Re: [xmlwrapp-users] Good News

[Vaclav S. <vs...@gm...>]

[resending this with proper word-wrap, as my mail was all but unreadable
in SF archive; sorry for that]

Hi,

On 18 Mar 2012, at 20:02, Browder Jr, Thomas M wrote:
> Glad to see the original xmlwrapp project back up and running.
> 
> -Tom

May I ask why felt the need to do this? And what are your plans with
xmlwrapp now?

"This" above refers, of course, to what you silently did two days ago
with sf.net/projects/xmlwrapp, still xmlwrapp's home: removing me (the
maintainer of xmlwrapp for the last 3.3 years) not only from the admins
list, but completely from the project — along with, apparently,
everybody else [1]. And changing the description to say that the
official xmlwrapp source repository,
https://github.com/vslavik/xmlwrapp, is just "a fork".

I'm really baffled by this, to be honest.

For the benefit of the public record, here's a brief summary of
xmlwrapp's recent history:
Back in 2008, xmlwrapp stagnated: no new commits were made (the last
ones were from 2005 [2]), patches were rotting in the tracker unapplied
and without any acknowledgment. Relying on such a library didn't look
safe, so I, together with Vadim Zeitlin, approached Peter Jones, the
original author, Eric Beyeler and Tom Browder (then-admins of
sf.net/projects/xmlwrapp) with the proposal that we'll take over
maintainership of the project to keep it alive. The driving motivation
was that we wanted to avoid a fork, be it private or public, because
forks are bad (I'm an old school Open Source guy that way).

The response was unconditionally positive (Eric: "If you want to, it's
all yours. I simply haven't had time to do anything with it"; Tom
Browder: "Concur--please feel free to take it over." and "Vaclav, you
have the whole ball of wax!  Thanks, and good luck." a bit later; even
Peter stepped in to thank everybody for keeping xmlwrapp alive). And so
I did.

Over the three+ years and 100+ changesets since then, I did much more
than what I needed personally: from the general cleanup and
modernization, to fixing various problems, making several releases,
improving performance and adding new APIs. I honestly don't think I
neglected anything in maintaining the library and I more than earned my
place in xmlwrapp history. Seeing all that dismissed as just some fork
offends me deeply.

Tom, what makes this even more puzzling is that you didn't show much
interest in xmlwrapp in that 3+ years. You mentioned Debian packages in
late 2010, to which I offered passive support, but that wasn't exactly a
contribution: not only is distro-packaging an affair external to the
library itself, it apparently didn't work out, as packages.debian.org
still doesn't list xmlwrapp. Then you complained about the move to
github in September 2011
(https://groups.google.com/d/topic/xmlwrapp/8JPNmQ4vUfI/discussion),
despite being off active xmlwrapp development for 5 years. But you
seemed to accept the explanation [3] and didn't pursue it further.

So why do you now, out of the blue, fork off xmlwrapp, take advantage of
the official home (it's kind of hard to be the maintainer when I don't
control the home and can't even upload release tarballs...) and do all
that under the radar? Instead of working in the normal Open Source way
of cooperating on shared codebase?

Thanks,
Vaclav


[1] I can no longer view the members list, but I can see that Peter the
founder and Eric, both of them admins of the projects, no longer have
xmlwrapp on their respective SF user pages.

[2] Specifically the two months period in Sep-Nov when Tom Browder
committed into the SVN repository; the last commit from pre-Tom era was
another 1.5 years older.

[3] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/xmlwrapp/aoFZ7FKGWPk/discussion --
and really, meritocracy in Open Source is sacred to me, I would never do
anything substantial without discussion among _active developers_.