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Re: please desist

From: Mark C. Chu-Carroll <mcc_at_watson.ibm.com>
Date: 2002-08-13 11:04:09 CEST

As the lead of another SCM project who listens in on, and occasionally
contributes to discussions here, I've got experience with being an
outsider trying to manage tho balance of trying to contribute what
I can, while clearly having different interests and priorities than
the primary focus of the mailing list. I thought I'd add to what Greg
just said.

Reading and contributing to discussions on the developers mailing list
for a competing project is a somewhat tricky thing to do. Obviously,
to be working on a competing project means that you disagree
with the priorities, design decisions, or implementation strategy
of the developers on the mailing list.

But it's *their* forum, not yours. It's *their* priorities that take
precedence - not yours.

It's OK to put in your two cents from time to time. Working on a different
project can give you insights that the group focused on Subversion,
and those insights can be valuable to everyone involved. (For
example, I'd like to think that my contributions helped back in
the discussions of authentication modules in Subversion.) But when it
becomes clear that you've reached one of the points where you
fundamentally disagree, it's time to just drop it. It's *their* project.
They're the ones who are working on it, and they set the priorities,
and make the decisions.

I've got my problems with the Subversion architecture. I've done my
best to contribute to discussions where I thought my viewpoint
could help make good design decisions. But I'm not working on
Subversion, and I don't get a vote in how it works. So I've tried very
hard to be a helpful voice, without being an intrusive, disruptive
presence on the list.

Tom: what you're doing right now is simply not appropriate. This
is not the arch mailing list. This is not the "Tom Lord's opinions of
Subversion" mailing list. It's clear that you and the Subversion
team have some fundamental disagreements. Posting dozens of
insulting messages to thier mailing list isn't going to help you, or
arch, or subversion. The only thing it does is make you look
like an obnoxious boor.

        -Mark

On Tuesday 13 August 2002 06:15 am, Greg Stein wrote:
> Tom,
>
> Many of your recent posts to the Subversion dev@ list have followed a
> general pattern:
>
> * off-topic
> * hard to determine applicability to the SVN project
> * fly-by deprecations of SVN
>
> There is more here. But I think the basic summary is simply, "you're adding
> a lot of noise, but zero value [to the list discussion]." I realize that
> somewhere in there you are striving hard to bring information and
> experience to the list. You definitely have a lot to give. However, it is
> blanketed in a lot of rhetoric and unsubstantiated commentary about SVN.
> While I absolutely welcome negative *constructive* commentary about SVN,
> I'm not seeing anything particularly constructive about your responses.
> Mostly, it is *vague* "brokenness" in SVN, rather than specifics.
>
> If you can bring specific problems, then I welcome your particiation. But
> if you are going to continue to bring off-topic discussions, and
> non-constructive feedback, then please do not post to this list.
>
> I am not the final arbiter of this list. In fact, I have no particular
> powers. However, I do think/hope that I represent the general viewpoint:
> you are adding noise, but little signal.
>
> In review, I would ask that you refrain from posting to this list unless
> you have particular, constructive, feedback for the Subversion project.
>
> Regards,
> -g

-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***		http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: mcc@watson.ibm.com  ------- Personal Email: markcc@bestweb.net
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Received on Tue Aug 13 15:05:05 2002

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