Michael Goikhman writes: > The latest events are sad. It seems that neither Tom Lord nor > Canonical are interested in developing Arch anymore. And noone yet > volunteered as the new maintainer.
Let me expand on, perhaps even change my position about that. Negatives, and then positives. The negatives: ~ I am not interested in continuing as an official GNU Maintainer I have too many political differences with RMS about the proper handling of the GNU project and so I do not think I can represent the project's values and policies well enough to be a maintainer. *Of course* I agree about the importance of software freedoms and will do my best to always chose GPL-compatible free software licenses but those points of agreement are insufficient, in my opinion, to also stand as a public interface to an official GNU project. ~ I am not interested in running a "fashionable" public free software project. I've taken no end of heat from vocal members of the Arch mailing lists about such things as whose patches and bug reports I spend time on and when. Often the implicit threat, and actual effect, has been "Do our bidding or we trash your professional reputation." The sad truth is that with the resources I've had, to keep such a user community satisfied would mean making huge sacrifices to the code quality of GNU Arch and to any work on making major leaps in functionality. There is room, certainly, to enable skilled and dedicated volunteers and promising, eager-to-learn volunteers to help hack a public project. There is value, certainly, in being able to receive bug reports. But the wild-west gambler's-town style interaction I encountered in this project doesn't fit the bill. A better, more restrained approach is needed -- one which is less dependent upon the way the winds blow on the mailing lists from week to week. The In Between: ~ I am not interested in dying. The same old sob story: I've no revenues. I'm in the red for october (meaning that basic expenses like food and DSL and electricity through the end of the month vastly exceed my remaining cash. I'm flat, flat, flat broke in just a few days with nothing redeeming in sight). I'm not interested in "working for fame" or any other such intangible. I did that. I earned my own modest share of it. That and a $1.50 will buy me a cup of coffee (though I'll have to stiff the barista on a tip). The positives: ~ Especially with Canonical abandoning it, Arch can have a future. Arch is no longer my heart's first true love -- that's for sure. On the other hand, and especially in the direction of revc, I think it can have a bright future. I am willing to enthusiastically keep working on it under the right circumstances, provided that I am able to go in directions that I think make sense, especially directions that move far, far beyond just "software source code revision control". Surely I have earned some credibility with which to chose a course. I think that porting some of the missing features from tla to revc, which would be quite useful for source code management, is a good place to start. This can be done without sacrificing the already file-at-a-time CVS/SVN-like command set of revc or the nice git-like performance characteristics. I would certainly be willing to be technical adviser to a group that wants to maintain tla as it stands (although they have to pay more than lip service to my role in that capacity). It is simplifying that Canonical is going in their own direction. It would have been just swell to have help improving the UI in this direction or that but, for whatever reason, they came with far too much baggage. ~ All it takes is monetary investment So, Arch got started (out of necessity) by my going into debt. It got sustained by the stunning generosity of many people when I was busking. It got sustained further while an angel investor and I tried unsuccessfully to bootstrap a start-up business around it. There seem to be a significant number of interested users. It has certainly had its share of positive impact both directly and by influencing several other systems. Somehow, our collective mode of economic organization has failed to actually reward *me* and allow *me* to, in good conscious and fully living up to familial responsibilities, continue to work on it. I reject the glib defamations of the Canonical crew and those they've influenced. I don't even begin to claim perfection as businessperson or entrepreneur but I'm certain I'm far from the outlier I've come to be portrayed and widely regarded as thanks to their "efforts". So I'm throwing up my arms a bit: Dear Lazyweb -- what the *hell* am I supposed to do at this point to keep the effort going? Anyone got any ideas? Any offers? Selfish and self-righteous replies from Canonical, their groupies, and think-alikes will be called out as exactly that. ~ A Vast Frontier Opens Up Before Us Take revision control far enough and you wind up smack dab in the middle of global file-systems generally. There is *so* much to do that is worth doing in elaborating this framework for other kinds of content management and with respect to new kinds of user application that build upon it. This weekend I've been working on raising the bar of wiki parsers. I don't think I'll have time to finish it before I run out of cash. Roughly, the idea is that Wikis, deep down, are based on multi-pass, recursive parsing -- a rough parse of a large piece of text, followed by a finer parse of each component. At each level of recursion, the lexical and syntactic grammars change (a trivial example: wiki mark-up that let's you make a stylized paragraph at one level -- but have a mathematical equation that can be fed to a compute-engine and/or fancy formatter at the next level down). It ties in nicely with revision control because wiki-style syntaxes tend to branch and merge nicely, and applications which handle them tend to be error-tolerant and provide user-friendly-recoverability for subtexts containing syntax errors (such as after a slightly-off merge). The rough idea there is to bump awiki to the next level as a precursor for integrating it with revc. Many nifty applications flow from that. -t Emergency assistance welcome: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on paypal, same address for inquiries into what directions I'd like to take my R&D efforts in the future. _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
