Re: What's going on?

[tomas]

On Sat, Sep 22, 2001 at 06:26:18PM -0500, Rob Browning wrote:
> 
> Can someone explain to me why the tone has become so hostile here
> lately?  It seems like all of a sudden, there's an awful lot of axe
> grinding going on, and very little benefit of the doubt.

(From a mostly passive bystander)

It struck me too. I didn't give it too much importance, but one of
the reasons I enjoyed reading this mailing list was the friendly and
constructive tone. (But I think it's coming back on track again, see
below ;-)

I agree with you that Guile has improved *a lot* over the last year and
very exciting ideas are being kicked around.

I can understand that some like Bill Schottstaedt are a bit piss^H^H^H^H
irritated at Guile's strange version divergence (1.3.4 being that much
in use, 1.4 being the official stable and not-yet-1.6 being so much
improved over the others: this did bite me before). If you have a big
application out (Snd *is* terrific, really) and bet all your eggs to
one embedding language, you want *that* part to work consistently.

I think the most important thing after getting 1.6 out might be to tell
the world to upgrade asap and try to iron out whatever issues arise then.

What I don't quite understand (for example) is Emacs' folks seeming lack
of interest in things like Keisukes' wonderful job of embedding Guile
into Emacs (the G in Guile is, after all, supposed to read `Gnu'). OK,
it's another path than the original plan, but it might fit nicely into it.

> No, guile isn't perfect.  No, the developers aren't either, and yes,
> the documentation still needs work[1], [...]

Come on. No one expects that. And believe me, the developers are the
best I can imagine. I do really appreciate the great job you are doing
(and especially the way you are doing it).  All of you. I'm sure I'm
not alone on that.

> [1] Though several people have been doing a really nice job fixing
> that problem.  The documentation is far better than it was even 5
> months ago.

See above. Especially this part has impressed me a lot.

> (Somewhat disturbed by the apparent depth of sentiment behind recent
>  outbursts...)

Take Aubrey Jaffer, for example. His first posting was a bit -- uhh
rough. But now he's sending in patches. Not bad, eh?

Thank you all for your great job.

Cheers
-- tomas