Re: New Maintainer for MC Project?

[Leonard den Ottolander <leonard den ottolander nl>]

Hi Miguel,

(Still busy writing a response to Terry's mail.)

On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 13:00, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 	* In open source, maintainers are chosen by their merits, before
> 	  today I have never heard of you.    It is a meritocracy, you
> 	  have shown none so far.

Although this is a valid argument I'm not sure we should give Terry and
the Krusader Krew the benefit of the doubt here. He has written down
some of his credentials and motivation for stepping in.

> 	* In open source, I have never seen a "project manager", this is
> 	  an invention of the standard software industry.  There is no 
> 	  "project manager" for Linux, Samba, x-Windows.

This is nitpicking over semantics. "Maintainer", "project manager",
what's the difference. I have no problem with somebody stepping in as a
"project manager".

> 	* Maintainers are people with deep understanding of the codebase
> 	  and the language the code is written in, so they can make
> 	  decisions as to what is best for the project on technical 
> 	  grounds.

This is a valid concern. However one could sail on the opinion of the
developers and those who frequent mc-devel wrt technical problems. It's
not like Terry has no understanding of software development.

> 	* You exhibit the behavior of many people who have no ideas
> 	  whatsoever about the project but like big titles.  "Public
> 	  Relations Coordinator", "the leadership", and "Project
> 	  Manager".

Hm. Not sure this is true. Although Terry uses his own jargon I do
believe his offer is sincere. I'm not sure I like the infrastructural
aspects of the proposal, but I believe his offer to help out with some
"project guidance" should be considered none the less.

> 	* MC should not be part of the "Krusader family", it is 
> 	  an independent project, not part of a suite.

I think this part was already covered. Although the infrastructural
issues leave some room for doubt.

> 	* I dislike people who misspell: "Krusader" and "Krew".

Bah. What a sorry excuse for an argument >:-( . I don't want to go into
Gnome versus KDE here. CLI rulez!

> 	* Tell the "Leadership" that thanks, but no thanks.

... If meritocracy is the rule I think we should decide this on merits,
don't you? Which means you shouldn't decide this all by yourself. I
would like to get some input from others as well.

Even if we decide to reject this proposal it is probably a good
opportunity to formulate the issues that need to be addressed to get the
project back on track.

> As I stated previously, if we have problems in Midnight Commander, I
> will step in as its maintainer or suggest someone actively involved (or
> which has been actively involved in the past) to do so.

Well, now is the time! We should have had a release candidate already
last december, and Pavel seems to be unable to produce one. For a
release of 4.6.1 all we need to consider is whether we need to backport
the gcc-4 fixes Pavel added to HEAD.

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research