Hi, So I'm stepping down as maintainer/developer. Don't want to make a fuss about it, but since the decision has been made public and appeared in some blogs, weekly news and so on, I wanted this to be public as well.
About the reasons, well, I don't think that nitpicking every step that somebody takes to try to improve things is the way to go. aptitude's code itself contains many hacks, bad practices, lack of documentation; the debian package is quite outdated in terms of some packaging standards; the code and the package are starting to fall out abysmally in terms of correctness with things like multi-arch or new package-translation files; and many of the bug reports were disregarded for years and the BTS was poorly kept up-to-date. (Not that I blame the original author at all, he's done more than most by creating and maintaining this project in good shape for so long, but the facts are there and the quality/state of the code and the package is what it is). So about the nitpicking, for example I don't agree that delaying the release of a new aptitude package for lack of a [obsolete] webpage and similar lintian warnings *present for years* is a valid reason to delay an important release with ~50 fixes even if it's only for a day. By allowing the most buggy package to stay for longer you're not improving the quality of Debian, the quality actually decreases, even if you firmly believe the contrary. Also, even if my code and coding practices are not going to make it to the "Beautiful Code" book, I prefer to spend time actually having some fun coding and making the project overall better than creating the perfect commit everytime. And after being working on aptitude for all of the weekend, spending two hours reading things like "fixing a string->const& string in an unrelated commit" is bad, I feel quite miserable. It's not that I cannot stand criticism, but dealing with the 8 year old and often obsolete bug reports is dull enough, no need to make the fun part dull as well. I also have some nit-picks about your ways of doing things, but I saved you from the pain because overall they're not that important. I think that, all in all, aptitude is a very good example of how a project can be extremely successful without being perfectly bright and shiny under every light. I suspect that if Daniel Burrows had some nitpickers around him scrutinising every mistake, aptitude would not be what it's today. I wish you good luck anyway, but I guess that the environment of the project is just not enough rewarding for me, or I am not good enough for it. So long, and thanks for all the fish. _______________________________________________ Aptitude-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aptitude-devel
