Paul Schmehl wrote:
--On December 14, 2007 5:21:02 PM -0800 Brian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Information does indeed need to be gathered, and while even the ports
list will only grab a small percentage of FreeBSD users, other options
would likely grab a lot less. Plus, most of the users here are
knowledgeable enough to give decent input. For those of you that don't
like change may I suggest the book that led to
http://www.whomovedmycheese.com/. It is really in all of our best
interest to have the product evolve, the alternative is much worse.
This really is getting quite irritating. Not one person on this list
has *ever* said they don't want to entertain new ideas for ports. Not
one person on this list has said they don't like change. *All* of the
complaints have been along the lines of "go write some code and stop
filling up this list with posts". And that is *precisely* the point.
Yet the proponents of the Aryeh bandwagon keep throwing up this straw
man that those of us who have tired of the useless back and forth are
refusing to listen and uninterested in change, when *nothing* could be
further from the truth. ports@ is *not* a development list. Its
purpose is to provide news about ports, discuss problems with ports, get
advice on porting and so forth. Or, to quote its charter, "Discussions
concerning FreeBSD's “ports collection” (/usr/ports), ports
infrastructure, and general ports coordination efforts. This is a
technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected."
Get that? "Strictly technical". "How do you feel about the present
design" or "what don't you like about the present design" or "if you
could change something about ports, what would it be" are *not*
appropriate discussions for this list.
You are the first person who has raised any kind of coherent argument as
to why perhaps Aryeh shouldn't be asking these questions on [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Your argument is based on the interpretation of the phrase "strictly
technical" that appears in the charter, because Aryeh's posts are
clearly in line with every other phrase in the charter. Personally I
would not agree with your interpretation that Aryeh's posts contradict
"strictly technical," but then again I have never really thought long
and hard about what "strictly technical" means in this context.
Now to your point about "straw men", I have refrained from doing as
others have done, and have not tried to ascribe motives as to why this
particular discussion has so offended people. But the overreaction to
Aryeh's posts is definitely a mystery, and I can understand why people
are speculating.
The idea of a new mailing list: if the discussion about ports design got
to overwhelm ports@, then it would become time to create a new mailing
list. But up until now, the ports design posts with genuine content (as
opposed to the "get out of here" posts) have been sufficiently few and
sufficiently non-disruptive to this mailing list, that I don't think it
is worth while to do this.
If people simply responded to Aryeh's posts with strictly technical
answers, the whole discussion would have been a few posts. I do agree
that Aryeh's discussions are not along the lines of "port XXX is not
working", but I just don't see why both kinds of posting cannot coexist
in peaceful harmony, with a split happening only if one set of
discussions threatens to overwhelm the other.
Stephen
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