Please let me be very clear about a few things. This is not about lack of praise or thanks - I'm doing weather and light mainly because I like doing it, because I like to see if I can capture the essence of a scene I see in real life in shader code. I am passionate and excited about that, and I try to share this excitement for instance in the forum. But ultimately, my gratification is that I myself can fly into the perfect sunrise.
This is about being a team or not being a team, and my vision of being in a team is some amount of mutual support, not that teammates lob rocks into my path. So, for me being in the FG team implies that I consider project needs in addition to my own preferences. For instance, I spend some time explaining and summarizing devel list discussions to forum users. For instance, I try hard to accomodate a release schedule even if it clashes violently with my private schedule. I hand my stuff in via GIT merge requests, although I absolutely hate dealing with GIT and although it costs me a lot of extra time - because TorstenD convinced me that it's better for the rest of the team to see what is affected than if I package as tarball. I try to discuss what I'm doing early on so that we have the possibility to create some coherence in the project, if someone asks for feedback, I usually try to find the time to give it. So for me the team is not just a bunch of people with commit rights who work next to each other. But in return, I do expect a few modest things - common fair play in dealing with each other, and some help from the experts if needed. So, if I'm working on something, someone else is working on a similar thing, says 'Send it over, we'll merge yours in.' and I do so, and nothing comes of it after 6 months waiting, that's not a problem - we're all volunteers and schedules may not work as planned. A simple 'sorry, didn't work out' would be nice. My problem starts when the story is later told as 'I can't work with you, because you insist in doing things your way.' Because that's a lie, and has nothing to do with fair play in the team. I have no problem with criticism as such (I tend not to take it so well initially, but after sleeping over it, I usually can accept that I was wrong). I think it's a necessary, though uncomfortable, part of development. I do speak up now and then and say my piece about things I consider badly done. I usually do this after I've convinced myself that I understand the problem, i.e. after working for a week, trying alternative solutions and having found something better. I think it's common decency that if we say bad things about other's work, we should at least be sure it's justified. What is not fair play is armchair criticism which is just taking cheap potshots. Snide remarks at Nasal coding, because we know it's bad, right, regardless if any measurable evidence says otherwise. Offhand remarks about shader performance. And so on. We get to hear a really vast array of that, despite the fact that this is a devel list where people should know better. It's so cheap - it costs 10 seconds to write down a claim, it may cost a week to disprove it. And if I don't understand a problem but have the feeling something is going wrong, then I might as well ask a question rather then complaining ahead. There have been things of late for which, try as I might, I can't find a charitable explanation. For instance, I introduced a bug into the urban shader when in the aftermath of throwing the binormal out or varyings and replacing it with cross products. I didn't notice it, because it's not in my devel branch. Emilian notices it, comments on it, traces it to my work comments that he's going to send Fred a note, but doesn't tell me a thing, yet when I finally notice it, I get to hear 'You did that' immediately. I ask myself - how on earth is it in the interest of the project if the one person most likely to be able to quickly fix the bug is identified but not notified? I couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation, but I can come up with a few less charming ones. It's not my idea of teamplay. I get to hear comments like 'You can't rely on z being up in shader space' here - but when I ask how I should do it alternatively, then all I get is silence. What idea of propagating information is this? I've read my statements with regard to Windows/Linux a few times. Given that X-Plane apparently is distributed in a binary edition, the question why we don't do it doesn't seem grossly unreasonable to me. Given that I even said after being introduced to the Build Server that I take back my remark if that is the concept, there's absolutely no reason in my text I can see for ThorstenB to paint me here as a petulant user who feels entitled to prime service from a volunteer, thinks everyone involved does a bad job and is pissed because he can't get what he wants. So whatever the reason may be, that again crossed a line from fair play into something less charitable (one might think it was a simple misunderstanding, in which a short 'Sorry, I didn't get your meaning right' would have been nice, but apparently not). So, I don't feel entitled to thanks or praise - but I do feel entitled to fair play and common decency if this is supposed to be a team. And it's the lack of that which makes the Flightgear experience miserable for me. And I have reached the point where I no longer see that I should do my share of teamplay if part of my team doesn't stick to the rules and the other part stands by and watches silently. That's not a team I desperately want to be part of. * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep yourself connected to Go Parallel: DESIGN Expert tips on starting your parallel project right. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
