Hello Eli :) On Wed 12 Feb 2020 19:13, Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> writes:
>> From: DJ Delorie <d...@delorie.com> >> Are we DONE producing that operating system? No? If not, why not? >> Aren't all those developers who finished their packages working on >> other, new packages? Why aren't the package counts continuing to >> increase, if the developers are otherwise unoccupied? > > Those are very important questions Glad you agree! > and they should have been investigated, analyzed, and answered I agree also! This sort of activity is natural in a project that engages in self-reflection. If a project has leadership, then naturally leadership would be conducting the exercise. > _before_ showing us a bunch of naïve graphs and drawing conclusions > from them (which unsurprisingly coincide with the opinions the author > expressed long before showing those graphs). I know that we may disagree on interpretation of the data, and that neither you nor I can avoid starting this kind of investigation with preconceptions, but please believe that I did the analysis in good faith. I started with an open question about what it would mean for GNU to be a project in good or bad health, settled on using project release data as a base, and in the end thought active projects could be a good measure. There are other ways to interpret the data; again, if the data have problems, corrections are welcome, or fork the repo and do your own analysis... seriously. If we admit the possibility that GNU may be in a bad state, then we should certainly look into it. I have my conclusions which I stand by but which are certainly not set in stone. > If someone wants to try answering this question: > >> If a set of developers finish a package, and don't start on a new one, I >> think that says something interesting about the health of GNU and its >> community. I agree entirely, it's a very good question. > Why wasn't such (or similar) analysis done before coming up with this > "state of GNUnion"? I think such anecdotal studies can speak volumes > more than those graphs. This could be! Please do go out and ask. > And then we have Guile, whose development pace leaves a lot to be > desired, if we really want it to become the GNU standard extension > languages. Strangely, the Guile developers, including Andy Wingo, > don't seem to do anything about that. There are no discussions about > making the project more active, none at all. Does that mean the Guile > level of activity is OK with Andy? If so, how does that live in peace > with the seemingly grave outlook for the rest of GNU? Honestly this argument is beneath you. You do not believe my conclusions about GNU -- which is fine -- but instead you try to shift the focus to the project I maintain, claiming that it is in poor health -- something that which would not invalidate the argument -- but, with no data or analysis to back it up, which is the aspect that you criticise about my conclusion. WTF. We can never know what might have been, but I believe that without my work on Guile, it would certainly be dead now. If you believe otherwise, it's an interesting discussion, but not germane to the current one. > Last, but not least: I'm not at all sure that statistics of the kind > we were presented, which is based on various measures of package > activity, tells anything about "the health of GNU", because GNU, at > least as I understand that term, has almost nothing to do with > development activity of GNU packages. The development activity is > determined solely by the project's development team and its abilities > to draw contributions and find worthy development goals. GNU as an > organization doesn't have any impact on that, because they almost > never interfere into these matters (unless there's some sort of > scandal, which happens only very rarely). Thought experiment: what would GNU be if all of its packages stopped developing? Dead, right? I understand that some GNU developers feel that things are fine. I heartily encourage you to come up with criteria by which to understand the health of GNU and to make an associated investigation. I have done so for myself and the results are not satisfying. Regards, Andy