On Wed, 9 Feb 2011, Eric Shulman wrote:
I think that the 'pointed language' on *both* our parts is a result of the long-term frustrations with the process. Regrettably, those frustrations sometimes lead to a bit more 'heat' and less bit less 'light'. Thanks for looking past the words to get to the meaning.
My pleasure. I enjoy a good frank discussion. It seems we have reached some agreement on abstractions of problems and solutions. The next step, then, would be to make some of the vague solutions into practical proposals. We already have a few concrete things in progress: * Move the code to github to "blow the dust out" and improve accessibility * Tidy and migrate the tickets * Migrating tiddlywiki.org (I hoping this will have secondary effects of encouraging engagement, but that may just be hope) Some of the other things probably need to be narrowed down a bit. 1) We know that we want greater information sharing from the "core team" (whoever that might be) about: * changes planned for the next release * changes and the impact thereof in the current release but what form this should take is not yet clear. Some seem to argue that the presence of a ticket or a reference to it is enough. Other suggest that commit messages ought to be enough. Experience suggests that neither of these are satisfactory for the full breadth of the TiddlyWiki community. If there were endless resources a series of translators would be nice, but resources are not endless so something else needs to happen. 2) We also know that we want much more timely turnaround time on evaluating and processing tickets. I suspect that setting strict guidelines for this sort of thing will just lead to disappointment. That is, it is better for us to record a spirit of intent rather than a letter of the law. From our conversations it seems the most relevant spirit to uphold is acknowledgement. 3) We want a greater diversity of people, thought and code in the core development process. 4) And finally, we know that there is work to do here. Not only to keep the "core" in proper shape, but to improve it and to improve the ecosystem around it such that there are positive feedback loops. (In my own mind, on this particular issue, I keep coming back to restarting chef, in part as a way of allowing assemblages of only some parts of the core.) I would think that immediate next step is continue with the migration of the core code to github and getting to work on pending stuff. If an expanded group of us participates in that any issues will soon be revealed. Agreed? Any additional stuff? More comments within:
Basically, after a long time of feeling like I'm on the outside, cut out of "the loop" and banging my head against a brick wall, I gave up trying.
In the small world of tiddly stuff, this is tragic. Unfortunately we've seen the pattern a fair few times: With you, the Bairds, Udo, Saq, others. That's not how it is supposed to work at all. In fact the usual trajectory for a maturing open source project is that the original maintainers fade into the background as figures of hazy legend while new ones become the keepers of code, commits and tickets.
Extra thought: THANK YOU! This is the discussion we've been needing for YEARS!
Thank _you_ for participating. Now I hope we can get additional people in the mix. While the Chris and Eric show is fun and all, it isn't going to get us too far. -- Chris Dent http://burningchrome.com/ [...] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWikiDev" group. To post to this group, send email to tiddlywikidev@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tiddlywikidev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en.
