Hello Benjamin,
Excerpt from Benjamin R. Haskell: -- <snip> -- > I concur completely that a team of runtime file maintainers sounds > better. Back in January, I started composing an email wondering whether > having maintainers still made sense as a development model. > (Personally, I also find it very odd that even after switching to > Mercurial there are still hundreds of individual patch-files that can be > obtained via FTP, but that's probably a much broader discussion.) In > addition to the issues with maintainership mentioned so far: > > - Maintainer might not be responsive, creating more work for Bram and/or > the maintainer later ..or a random patch submitter. confirmed. > - Maintainer can't make Vim-wide changes (like the '&cpo' changes from > earlier this year) confirmed. > > My main concerns are that: > > - (it seems) Many maintainers are never really all-that committed. IIRC a maintainer has committed himself to be reachable via email 3 years after his last change. (I must have read that in vim help somewhere, but need to seek that out again first where exactly that was). ...but $ recgrep -c "by Thilo Six" . | grepinvert "0$" | wc -l 28 basically all of those files have been changed last time by their original maintainer a decade ago! > Probably similar to the above concerns, but it makes perfect sense. > Over the past nine years, the main programming language I myself use on > a daily basis has gone from Perl to C# to PHP and now to Ruby. It's > hard to find someone to be a long-term maintainer for {Language X} where > that user is also well-versed enough in Vim to keep the syntax > well-maintained. > > - Having a maintainer makes bugs last longer, especially for minor bugs. > > Since even minor changes have to go through a maintainer, (it seems) > that changes don't immediately get sent back up to Bram. Often versions > seem to linger until there are enough minor updates that the maintainer. I know currently patches go lost! > Just for some data points, at the time I was writing the email in > January (which I never sent), I was able to very quickly find four > instances where having a maintainer made things more difficult: > > Date | Subject: > > 2012-01-31 | ruby.vim does not work with greater than rubygems 1.7 > Patch was mailed to maintainer, possibly didn't get back to Bram. > > 2012-01-17 | [patch] indent/java.vim: the line after @Override should not > indent > Java maintainer has resigned. > > 2012-01-16 | spellcheck in mail: Subject header key is incorrectly underlined > Lech Lorens reported to maintainer long ago, update didn't get to Bram. > > 2012-01-08 | [patch] vim: runtime/syntax/jam.vim > Email bounced trying to send to maintainer, so sent patch to list. -- Regards, Thilo 4096R/0xC70B1A8F 721B 1BA0 095C 1ABA 3FC6 7C18 89A4 A2A0 C70B 1A8F -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php