Re: how to be more careful

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

   From: Miroslav Silovic <address@hidden>
   Date: 07 Oct 2001 21:39:00 +0200

   Funny... After reading Tom's post, Wiki was the first thing that
   popped to my mind. Glad to see somebody else thinking the Right
   Way. ;)

the reality is that guile development is neither a traditional committee
effort nor a wholly-uncoordinated random walk, and different people try
to move it in different ways for different reasons.  the truth is very
bland in this case.

the more people know their own motivations the easier it is to realize
collectively that communication of motivation correlates highly w/ well
factored effort.  since agility must come w/ practice (what doesn't?!),
public self-expression must be cultivated.  how cultures deal w/ that is
highly varied.  [insert usenet flame analyses, here.]

in guile's case, it is like a pizza rotating half in the oven, half
out -- bad rotation means over- or under-baked.  the rotation is
determined by two little cycles, planar in different dimensions, namely
w/- and w/o- write privs, precessing madly.  a few wanderbys spin the
pizza and snag bites.  the pizza maker is too busy rewarding some cool
cats in the back to notice, and after noticing, only says: "hoodlums!".

ok, sorry this analogy may be meandering off as my stomach churns.

the point is, free self-expression rules!  i guess this is the most
polite way to invite people to mouth off publically and anonymously.

another point, as a once-grumbling user and now a besieged maintainer
(and still-grumbling user ;-), i value light but sharply defined process
layer growing crystal-like out of the normal goo.  i see many seeds for
this kind of growth (eg., devel subdir) but slow take up.  the thinking
seems to be: uh, who's going to read this so why waste my time?  this
concern should be systematically addressed by publishing motivation,
design, and everything else, basically.

i will put in place automatic mirroring of such files like TODO and
ChangeLog(s).  i will defer to any objections on publishing the devel
subdir.

(process-related fiat is not so bad, is it tom?)

thi