On Wed 16.Sep'09 at 11:11:05 -0300, Renato Botelho wrote: > Don't you think it could be a great thing to call Carlos to help > you to maintain the project?
This one I can answer myself. Some time ago he did that offer to me, so that I could help him with the mercurial repo. And I thank him for trusting me to do that. But I refused. Mainly because I dislike mercurial as much as I like git, and whenever I had to see the mercurial logs, commit stuff, search the history etc, I found it so annoying that it killed my enthusiasm to even go inside the mercurial folder. So that is reason number one: I don't like mercurial and it wouldn't be fun to maintain that repo, unfortunately. There was even a slightly troll thread which I started about the authorship handling of the mercurial logs. I simply couldn't understand why the _author_ name didn't stand out in the logs, and one apparently has to play tricks about who _committed_ the patch to the repo so that the author name can be known at a glance. And I care deeply about having the author recognized as much as possible, as this is an open source effort with many people and it is easier to know who to blame :-) [ although I never checked if there is a working 'hg blame' command which points out who wrote each particular line of the source, which would not be confused by this mercurial-way of handling authorship. But I haven't looked that much, as the whole thing seemed broken to start with and I didn't want to waste my time on that. But maybe there is, so "caveat lector" ] Another reason is that I wanted some independence over the code, so that I could go wild sometimes while I was learning things (and I still do learn). So it would be simpler for me to simply say "this is a fork of Window Maker" than to try to be a hard conservative about everything. In fact, one of the things I didn't like about the code was its coding style and naming conventions. It was one of my happiest days when I changed the coding style in one go with 'indent -linux', because that means that now I can _enjoy_ reading it (even if there are remaining things to tweak) That does not matter for many people, but it matters for me. As there was a commit made by Dan himself changing "tabs to spaces" I thought it would be really really hard to make the new style official. So having my own repo solved this issue too, I would not have to stick with something which hurts my understanding of the code because of "hysterical raisons". The other reason is that I am not confortable with having "two heads" to manage only one repo. What I do to my repo is my responsibility alone, and I would not like to perhaps screw somebody else's repo. If someone has a lot of new stuff to commit and that person is really worth of trust, that person could simply send a pull request. But that also means that in the end the final word is the repo owner's (but not that this pull request thing will ever happen in a small sized project like this, but the thing is, we never know. Perhaps tomorrow someone has finished the conversion of wrlib --> cairo and sends a pull request :-) Ok, but that is a long enough email for a single-line question. But "if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter", as Pascal used to write :-) -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [email protected].
