Jay Freeman (saurik) wrote:
>Karl:
>
>I'm not "complaining" about "other people" to you. I was bringing them up
>as something to understand in the emotional climate that I am in as I typed
>the previous e-mail. I do find it interesting that you don't care much
>about the fact that "other people" have complaints about Subversion.
>
In light of this, and quoting from your previous post:
>I understand that my e-mail here is a little abrasive, but it's a
>culmination of being fed up for months, dealing with other people who are
>now thouroughly convinced that we won't be able to switch to Subversion for
>the projects I have been advocating it for due to the seeming lack of Win32
>empathy, ...
>
It seems to me you're blaming us for your losing face in front of your
co-workers because we didn't keep to a schedule we never implied,
promised or contracted for. That's an interesting position, to say the
least.
>Touche on your "are you volunteering" response. Actually, I _would_ be
>willing to rip out all of the read only file code if this hasn't been done
>already (which would be "solve [the] problem[]" on "the code should be
>rolled back"). Brane asked if this could be done a while back and I believe
>the discussion died for some reason (which was interesting, as I remember
>Greg being mad at the read only code himself for other reasons).
>
You're complaining about a minor inconvenience that was to be expected
in pre-alpha software, as if this was a support contact, not a
development list. That attitude puts people (including me) in a bad mood.
(I've gone and fixed that bit in the meantime, BTW, and the very least
you could do is inform yourself about the facts first.)
>Alas, I am unable to do much about people who add files to the project and
>don't get them into the Windows project files. The fact that people aren't
>helping other developers and notifying them when they add files is the
>problem here, not neccessarily something that a third party can efficiently
>address. This is a policy issue on commiters, and a good example of the
>kinds of things that would help non-Unix developers.
>
>If you want something I _could_ offer (and likely would), it is either to
>futz with the build enviroment and build an automatic dsp generator (which
>is likely to be important as the APR people got so mad when I... nicely I
>might add... asked if VC++ 7 could be supported and they yelled at me that
>VC6 might not even be continued to be supported until someone wrote an
>automatic project generator). I am likely to be doing this for my own
>purposes anyway, although I think that someone else was already volunteering
>to work on such a solution for APR, which would make the effort quite
>duplicious.
>
If you really mean that, there's a lot of infrastructure now in place
for generating the .dsp (and other kinds of project) files. It would
definitely help, and I for one would be glad to help you get started,
although I can (for now) live with the status quo.
(I don't see what bearing the response on the APR list has on this
discussion.)
>The patches I sent in weren't ignored... the patches I sent in _were_
>merged, and a good amount of my time was put into trying to deal with these
>various issues. It was more that they weren't enough to deal with the
>issues (I simply didn't understand how Subversion worked well enough to
>address most of them), so the issues were sluffed off as unimportant and
>mostly still left unfixed. The point of the sentence had nothing to do with
>the patches themselves (and maybe the effect would have been better had I
>not even used the word "my", I had a feeling someone would nit on that), but
>on the attitude that went into such a milestone release.
>
Have you ever heard of the concept of priority? Has pre-alpha been
explained to you? I'm sure the priorities for the project were/are
clear; and, while Win32 support might be a goal for 1.0, it was more
important _at that time_ to get features in than to get Win32 working.
Even though I chose to develop almost exclusively on Windows -- taking
the harder path on purpose, BTW, as I'm equally at home on Unix -- I
entirely underst(and/ood) and support(ed) that decision.
>Tasking outside developers,
>
What are "outside developers"? You seem to persisit in the notion that,
because some people are empoyed full-time to develop Subversion, you
have a right to demand support service from them. You do not. This is
still an Open Source project, with all that implies. Individual
contributions may vary, but the key is "contribution", not "gimme".
If you want some feature, you can implement it. If you don't have the
knowledge/time to do that, that's fine: proposals and proper discussion
are never discouraged, and we even have Issuezilla to help keep track of
things. But priorities are based on project goals. If you can't live
with that, you should try to contribute -- either code or funding would
work, IMHO. Making demands from volunteers won't work, and will gain you
no sympathy here.
>who by nature aren't at expert level at how
>Subversion works, exclusively to fix issues that seem core to the
>abstractions (such as case sensitivity and the occasionally weird behavior
>of directory seperators) is not a sufficient way to deal with these problems
>(a point helped in evidence of this project), and I hate to break this to
>you, but don't require much platform specific knowledge at all. You just
>have to know some of the limitations of the other platform (such as "case
>insensitive" and "uses \ instead of /", we aren't talking things that are
>that complicated) as you develop. If you want other people, including me,
>to be able to fix these issues, you have to devote more of _your_ time to
>understanding the issues, finding the problems, and yes, even thinking a
>little bit like a Win32 programmer.
>
Fixing "issues that seem core to the abstractions" takes time, even if
they're "not that complicated". So they have to be assigned a priority.
Basic project management principle there.
The priority of this particular issue is not high enough to gain
attention from full-time developers. I might contribute a fix in my
spare time, if it starts bothering me. But it doesn't bother me yet, and
I have much more important SVN work to do, so I won't fix it now.
>To point out, similar issues to the ones I'm bringing up have come up in the
>past in a thread called "Subversion portability", started by Brane after a
>"sermon" he wrote to another thread. The entire thing is rather well summed
>up by the first e-mail to "Subversion portability" that contains both the
>sermon, a response, and a few extra points.
>
Please do not ever again even think of misrepresenting me like that.
Read that thread again. I analysed the problem and its possible
consequences; then I contributed code (and equipment!!!) and set up
automatic testing on several platforms, and made regression tests run on
Windows. And I definitely did not demand that other people should do
that instead of me.
>The arguments are quite similar
>to mine, and only slightly less inflamatory :).
>
>
I find your arguments more than inflammatory. They're downright
offensive, especially to the many people who've spent a significant
amount of their spare time contributing (code, design, or knowledgable
discussion) to this project. Such indiscriminate flaming is simply not
how I'd expect a mature person to behave in public.
--
Brane Čibej <brane_at_xbc.nu> http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
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Received on Thu Jun 6 00:51:12 2002