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sorry ... (was: Re: Minor patch for Makefile.in)

From: Greg Stein <gstein_at_lyra.org>
Date: 2001-06-06 10:33:29 CEST

On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 11:50:05AM -0400, Greg Hudson wrote:
> > A good chunk of us agreed that we wanted to see a new system like
> > this. Once you have agreement on the end goal, then it is a matter
> > of what an *individual* chooses to do. This is, after all, a
> > volunteer effort :-)
>
> For the record, it bugs me that (unless I missed something) discussion
> on the list only seemed to happen after implementation. There's
> nothing wrong with designing things offline, but I thought the list
> was supposed to hear about them (and have a chance to point out flaws
> in the premises behind the design change--there were many, in this
> case) before code is checked in.

I'll take blame for this. My apologies.

Not to excuse the action, but a background on how my disconnect happened...
At the ASF Hackathon in April (a two day geek extravaganze), a bunch of us
got together (myself, Karl, Ben, Mike, Fitz, Jim). At one point, I lamented
about how automake was pissing me off and re-running configure on me. I
asked the guys, "hey. can we torch automake? maybe toss recursive make?
[has everybody seen Peter Miller's paper?]" They all said "sure, no problem.
but ask Jim, too. he may be keen on automake." When Jim arrived, I asked,
and his eyes glazed over. "whatever. I have no attachment to automake."

Boom. Decision sealed. It was all of about five sentences of discussion. As
a result, it didn't feel "big" and I didn't pay it any degree of "potential
contension to be discussed and resolved."

So... that was the mental state as I started on the work. *BUT* ... my
failing was that I was about to make a large/basic change to the SVN project
without public disclosure/discussion. Even though there was a consensus(*),
that does not obviate the requirement to provide some forewarning and
provide a chance for people to say, "you moron. did you think about <this>?"

My fault was that I wasn't paying proper respect/inclusiveness to the other
developers on this list. Sorry about that.

Cheers,
-g

(*) the consensus achieved raises a meta-issue. on a sheer +1/-1 type of
    voting (assuming no veto rights), then consensus was reached. but there
    is the underlying question of whether the contributors are stratified
    and whether that is a problem. I typically have the impression of a
    "core" set of developers who are regularly/continually involved, plus a
    lot of other contributors and developers. is there a problematic
    classification? if a problem exists, how/should it be addressed?

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:31 2006

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