Re: Upgrading Shepherd services

[Attila Lendvai]

hi Felix,


> And Attila, as for your interaction with Ludo' I am not sure there is
> great value in venting about Ludo' making changes that are difficult to
> rebase upon. It is the privilege of a maintainer.
>
> You are not the only one to have felt that frustration.


well, i have two hats on in this situation:

when it's my developer hat on, then i agree with you.

but when i have the enthusiastic guix user hat on... then i'm a bit concerned 
that shepherd seems to be a one-bus project 
(https://chaoss.community/kb/metric-bus-factor/). and it has issues that are 
stopping me from using guix in ways that i'd like to... which is why i 
sometimes put the developer hat on, and then send my contributions... which are 
then met with... well... a moderate level of enthusiasm.

now, i, the dev, understand Ludo's perspective: i also prefer spending my free 
time hacking ahead on the joyous path of my own plans and inspirations, instead 
of reviewing contributions.

but one of these contributions was a fix for a long-standing, and rather hard 
to find bug (that, BTW, also caused the recent, multi-day outage of several 
guix services). and the rest of the commits in my branch are mostly "just" the 
means to finding bugs like that, including the ones in my own services. and 
it's reasonable to expect that these commits will be useful for finding future 
bugs, too. and i, the user, am somewhat concerned about the way such 
contributions are greeted.

now, the situation is tricky here, because i'm both guys... :) and the 
concerned voice of the enthusiastic user sure sounds like the whining of a 
self-righteous, misunderstood genius... so, yeah. but here we are nevertheless.


> At the same time, your contributions to the Shepherd could be very
> valuable. You are talented and committed to excellence. All you have
> to do---if it's not an overreach for me to say so here---is to get
> yourself on the same page with Ludo'.


that sounds like a monarchy, but my preferred locales are meritocracies... ;)

yet, i think i'm still going the extra mile for now, and i'm jumping even those 
hoops that i find arbitrary (even if i argue against them in the process).


> Please forgive my professorial tone.


no, it's welcome, i appreciate your feedback! it has helped me to understand my 
internal dev vs. user conflict.


> For example, if Ludo' doesn't want debugging statements all over the
> place there must be another plan to capture the output. (Ludo' has not
> said how, or I read over it.) There is no point to litigate the details


ultimately, you can't escape the fact that only the programmer knows what state 
is useful in a sequential log for understanding the dynamic behavior of a 
codebase. and "log statements scattered around the codebase" are exactly those 
annotations. and in addition they also serve as comments, only "smart" ones 
that are also observable at runtime when needed.


> here, but I would be happy to offer my help to mediate so that your
> contributions become more acceptable upstream.
>
> As a rule, I do not contribute to projects where my own direction
> diverges too much, unless I offer features that are universally
> attractive. Life is too short.


sure, i get it. and with only my programmer hat on, i wouldn't even be here 
writing this mail... but with my enthusiastic user hat on, i'm all the more 
concerned about that sentiment!

--
• attila lendvai
• PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39
--
“The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we 
behave when we don't know what to do.”
        — John Holt (1923–1985), 'How Children Fail' (1964)