On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 6:28 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > Here the primary discussion I was trying to start was about why the > discussion failed and led to bad feeling.
Well, I have a hypothesis, don't know if it's true. It goes like this: Most of the time, when one of us decides to take the trouble to try and implement some change to the numpy core, it's because we really want to be able to take advantage of that change in our own work. This has two consequences: (a) it's only worth bothering if we can make sure that the resulting code is really useful to us. So we're really motivated to make sure we nail at least one use case. (b) we don't get any benefit from our work unless the code actually gets merged. So we're really motivated to build consensus and convince other people they really want our code too, because otherwise it'll probably get dropped. In this case, though, Mark got asked to write some code as part of his job. Making commercial development and FOSS mix has this notorious habit of going off the rails despite everyone having the best of intentions, and I wonder if that was part of the problem here. If Travis hired me to implement some feature demanded by the community, then I wouldn't feel the same urgency to really make sure that everyone was on board before investing my time. And I wouldn't have the same urgency to make sure that it really nailed my use cases, because that wouldn't be so central to my motivation for doing the work. And on a limited-length contract, I'd have more urgency to get something done quick. As it is, I don't want to waste this opportunity enabled by Mark's time and Enthought's money, but I do care a lot more about getting a good result than I do about making something happen this month -- because I'll have to work with, support, and teach people about whatever we come up with for the next however many years, and that weighs a lot more heavily in my calculations. Hopefully i tgoes without saying, but to be clear -- I'm sure Mark *is* worrying about all the things I mentioned, and doing his best to make something awesome that works for people. (And, Mark, sorry for talking about you in the third person... not sure how to talk about this better.) But sometimes that's not enough when the incentives are weird. It also doesn't help that apparently there have been multiple discussions going on in different venues (on the mailing list, in github, and presumably some face-to-face at Enthought's offices too), which makes it very hard to keep everyone in the loop. I'm a big fan of Karl's book too -- here are some sections I think might be particularly relevant: http://producingoss.com/en/contracting.html http://producingoss.com/en/setting-tone.html#avoid-private-discussions http://producingoss.com/en/bug-tracker-usage.html -- Nathaniel _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
