[Gnu-arch-users] Re: arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to")

[Miles Bader]

address@hidden (James Blackwell) writes:
> Let's hypothesize for a moment. Hypothetically speaking, Tom goes
> bonkers and decides that from now on, instead of using english, arch
> would use piglatin. This most unpopular decision would result in the
> other significant developers to start following a different tree. Tom
> would be left alone.

Sure, but there's a lot of hysteresis -- most tla users already trust
Tom, and are used to him, and so won't abandon his tree without a fairly
strong incentive (at least quickly; if someone else's version of tla
were just "slightly" better, there might be a gradual drift of users to
it).

That means that Tom (like Linus) has a fair amount of wiggle room, and
_can_ make decisions that are unpopular in the short-term without losing
his users.  This is a very good thing because sometimes such actions are
necessary.

[Of course forks are not always so clear-cut anyway, if the maintainers
of different trees are all merging from each other (e.g., the different
BSD forks -- though judging from the abysmal OpenBSD benchmark numbers I
saw recently, they're not doing it enough!).]

-Miles
-- 
`...the Soviet Union was sliding in to an economic collapse so comprehensive
 that in the end its factories produced not goods but bads: finished products
 less valuable than the raw materials they were made from.'  [The Economist]