On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 11:04:24AM +0100, Bernd Eidenschink wrote:

> > I think the reason behind both issues is because the proposed
> > contributions weren't that great.  I'm sure this statement tweaks a lot
> > of people, but I think it's the truth.
>
> I'm not the expert to verify that on the C level, but the situation was: There
> was a solution done by aD from Rob Mayoff and at least one version that
> patched the aD Part into the main 3.x line. The aD version was unmaintained

When he said, "the proposed contributions weren't that great", I
believe Dossy was referring to the multi-protocol support patches, not
the Rob Mayoff's much older ad-* patches.  (I will ignore for now any
question of whether his evaluation was accurate or not.)

I have NEVER heard anyone even suggest that Rob Mayoff's ad-13 patches
were anything other than top quality work.  I've also looked at some
(not all) of that code myself in the past, and it seemed quite careful
and conservative - targetted to be just what a project maintainer
should want in a patch.

AFAIK, Rob's series of ad-* patches were ignored simply because the
then-current AOLserver maintainer was a jerk.  (I was not following
the AOLserver list then, but MANY people who were have made exactly
that comment.)  The fact that each of Rob's patches either fixed
memory leaks or other bugs, or added critical-to-ACS functionality
(encoding support, ns_cache Tcl API, *.tcl page bytecode cacheing),
was apparently of no concern to that guy.

Now that we have a better AOLserver maintainer, I'm SOMEWHAT confident
that most of the old ad-* patches would have been accepted relatively
smoothly.  The AOLserver project finally reached the, "all bugfix
patches accepted smoothly" point some time ago, and in fact has gone a
bit beyond that.  (E.g., Mayoff's old encoding work was finally
forward ported, and I know Dossy accepted a small feature improvement
patch from me; no doubt from others as well.)

That's all good.  The big open question in my mind is whether this
progress will be extended to having more than two people, both of whom
work for AOL, touch the AOLserver core code.  Especially given the
feature lists Zoran and Stephen D. just posted, (many of which they've
already implemented!) I see LOTS of potential value in giving these
guys free rein to contribute.

Note that to date, the AOLserver project seems to have always had the
"not enough contributions accepted" problem, NEVER the "too many
incompetent cooks stirring the soup" problem.  And so far all the
cooks look pretty darn competent to me, so the main question is
whether the door to the kitchen will be unlocked or not.

I say unlock the door, and then all you chefs figure out how to
coordinate your cuisines.  Fearing that you might not care for the
taste of some of the new dishes is not a good reason for keeping the
kitchen door locked.

--
Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.piskorski.com/


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