[slime-devel] fork ?

[Attila Lendvai]

> 2. If you really, really can't abide by point 1 then you should create
>    a proper fork. This means choosing a new name and creating a new
>    project with its own mailing list. On your project website you
>    should also try and justify the fork and the inevitable drain on
>    developer resources.

first of all, we could have a long discussion about what exactly a
fork is and how people think about it. i don't want to do that, so i
just summarize my opinion that it's not a bad thing at all. slime is a
tool we use every day, therefore it's natural that there can't be
consensus about it - everyone will have needs that others will
dislike. darcs (or git or your favourite distributed source control
system) helps a great deal in managing branches, and in fact each
checked out darcs repo instance is a branch. my suggestion to use
darcs was driven exactly by this, btw.

then it slowly turned out that i don't agree with many unwritten rules
about elisp/emacs coding. for example at the beginning i wasn't aware
that the lack of use of defun* with keywords as opposed to all those
many &optionals are not due to historycal reasons - which was my
obvious guess. later these things caused many small confrontations
that i wasn't at all aware of, until Helmut finally expressed his
dislike of them in a quite short mail.

by now looking at his cleanup checkins on my changes i understood it
and to be honest i'd be very disappointed if mails like that could
change my opinion about technical things in which we don't agree. but
there's nothing unusual in that, sometimes people don't agree. without
that nothing would ever change in the world, while with that arguments
are inevitable.

i honestly tought that the things i was changing (in that relatively
short period i was committing to the cvs) are generally useful for
everyone. i always missed slime-mode-map in the minibuffer, now it's
even gone from the official. i also missed the dwim inspection or the
10-fold (or was it even more?) speedup of the fuzzy completion, just
to mention a few.

to get back to "forking" (which is in fact only a darcs repo caching
my (our) changes that we can easily share with my collegues), i
suggest to forget about it completly. that thing was created to rise
my own _efficiency_ [yeah, i'm selfish, sorry], and then i popped it
up so that maybe people will like the idea and then it can be for
eveyone's good [or not?], but it turned out that it's not the case.
from my point of view and needs, creating a new project with a new
name and a new mailing list is the worst idea, so let's just forget
that darcs repo ever existed!

in my view slime is just a tool that i'm shaping the way it fits my
hands the best and therefore it may not fit the hands of others that
well. and i honestly think that it's normal and is part of the way our
world works. if you read back my mails about moving to darcs, my most
important reason was that using darcs people can very easily manage to
keep some of their changes local, while the generally acceptable
changes can be put in the official.

> Note that forking due to trivialities is highly unlikely to attract
> other developers.

which makes it obvious how different we think about "branches" or
"forks" (or iow, distributed repo instances).

> So I think Helmut's position is justified and not an overreaction
> (although an ultimatum is probably not the most effective course of
> action). My advice to Attila would be firstly to apologize, then
> either retract the fork or commit to it, the current situation cannot
> continue.

you can pretty much have an opinion about me and the way i was acting,
but i humbly note that i don't really find it grounded when
suggestions are given about projects by people not being contributors
of it. (this may not be the case here, in which case i'm sorry and
take it back)

but i already apolagized for any/all possible misunderstandings about
my comment on Helmut's changes. but to be sure i re-phrase again that
i don't have bad feelings behind this "fork", i didn't intend to make
Helmut (or anybody else) mad with my changes in slime's cvs and i'm
sorry if some of my comments were not formulated in the least
confrontational way and if they left room for misunderstandings.

but as i already expressed above, i won't apolagize for thinking
different about some thechnical terms and that i have different needs
from a tool than some of the others. this is just plain natural for
me, even when i'm "on the other side" of the argument if there is such
thing at all.

i tought that my previous mail was the last one to this list, because
i find it quite pointless to waste anyone's time with matters like
this, and it seemed to me that the situation was clearly stated. but
it seems like some things about the status of that other repo needed
to be cleared up.

but what other repo are we talking about, anyway? :)

sorry for wasting your time,

-- 
- attila

"- The truth is that I've been too considerate, and so became
unintentionally cruel...
 - I understand.
 - No, you don't understand! We don't speak the same language!"
(Ingmar Bergman - Smultronstället)