Re: Happy 20th Birthday!

["Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury shurup com>]

On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 21:07 +0100, Egmont Koblinger wrote:
> The initial passion from the new maintainers has faded.  They hardly
> have time to work on the project.  Many patches or important
> bugreports go unnoticed for long months or even years.  Some tickets
> have heated technical discussions between some non-maintainers, yet
> the maintainers remain silent.  Some contributors have already
> expressed that they've lost motivation due to the lack of response
> from developers, and alas more (including myself) are likely to
> follow.  (This whole issue has been raised in [5].)  I really don't
> know how this problem could be solved... I'm just hoping that we'll be
> able to figure out something. 

Hi Egmont,

I was thinking of replying, but Slava has beaten me to it. In a way, I
guess it's all pretty simple...

Speaking of me personally, all the bugs that were annoying the hell out
of me are in some way resolved now thanks to the very impressive
contributions by Slava's team, including Andrew and Ilya, and, on the
other hand, I simply haven't got any "spare" time in the last 3-4 years.

I've been trying to fix minor things in the mean time, but bug triaging
is not fun in many instances, because some individuals prefer to express
themselves in a very agressive format. I don't know if this comes from
the fact that they are simply unable to fathom some peculiarities of the
English language and thus are genuinely unaware of what it sounds like
in a conversation, or it's just the way they roll... but anyways,
whereas I can tolerate it from say Linus Torvalds due to his brilliant
technical acumen, my knee-jerk reflex to some douchery from Joe R.
Hacker would be just "fuck you". So, this plays some role too...

Anyways, as Slava said, the main issues are a) general lack of resources
and b) most personal itches have been scratched by the current team
members, but they do welcome new members. Logistically, that's a bit
difficult because the current development chat is in a jabber room and
happens in Russian, but this is not a problem that can't be solved.

Are you personally interested in becoming a committer ;-) ? You've made
quite some amazing contributions in the past, like 256-color support,
which I am really enjoying every day.

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev