Dear GNUsteppers,
as some of you may have noticed I was on a break from the project for
some time. This hiatus was caused by the way Greg reacted on the mail
from Johannes on RMS.
For the record... my initial reaction was this:
# Johannes,
#
# As list moderator, I am obliged to inform you that political infighting is not what this list is meant for. # Kindly take any discussions regarding this matter off-list. I am NOT censoring you, but this is simply not the
# proper forum to discuss this.#
# Yours, GC
I struggle to think of a more neutral response. If you can think of how I could have reacted MORE gently, please let me know. My intention was to avoid an unnecessary flame war. Also, I was within FSF guidelines when doing this:
Which explicitly states that unrelated political discourse doesn't belong on GNU mailing lists. I apologize if anyone considered that, in fulfilling my role as list moderator, that I was too harsh. I acted in what I deemed an appropriate and measured way to prevent issues on the list.
Just a note: One thing I won't do is constantly ask for consensus before I act. I saw Johannes's post as a clear provocation.
Just to state the obvious, I think that Johannes
was wrong here, still he deserved a friendlier reply. I was not
surprised that Johannes choose to quit the project. The tone on the
GNUstep mailing lists, and sadly on many free software projects, is
often very unfriendly.
After this I needed some time to think about what my role in such a
project should be. Why would I subject myself to treatments in my spare
time that I would not accept in a payed position?
So if you started a political discussion on a list at work that you knew would create controversy you wouldn't expect your manager to step in and say "hey guys, this is not the right place for that"? There was no name-calling, cursing, or inappropriate action by me towards Johannes just a warning.
The result of all this thinking is that I still want to contribute to
this project, for which I have worked more than twenty years. But I will
scale down my involvement. I would like to give up on chores that I
never enjoyed and work on fun stuff like problem analysis and bug fixing.
There are three main jobs that I would like to pass on:
- Maintainership of GNUstep gui and back.
I'm sorry that you don't wish to do this. You are an excellent developer. I am happy you will keep contributing, but I do understand not wanting to be ultimately responsible. This falls to me if you do not wish to be the maintainer of gui and back anymore. If anyone would like to volunteer to maintain gui and back I am willing to entertain discussion on that point.
Here it would be great if
somebody could at least take over the review of Greg's pull requests.
Somehow we are not able to sort out our communication and this results
in a rather frustrating experience for me.
I am very sorry to hear this. It seems no matter how hard I try we are not able to connect. Indeed every time I believe we have had a good interaction I hear differently from you later on. I am a very jovial person and I believe you either take me too harshly or misunderstand me. That much is apparent from your review of one of my previous PRs that when I missed a detail you pointed out and then later corrected myself that you thought I was being glib or dismissive when, in actual fact, I totally missed what you were referring to because it was 3AM for me when I looked.
Nevertheless, I learned a lot from our interaction and I will sincerely miss it. It should be said that we should all be reviewing each other's work as it is crucial to quality.
- Package building on OSB
(https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/X11:GNUstep). Here an update to
the latest GNUstep release would be needed and there is a lot room for
further improvements.
- Coverity Scan for GNUstep base
(https://scan.coverity.com/projects/gnustep-base?tab=overview). I use a
docker image to create these metrics and at the beginning of the year I
wanted to improve on that script and even extend it to cover gui as
well. Now I would rather pass this on to somebody else.
If you are interested to take over one of these jobs, please contact me
directly. I will stay out of further mailing list discussion but will
still be around to help developers and users with their issues.
Cheers,
Fred