Re: [naviserver-devel] Why was NaviServer forked?

[Andrew P. <at...@pi...>]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 04:49:38PM +0200, Zoran Vasiljevic wrote:
> 
> Am 12.07.2006 um 16:22 schrieb Andrew Piskorski:

> > I would have started actively and frequently committing code to the
> > AOLserver CVS, as Dossy explicitly asked/challenged you to do, rather
> > than merely talking about doing so.
> 
> Ah, this goes again... I did that, was publicly exposed as one who
> "broke" some internally used AOL API which (almost) resulted in all

No, the argument you had with Dossy came AFTER (and because of) that
incident, as did Dossy's saying more or less, 'You win, commit more
code.'  Note, I purposely said, "start actively and frequently
committing code", not "commit one change once and then give up".

I know you WANTED to commit code, but (for various reasons, all
social) you didn't.  If you were so convinced Dossy would in the
future gratuitously revert your new contributions, fine, let him do
it.  Then at least you'd have shown that a fork really was required.
My point is that as far as I could tell from the public record, you
never did.

> And not everything was going over the public list.

Since I know nothing about that, I can only comment on what was
public.

> > Look, Zoran, I know that's not your personal style, but as far as I
> > could tell you basically won your last public argument with Dossy, and
> > he must have known it.  He more or less threw up his hands and said,
> > 'Ok, just start committing code, we'll work it out from there.'  And
> > then you walked away!
> 
> Well, this is a very good observation. The reason was simple: I did not
> have the *time* to try again. My company is relying on the code  

Your frustration was quite understandable, however, technically
speaking, if you had the time to fork and then commit your changes to
Naviserver, you also had the time to commit your changes to AOLserver.
You were using CVS in both cases, same task...

Yes, you may have not had that time to then enter into NEW arguments
on the AOLserver list.  But one, you assumed that a new argument would
happen, it might not have.  And two, even if a new argument did
happen, it seems to me that there wouldn't be much forcing you to
spend time on it.  If necessary you could have simply ignored it, and
walked away THEN.

I've been in project lead situations before, and to my surprise, I
noted in my own behavior how easy it was to get all hyper and
overreact to small worries and problems, especially the first time or
three they came up.

And that's all I really saw in Dossy's response to whatever bug
exactly was introduced with your keyed list commit (which you then
fixed really fast).  Yes, he overreacted, and he could and should have
been a hell of a lot clearer and more proactive in admitting that.
But as far as I could tell, that's all that that was really going on.

A silly thing to lose half or so of AOLserver's active core developers
over, and a silly thing to fork over as well...  All IMO, of course.

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <at...@pi...>
http://www.piskorski.com/