatically exclude any attempts from the Savannah team to assume creative control over submissions: either tacitly, by refusing to accept them without reason, or explicitly, as is the case with my submission. Finally, I want to ask you, Tom, a question which I believe will elucidate the issue. What would you personally do given the following hypothetical scenario: Tomorrow you wake up to find one of your own Savannah-hosted projects suspended/removed. Upon inquiring why, you get the following reply from a single Savannah project member: "This project does not seem to be generally useful. This is my personal subjective opinion, and it does not coincide with yours." What's your next move? And here's another hypothetical scenario, starts the same way, and the message you get is: "The formatting of the non-functional whitespace indentation in your code is too ugly. You could fix it, for example, by making sure that the indentation levels are uniform throughout: 2 spaces for the first level, 4 for the second, and so on." What's your next move? Before you point out that your code is too obviously pretty and useful compared to mine for it to be blacklisted, I want to stress that it's most definitely not in the court of subjective personal opinions. On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 4:32 PM, Thomas Harding wrote: > Answer is : no to all. Having only 2 projets hosteds for approximately 10 > years. > > In fact, they are parts done as personal job for an hardware database I > written, wich fitted the needs at work and has been superseded 7 or 8 years > later. I would never upload it to Savannah. > > The other one is PHP::PRINT::IPP. I primarily hosted it on "PHP classes", > but didn't one the "need to register" process and was unsure at time of any > other repository (who owns ?). Also PHP was trend-setting web programming > and frameworks not yet. It has been forked by unknowns on some code > repositories in order to be integrated in some frameworks, but no one wants > to do the job :-/ > > Ecosystem is full of "Personal job", and sysadmin scripting is PJ by > destination. You will most likely face maintainance alone, with too few bug > reports from rare users. > > Le 1 mars 2017 18:49:48 GMT+01:00, john smith > a écrit : > >Dear Thomas Harding, > > > >I would like to address your concerns, but in order to give a > >meaningful > >reply I first need you to clarify one thing for me: > > > >Are you a mere *user* of the Savannah hosting, using it as a platform > >to > >share your own projects, such as "PHP code128 barcode", or are you a > >contributor to the Savannah project proper? In other words, are you > >affiliated with the
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
> I am the administrator of one of the Savannah packages, > and not a Savannah administrator. Thanks for making this clear. > http://savannah.gnu.org/register/requirements.php This list I am aware of, and to my best knowledge I am in full compliance, which is as much as confirmed by the reviewer, who never brought up any of these *objective* rejection criteria. > http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html I have made it abundantly clear to the reviewer that I want to maintain complete creative control over my project, and have no desire to adjoin it to GNU. > The servers that run the Savannah hosting are run by > volunteers and paid for by donations. It's impossible > for Savannah to host every project... I'll cut you off right here if I may. What we have here is an apparent rejection of a *single* ~120 KiB project. It is ludicrous to claim that accepting my project, or any other project similar to mine would imply that Savannah has to accept *every* project. I am not saying you are claiming it, I am just saying, I hope you don't. > ... so I can see why the Savannah hackers would want > to apply some subjective criteria to help focus the > limited resources. And I don't see that at all. I am convinced that whatever abuse exists (does any exists, by the way? and how much of it?), it can be dealt with by applying *objective* rejection criteria. This is, of course, my personal opinion, but if any Savannah project member wanted to refute it, they could easily do so by providing the evidence of attempted abuse, so that we can judge its scope by ourselves. I very much doubt the Savannah team has the problem you are alluding to. I would not be at all surprised if the amount of evidence they have for hosting-crippling abuse via tiny and functional shell code is similar to that for the evidence of illegal immigrant voters throwing the last US presidential elections. Who in the world would abuse Savannah in this way, when it takes 6 minutes (I checked) on GitLab, from reading the instructions on creating an account to having a working public git repo? This is not an endorsement of GitLab or any other slimy hosting services, just an observation. > Your options at this point are either to wait > for another Savannah hacker to agree with > you and overrule ineiev, This would move things in the right direction, in my personal opinion, but I have to be frank: what I have seen thus far will force me to keep inquiring about a policy statement from a Savannah team, since that's the only thing I am after right now. This current inquiry is not about getting my project approved. The approval forum linked upthread is a more proper place for the approval discussion. > or to make improvements to your code to make > it more general-purpose and applicable to a > wider audience. This would not help. My reviewer was abundantly clear that the code changes would have to be made with the goal of convincing *him* *personally* it meets his subjective "general usefulness" criteria, which is pretty much the opposite of what you are saying. And even if the entire Savannah team comes to his side, the force of my argument will not diminish in the slightest, since the subjective opinion is a subjective opinion even in the case when it's a project-wide consensus. You are right about one thing: all I can do right now is to patiently wait until an actual Savannah administrator addresses my concerns.
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
> Ineiev is an "actual administrator". I am sorry, it was never my intention to state or imply otherwise. What I wanted was a reply from any *other* administrator, which is what I originally asked Ineiev to expedite. Looking at your profile I can see you are that other admin. > The policy has always been that Savannah > administrators can exercise judgement, > and not be required to blindly accept every > project submission that meets the technical > requirements. Thanks for clarifying that. Please note Ineiev did not seem to be aware of this policy, although he might have refused to confirm it for some other reason. > I see that we have failed to state that on ; > we can work on that. Thanks, that would be great. Not only it would inform potential users, it would have also prevented the previous portion of this discussion from happening. If I was aware of that from the beginning, I would not have tried to submit any projects to Savannah, opting instead for discussing this policy with you straight away. > Savannah being a GNU project, you can appeal to > gnu-advis...@gnu.org, or ultimately rms, if you wish. I hope you don't mean by that I shouldn't bother appealing to the Savannah project itself first. It makes no sense to me to go over your head when I can at least try to make a direct appeal to the very people who set the policy. I would like a chance to convince the Savannah project to replace this policy by a set of objective rejection criteria, which would hopefully accomplish the same purpose. By the way, what is the purpose of this policy? I've seen a suggestion that this policy is needed because accepting everything would be basically too costly for a non-commercial volunteer-powered project like Savannah. Is this an accurate enough description of the goal? Are there any other goals you would like to achieve with this policy? I asked this question before, but so far no answer was given by a member of the Savannah team. I do not for a second believe you people are going through so much trouble without a reason, so what is the purpose of this policy? I hope you agree, this policy is fundamentally unfair and biased, more or less by definition. If you could replace it by a set of objective rejection criteria which would accomplish the same purpose well enough, would you be willing to work towards that goal? *Please*, even if you chose to ignore the rest of this message, please answer these 2 questions: what is the goal of this policy? would you be willing to replace it with an objective policy, if it could accomplish the same goal about as well? My only intention here is to help improve the hosting service. I submitted my project to Savannah, choosing it before any other hosting service, specifically because there are few things I hate more than nonfree software, and I am very thankful for your integrity on that issue, and your collective effort. All I want is a better, more fair, more friendly, and more inclusive free software hosting service. I also would like to take this opportunity to volunteer my time and my expertise for designing and implementing a set of objective criteria that would functionally replace the subjective judgement, unless, of course, the very purpose of this policy is to exercise creative control over submitted projects. Finally, I would like to apologize to Ineiev just in case anything in my posts was perceived as adversarial. I wish I could take back that paragraph with the word "extortion" in it, just because it was kind of mean, and did not add anything to the discussion. I hope Ineiev can forgive me by putting himself in my shoes for just 10 seconds: the first thing I heard from a hosting service administrator was, basically, that my code is useless. I do not believe any offense was meant, but I hope Ineiev can see that any person who is not aware of this rejection policy can easily misinterpret that statement as a personal insult. On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 2:33 PM, Karl Berry wrote: > until an actual Savannah administrator addresses my concerns. > > 1) Ineiev is an "actual administrator". > > 2) The policy has always been that Savannah administrators can exercise > judgement, and not be required to blindly accept every project > submission that meets the technical requirements. I see that we have > failed to state that on > https://savannah.gnu.org/register/requirements.php; we can work on that. > > 3) Savannah being a GNU project, you can appeal to gnu-advis...@gnu.org, > or ultimately rms, if you wish. --best, karl. >
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
I will take offense. I think if you spent ANY time comprehending what I wrote in my emails, you would have emailed your contributions to my project, quoted below, to melik...@melikamp.com. Throughout this whole process, I was very patient with people telling me why my code is useless, but it ends with you, Matt. Go fix your own projects. I refused to take any coding advice from Savannah admins, who, in my view, have a conflict of interest. And I am definitely not going to take any coding advice from people like you, who cannot comprehend plain English, even after I explained myself over and over again. On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 10:51 PM, Matthew Carter wrote: > john smith writes: > > > *snip* bunch of text > > No offense, but the scripts (I just got done looking through them) leave > tons of loose ends that would more likely hurt rather than help a random > user who ran them. > > They make tons of assumptions about directories and binaries existing on > a user's system, without proper safeguards / defensive programming > around the different commands prior to running. > > I think if you spent all your time on those emails enhancing the scripts > instead, they probably could have been in a state that was good enough > to be accepted by now. > > - my 2c > > -- > Matthew Carter (m...@ahungry.com) > http://ahungry.com >
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
Thanks for your reply, assaf! I feel like we are finally making progress, and I am delighted to hear that you would welcome objective criteria over the subjective judgements, in case if such a replacement is practically possible. I hope you are voicing the general sentiment of the Savannah community, and not just your personal opinion. In a way, what you are saying is a game-changer, and now I can finally level with the Savannah community in regard to the code I submitted. I am fully aware it needs improvement, to put it lightly. But just so you know, I submitted it in good faith, with the intention of eventually making it useful for the general audience. I've had absolutely no idea a subjective test would be applied beyond what is stated on the Web. After all, it's not like my submission was a single text file. While there is some (like may be a few KiBs) of generally useless crap, there are also some really awesome portions, like /dobackup/, and some moderately good ideas, like /open/. I let the reviewer know that the ticket can be closed, since I would have never submitted anything at all if I understood the entire rejection policy. It will take me some time to process your extremely informative post, but eventually I will come back here and/or in one of the venues you mentioned, and make some constructive suggestions in regard to the future development. This is not by any means the end of this conversation, and if any other admins would like to weigh in, I'd really appreciate it.
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
Just one more thing. Why can't I get anything to post from my domain? I would much rather use my actual email account instead of this atrocity. melik...@melikamp.com is subscribed, and gets the mail, but sending from there results in nothing.
Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?
> John, we have made suggestions of improvements > in your scripts that would easily make them > closer to something that could be accepted. > Note that. I noted that. I noted that several times now, and I thought I could not have been more clear about how little I appreciate the manner in which it was done. I was going to take some time to digest what assaf told me and start working on a constructive policy proposal, but since you people keep digging at me personally, let's start here and now. Please take note of how what I say in this post will be pertinent to the Savannah policy and relevant to every admin and user (read to the end), while the posts I cite below are off-topic attempts to discuss the internals of my code, which the critics themselves characterize as useless to nearly everyone. Thomas Harding's post was the least problematic one. > You should split your project by tasks This is an attempt to contribute to my project, apparently with the goal of making it more acceptable in the eyes of Savannah admins, even though I've made it clear by then that I absolutely refuse to meld my code in exchange for hosting. I refuse to do so in principle, and not just because there are just too many hosting options, including but not limited to my very own iron on the backbone. I refuse to do so mainly because I believe that validating this process will reliably lead to censorship and abuse on the part of Savannah admins, if it hasn't already. I have submitted my project to Savannah under a false impression the rejection process is objective, and once I was told by Karl Berry that it's not as a matter of policy, I have rescinded my submission. https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?14370#comment9 To be perfectly clear, I do not anticipate *using* Savannah hosting while this policy is alive, even as I am working up to *contributing* to it. I did not get offended by anything Thomas proposed, but in my replies to him I've made it clear that I am the project leader, that I have no desire to cede creative control, and that all good-faith contributions to my project should be directed to my private email. I repeated the same request in my reply to André's questions. Now I hope you can understand my surprise when I read what Matthew Carter wrote: > [your scripts] make tons of assumptions about > directories and binaries existing on a user's > system, without proper safeguards / defensive > programming around the different commands prior > to running. > I think if you spent all your time on those > emails enhancing the scripts instead, they > probably could have been in a state that was > good enough to be accepted by now. This is yet another attempt to contribute to my project, but this time it's not just rude and off-topic, it also betrays Matthew's refusal to acknowledge me as a project leader by ignoring my repeatedly stated submission guidelines. Either that, or Matthew actually didn't care to read what I wrote in this thread. And just when I thought it could not get any worse, André, who I thought was the most reasonable of these 3 (he did previously go private upon my request), decided to chime in: > we have made suggestions of improvements in your > scripts that would easily make them closer to > something that could be accepted. > I think these scripts, the way they are now, > do not justify making a project from them I understand it is your right, people, to use this mailing list for criticizing my code, however irrelevant it may be in regard to the questions I raised. It is also your right to discuss your would-be contributions in any public forum, including this one. But you shouldn't be surprised at my reaction when you blatantly disregard my polite requests for using a proper channel, since by doing so you tacitly reject me as the BDFL of my very own software project. Now let's talk business; let me explain how all of the above is relevant to the policy discussion. In a way I am thankful for the outpouring of the irrelevant and rude comments, because it clearly showcases what I have already suspected: the standing rejection policy is eating your project from the inside like a malignant fungus would. The 3 (non-admin) posters I mentioned above are seemingly unable to recognize how out of place their comments and tone are, and I think that's because as members of this community, they've gotten used to treating submissions in a way only a software project should. They think it's OK to wash the submitter's bones, criticize, and give advice no one asked them for. In fact, they seem to think it's OK to insult a project leader by willfully ignoring contribution guidelines. Let this not be interpreted as a jab at the posters. I am sure they have the best interests of Savannah in heart, and they actually believe they've done me a favor. But I also believe they themselves have become victims of the subjective rejection policy. And they most definitely did nothing to help me. They seem to be obli
