Mikahel:
> Ack on Tom being a bad maintainer [as opposed to a scientist]. :)
Half-ack from me.
I had occasion recently to review the guidelines for GNU maintainers
and they contain a surprising number of comments about not letting
users push you around. In that narrow sense I was at least not
out of bounds :-)
I don't dispute for a second that my strengths are in taking broad
perspectives and getting new, interesting, valuable things going.
My weaknesses certainly include being a one-man support team and
maintenance staff. That's what practical R&D largely is.
Another part of practical R&D is "technology transfer" -- helping
to smoothly move a project out of R&D phase and into production.
The Arch project flopped during the technology transfer phase.
I tried my level best. I advised on how to begin to construct
a support/maintenance infrastructure that would last and that
would preserve the value in Arch. Unfortunately I had only
minimal authority ("That isn't going to be a release of GNU
Arch" was about the extent of my available moves, under the rules) and
no incentives (aka budget) to offer. And, unfortunately,
some incentives that I considered (and in retrospect seem
objectively) to be destructive were on the table from a third
party. So here we are.
-t
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