[TCLCORE] TCT behavior (was: Using our time well)

[Eric M. <er...@aj...>]

Personally, I think the behavior of the core team in reaction to the
string growth patch was shameful.  There were plenty of people criticizing
the patch (and by extension, the submitter of the patch) and precious
little encouragement from the core team.  *Even if* you don't personally
agree with a patch, it behooves you to be polite, courteous, and
encouraging to the submitter, lest you turn that person away from
submitting ever again.  I am horribly disappointed in the Tcl Core Team
and their behavior over the last several days.

What follows is a message I received from Gerhard regarding the discussion
on this patch; I encourage all the members of the Tcl Core Team to read it
carefully and take his words to heart.  You are fortunate that he is so
resilient; I strongly believe that many people would have simply given up
on Tcl after such a negative experience.

   Eric "Not a member of the TCT" Melski  The Other Tcl Guy
   ericm at ajubasolutions.com            Ajuba Solutions


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 23:57:50 +0200
From: Gerhard Hintermayer <g.h...@in...>
To: Eric Melski <er...@aj...>
Subject: [Fwd: [TCLCORE] Re: Hintermayer's string allocation patch]

Here you are.
Well, after a day the disappointment is not that much any more, bu still
some bad taste is left. The response I got from you was, "hey great,
we've got both speed improvement on the one hand and the capability of
handling very large strings on the other hand", but most of the other
emails I got said "hey, why the hell did you do _that_, you could have
done it much better, like this or this ..". The frustrating thing was,
that the core team did'nt have a common opinion, I got lot's of emails,
a lot of people didn't realize the changes the patch does, instead of
looking at the code, actually I would not have been that much
disapointed if I got one single reply that said - "your patch goes into
the right direction, but could you try some modifications", I would'nt
have been disappointed at all, but getting a lot of rants saying
"removing the doubling algorithm is a bad thing" and "who needs a string
that big" made me feel sad. Instead of telling me "thanks, you made a
step into the right direction, we will do the finetuning" a lot of
people from the core told me, that the patch was a bad thing, well
actually all except you.
My conclusion to this - hopefully soon ending - discussion is: If
somebody supply's a patch, the core team should start an internal
discussion, maybe ask some question to the supplier of the patch to
clarify some questions and then come to a _single_ conclusion - take the
patch or drop it.
But after all I still like "tuning" the core and of course using Tcl.

Gerhard

-- 
Gerhard Hintermayer
http://www.inode.at/g.hintermayer



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