Re: "mc is over!?" - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site

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

On Wed, 2015-05-27 at 13:37 +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:

> There was a post on a popular Russian-speaking IT site geektimes.ru
> authored from an account with an associated full name "Ilia Maslakov"
> titled (translated) "ms is over!?": http://geektimes.ru/post/250964/

I can confirm that this is indeed a post by Ilia, one of the current
maintainers of Midnight Commander, speaking on his own behalf and
without talking to anyone first.

The situation was as follows:

I checked into the Russian-speaking Jabber conference where the
maintainers usually hang out to see if I can merge in some trivial
patches directly into master. There, my conversation with Andrew
happened, or rather he simply stated the quoted phrase and left. This
was witnessed by Ilia, and he decided to make it public in the way that
you have described.

> The post is written in a clear FUD manner, and implies too many
> far-fetched things, like: that departure of a maintainer means death of
> the project

I think that it's rather your reading of this post which has lead you to
make those far-fetched implications.

> that not this list titled mc-devel is where important
> discussion and announcements happen, but on "delevoper's conference"
> where people speak Russian, etc.

If you have been following the development, it would have been known to
you that, as a matter of fact, all relevant discussions to the
development of mc in the last 4-5 years were happening in Russian
speaking Jabber conference at mc-dev conference jabber ru .

Note, that I'm not saying that I personally think that's the way it
should be, but for better or worse it used to be this way.

> The current maintainers, namely Andrew Borodin, Slava Zanko, Ilia
> Maslakov, Sergei Trofimovich - please provide full disclosure of what
> happens within your team.

As Slava has said, most current team members ended up having personal
commitments that do not leave them enough time to maintain the project,
and this has been obvious to anyone following the development for quite
some time. The last active committer was Andrew, but (unexpectedly to
me) he decided to resign as well.

In what concerns me personally, I haven't been committing much at all in
the recent years, but I have been taking care of the infrastructure, and
I'm ready to continue doing so. I don't know if I'll manage to make
enough time to start committing again, but most likely not in the near
future, unless I will be able to negotiate sponsoring the development
time with my current employer.

In any case, we would certainly welcome anyone willing to take over the
maintainership. However, sadly, no one has applied so far, and the call
that I was about to issue by the end of this week was preempted by Ilia.

Oh well, let's consider this as the official call for volunteers. I'll
be reading the rest of today's traffic shortly.

> Whatever it is, please show goodwill by adding Egmont Koblinger to the
> maintainer team, if he agrees (including discussions and commit
> access),

I have personally publicly asked Egmont to take over the maintaintership
multiple times, however, he is understandably reluctant to do so, and no
one can force him to do it, if he doesn't want to. It's his decision.

> to show that the project wasn't usurped by Soviet Obkom.  

-25 points to adequacy

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev