On Wednesday 13 April 2005 01:41, Alvin Thompson wrote:
[snip]
> <flame>
> holy cow! this is a great product, but the elitist attitudes of some of
> the people really makes me want to retch. eric politely brought up a
> perfectly valid and well-articulated point, so why do you feel the need
> to belittle him with such a condescending and insulting message? does
> it make you feel better about yourself in some way?
>
> i'm sure now you'll respond with something like, "Obviously. If you
> were truly interested in stopping my elitist attitude you would have
> shot me in the head with a .44 magnum rather than lamenting my
> existence..."
>
> as an older friend of mine used to say, "You catch more flies with
> honey than you do with vinegar." why go out of your way to alienate
> people? you will find that being on good terms with as many people as
> possible is an excellent safety net to have once you move out of your
> mother's basement.
>
> -alvin
> </flame>
Not that I'm sticking up for bc, but I think there are several overlapping
problems here.
First, this is an open source project, and the majority of people are
working on this during their free time... something that most of us don't
have much of. Most of the developers are interested in fixing bugs, not
in producing binaries. But that isn't the complicating factor.
The real complication is that we get a number of users, particularly for
the Windows platform, who want binaries the day the product is released.
They start scouring the list, and almost immediately start asking where
the binaries are. They even start emailing the people who've produced
them in the past, and *that* is where things start getting hairy.
Honestly, I've though of sitting down and setting up a Windows box to
build the releases when they happen. But then I become skeptical because
I don't want people emailing me off-list because the binaries didn't get
produced fast enough, or because I happened to take a day off and do
something else other than work on Subversion. It seems like everyone is
willing to jump on the contributors that build the binaries, but no one
doing the complaining is willing to step up to the plate and contribute
to the project themselves. And that's were people like Ben are getting
frustrated and he sends the response he did. The whole situation is
just... tense. Users want binaries, but no one wants to help. Those who
consider helping are probably turned away by the general attitude of the
actions of, admittedly, a small portion of the Windows users.
Now I understand the complexities of building the Windows binaries (I've
done it, and I'll freely admit that it's tough to get the first time
around). I also understand that it's tough to expect users to download
the source and build it as a result. I wish I had a better answer, but
I'm not sure I want to jump in the fire so that I can have my inbox
flamed everytime a release is made.
That's my 2 cents on the situation. And FWIW, I agree with you... you do
catch more flies with honey.
-John
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Received on Wed Apr 13 11:18:11 2005