[Gnu-arch-users] "Getting back on the road"

[James Blackwell]

This is an email I sent to selected people on Sunday. Because of all of
the requests to "get going again", I thought I'd send it to the rest of
the list. 

Its ok guys. Be patient. Tom said that he'd have a plan on Friday.

=====

This is going to be difficult for me to write, so I'll be blunt; 

I've been single-mindedly focused on arch development, in a race against
opponents like BitKeeper, Subversions and Darcs. In a well-meant (but poorly
acted upon) manner, over the last two months I've been driving the arch
machinery forward as fast as possible, taking no mind to the sounds of the
creaking gears in the machinery. With a maniacal frenzy, I pushed the machinery
faster than could be tolerated. As the last two months progressed, there were
signs of problems; the 1.2.1 fix was a thrown piston; the on-again-off-again
flame wars were expelled from the mailing list much as an overheated radiator. 
This didn't stop me. I kept driving harder, until finally the transmission 
siezed.

If we are stalled on the roadside of development, then I should take the
responsibility of pushing the process to hard.  For that, I am sorry. 

The misake that I've made is that I was so focused on beating everyone else in
the race of version control, I forgot that the machinery isn't actually
machinery at all; rather, its people. I've pushed everyone pretty hard, some a
little too hard, and one person in particular, much too hard. For that, I am
sorry too.

I apologize to every one of you for the confusion that I've injected into the 
process. In particular, I apologize to Tom. 

And here we sit, on the side of the road. 

I'd like it if we could get moving again. I like the thrill of the wind as
we're racing along, passing the other teams in the dust, quickly gaining 
ground on the two teams that aren't quite so far ahead. I think we can catch
them, and teach them a lesson or two about how to play this game.

We'll have to work as a tightly knit team to pull this off. We've all got a
specific part to play in keeping our team in the race. With Aaron focused upon
performance enhancements, Jivera focused on the XL integration, with Andrew
Suffield handling the part of the infrastructure, with Talli feeding Tom (and
force feeding him dsl), with me focused on the user interface, short term
development and release candidates, and with Tom focused on long term
development and releases....

Yes. You read me correctly. With Tom doing releases. 

I'll agree with the rest of you. Tom's been here for a long while, and I should
show him more trust in him that he's going to do his part (in a timely way, no
less). So I'll do that.

Tom, please understand one thing though. I'm in a uniquely vulnerable position
when we do things this way. A couple well placed "I won't take that" monkey
wrenches can really screw up the machinery of my archive, leaving me with a
pile of conflicts that can be frustrating, possibly even impossible, to clean
up after. Please, if I'm going to be making these release candidates for your
review, give me the room to make judgement calls. A whitespace only patch that a
couple people grumble about is worth it because it makes the nifty merge tools 
I'm using much easier to work with.

In closing, I have an offer for Tom. Tom, If its ok with you, I'd like to 
re-open
my address@hidden branch, so that you can use that code to cut a release.

Regards to all,

James



----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
James Blackwell          Try something fun: For the next 24 hours, give
Smile more!              each person you meet a compliment!

GnuPG (ID 06357400) AAE4 8C76 58DA 5902 761D  247A 8A55 DA73 0635 7400