[Gnu-arch-users] Canonical and the requirements of users

[Thomas Lord]

David Allouche write:

 > Baz development was not driven by the requirements of the imports.
 > The import system was actually quite indifferent to baz changes,
 > except for some performance bugfixes.

 > It was driven by requirement of users, from the company and from the
 > community, and by community contributions.

Users, notoriously, make collectively incoherent demands and it is the
job of good maintainers not to just cede to every demand but to chose
a path that makes sense from a broader perspective.

Which users demanded that Canonical ignore architectural advice from me,
prepare patches that don't even bother to format code consistently, add
lots of bloat, and ultimately produce a fork that even Canonical itself
will abandon?  Where was the user demand that said "please trash this
project" coming from?  Where was the user demand that said "Please,
Canonical, don't support Tom in his work?"

 > I agree that baz stability has been disappointing. But the reason why
 > some Canonical developers are still very unhappy with it are
 > improvements that do not quite work (baz merge taking ages and
 > sometimes eating all memory and failing) and things that were 
 > inherited from tla (pathological performance on trees with a large
 > history and many branches, namespace clutter, network counter-
 > performance).

As for the stuff inherited from tla I point to revc.  It's true that
`git' prompted it but its also true that most of the important ideas
behind it were on the table by the time things went south with
Canonical.

-t