[Gnu-arch-users] Re: details, details

[Lalo Martins]

And so says Andrew Suffield on 09/09/05 00:34...
> On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 07:25:12AM +0800, Lalo Martins wrote:
> You appear to have forgotten the history, probably because you weren't
> there.

I've been there since the shell scripts.  If memory serves, more or less
as long as you.  I was just quiet.  (Which, in retrospect, is very
surprising - I'm not usually this quiet on lists.)

> When I look back, I can trace the rise and fall of arch to two
> rough events.

I agree with you, except my assessment of "rough events" is different; I
count under this label the multiple occasions where Tom stopped doing
anything remotely resembling maintainership - once for unknown reasons,
during which he openly stated he wasn't going to continue the project;
one to play with toy projects of very questionable relevance; and
others, shorter and with smaller impact.

> The second event was when Canonical hired most of them and stopped
> them from working on tla, moving them to their own projects. At that
> point development on arch more or less stopped.

Eh?  We seem to be in different universes.

Development *of* arch stopped a few months *before* that, with Tom
silently ignoring patches.  When asked about them, he'd wave his hands
very vaguely about how the patch sucked; most people just wouldn't ask,
and therefore wait pretty much forever.

Then Canonical decided to use Arch internally, and hired *some*
developers.  During this time, those developers that were at Canonical
continued contributing more or less as much as before.  I was there - I
attended their Oxford conference in mid-2004.  With 2 or 3 BoFs on Arch
and a room dedicated to continuously hacking on it, I'd hardly say
"stopped them from working on tla".

In fact, by then, tla was very much unmaintained, and the role of Rob
inside Canonical could be pretty much summarized as: "admin pqm at the
server, give support on arch, work on cscvs (to import archives from cvs
and svn), and maintain a branch of arch itself that has the bugfixes we
need".  This branch was also public, many people outside Canonical were
running it.  It was the basis of baz.

Then Jblack walked in; one more in a series of fools who tried to either
maintain Arch when Tom abandoned it, or co-maintain it when he
half-abandoned it.  He did releases, mostly by merging from the
"integration branch" I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

And then Canonical hired him too.  As far as I know, it was for his work
on the supermirror, which was very similar to what Canonical wanted to
do; although many who were there loved him for the release work.  *His*
contribution stopped, not because Canonical ordered him to stop, but
because Tom did, in words about one order of magnitude ruder than would
have been reasonable.

So, I really don't see your point.  Maybe you have forgotten history.

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
--
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       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
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