Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
Duncan is the original author of both Tomcat 3.x and Ant. He became more and more involved into open source evangelization activity in Sun (where he worked at that time) and detached from the Ant development community.
At some point, he came back, he didn't like some of the technical/design choices that were done and proposed his own. Since these changes were revolutionary, he wanted to use the rules for revolutionaries and start working on its own internal fork codenamed 'amber'.
Dry story: he was told he had to re-earn committership in order to do that. He tried to fought that, but got pissed after slamming on some rubber walls and left, leaving a bad taste in many people's mouths. His own first.
I differ with that rendition, and believe that it is harmful to the community for it to be propogated.
Thanks for keeping me on track on this.
I actually didn't know that I was choosen as an example of person leading a project, then going away, than come back. I did it twice, for different reasons.
But my way of coming back has been *much* different than Duncan's, probably that is what made the difference.
Anyway, going thru the mail thread I identified a problem that I didn't see before: Peter checked in several proposals and this would be something against the rules. Only committers have a right to propose an internal fork, but they must work on their own stuff, not act as a proxy for external people who came up with their ideas.
The reason is simple: a codebase without a person working actively on it it's totally useless, it just adds mess because people will not going to read that code anyway if nobody is there yelling "look at how I solved your problem in my proposal".
So, I think two things can be learned from the ant story:
- the original author of the code doesn't have to re-earn recognition, but it *does* have to re-earn respect from all the new persons that came to the project while he/she was away. Bashing is exactly the opposite of this.
- an internal fork proposal must have at least one committer actively working on it. This didn't happen and resulted in several 'dead but showing off' proposals that just increased confusion and FUD.
Anyway, I still see no sign that the rules for revolutionaries don't work.
-- Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------
