Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 02:11:49 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: nate@mt.sri.com, tlambert@primenet.com, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: More breakage in -current as a result of header frobbing. Message-ID: <199802230211.TAA18013@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <27525.888172295@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Feb 22, 98 10:31:35 am
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> > > More to the point, it's far more damaging to alienate and potentially > > > lose an existing volunteer than it is to have the tree occasionally > > > broken, as much as I might whine about that from time to time. > > > > To a point, I agree. But, if that is indeed the case, then why isn't > > Terry a committer? He may damage the tree, but we're definitely > > alienating him. > > I was really careful to say *existing* volunteer above for exactly > that reason. ;) > > And Terry isn't a committer for the simple reason that he's not > *trusted* by anyone on our 17 member core team, a group which shook > off its traditional apathy about such political issues to unanimously > reject the proposal that he be added (which was also a first for us). > I hate to single Terry out like this, but since you raised him as a > specific issue... Much as I love playing the human beach-ball... ;-) I have not *asked* for commit priviledges since they were first offered to me in 1994 and I turned them down on the basis of my being a USL employee at the time, and therefore a potential legal liability to the project. The core team members can vote, or not vote, or whatever, and they can be unanimous, or have unanimity with abstentions, or they can vote me in as God's Western Regional Marketing Manager. It really doesn't matter to why I'm involved, and choose to remain involved, one way or the other. But asking for code to be committed, and asking for commit priviledges are two different things. I *have* asked for code to be committed, and I certainly understand that a volunteer organization is probably not capable of the scientific rigor you would hope to find in a business or an academic research project. That's why I've been willing to scale back code changes to the point where it doesn't take a lot of rigor for them to be understood (see http://freebsd.org/~terry/). And I'm willing to continue scaling for however long it takes to get under a sufficient "I can't take the time to understand this because I'm a volunteer" threshold. > I really wish Terry's > specific predilection for pounding a pulpit didn't require such > constant push-back since it definitely leads to the impression that > we're going out of our way to hit HIM with a stick, but it's not > always possible to avoid this given the extremely wide range of > personalities (and personality disorders :-) we have to contend with > in a project like this. Hey, I'm a scientist. Passion about science is wherein lies its art. I wouldn't like me if I didn't argue passionately for rigor over expediency, correctness over fuzz, revolution over evolution, and foul-tasting medicine where foul-tasting medicine is called for. You probably wouldn't like me, either. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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