Re: development goals

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Han-Wen,

You're confrontational, indeed.

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

> - Rolling back a patch is preferred over fixing actual problems.

What makes you say so?

> - Nobody has enough initiative to put a single strategic #ifdef in the
>   code.

To me, it looks like the "strategic #if 0" was a way of admitting that
we know our code is broken, we don't know why, and we don't want to
investigate that ATM but we might eventually do that if we have time.
So no, I didn't feel that happy with this.

> - If someone finally does take initiative, it's only ok if it is
>   perfect.

Yeah, that "#if 0" was just per-fect, thank you very much.

I have the impression that I'm under attack.  ;-)  It turns out that I'm
working on Guile in my spare time, which is scarce.  Surely I could do
better work if only I spent more time on Guile, I could take more
initiatives because I would be confident that if I do break something I
can work something out.

> You might construe that I would like to turn Guile development into
> LilyPond development.  That is not necessarily the case, but I keep
> misunderstanding what people expect in this community.  I am assuming
> that developers in general are interested in a more lively and more
> rapid evolution of Guile, but everytime I see habits and policies that
> seem contrary to that goal.

How many people fix bugs reported to `bug-guile'?  Believe me, spending
time doing this makes you feel reluctant to large unmotivated changes.

> Then again, with all the back & forth porting of changes between 1.8
> and head, it's difficult to tell what is in 1.8 and what is not.

Surely you'll enjoy it: we have an old-fashioned tradition of updating
`NEWS' when changing something in a branch!  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo'.