Dear Waldek: I feel sad that you have decided to "listen to Tim," but precisely at the wrong time! I understand that your decision has been provoked by Tim's message (A modest proposal). I was surprised that Tim chose to communicate his convictions in such a strong and provocative manner. I take full responsibility for the consequences of my posting the message to Tim that started all this. However, I did not anticipate this turn of events and I apologize to the Axiom community for sparking this chasm.
I applaud Gaby's restraint to stay in the project despite similarly provoked. I, too, considered "listening to Tim" and quit, but I found other reasons to continue to hang around. I particularly find Gaby's willingness to work on a megapatch to merge his build-improvements with the trunk and his consideration for unity inspiring. He sets the best example for us to follow. At this stage of Axiom, forking is certainly not desirable. Tim has taken the "rules" of open source to the extreme. I think I understand Tim's reason for not merging his branch to another. He does not want to set a precedent: where the best "running code wins" even if the "running code" is not the "runing, documented, code." Tim's version of best "running code wins" is best "running, documented, code wins" and perhaps he believes his work so far holds that title. But if he WAS (he certainly IS) unwillingness to merge his patches to wh-sandbox (for whatever reasons, one of them seems to be wh-sandbox is not (yet) the best "running, documented, code"), he should not have asked me to make my email public, requested a vote, and said, "We will go with the majority opinion." [Tim: you cannot both dictate and be democratic.] For, to say "we will go with the majority opinion" (which opinion is not yet clear and likely a tie) implied his willingness in the event that there is a majority opinion agreeing with the proposal. In my private email to him, I had this as the first paragraph (removed in the public message "A suggestion for Gold"): "I am writing to you privately because I do not want to put extra pressure on you. You can simply ignore this message if you do not agree. If you feel you rather prefer this to be made (or answer this in) public, please simply delete this paragraph and quote the rest." I believe somewhere along my private communication with Tim, we had a misunderstanding. But that is not important. In fact, it is not important *to the project* which of you, Tim or Waldek, has to do the work of bringing the trunk up-to-date and documented (I know, easy for me to say; but you have both contributed greatly to the project and neither of you are scared of work). What is important is what Gaby said, "move on *with* Axiom." Please reconsider and continue your good work. William _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
