Hi Simon, I have re-read the entire document and I'm willing to try it out in its current form. I'd like to use the remainder of this email to note my remaining reservations, to clarify my thinking on these issues if nothing else.
Motivation and momentum ====================== Keeping oneself motivated is necessary in order to be productive, especially in open source where you don't get paid to work. Progress is often made in small spurts, often during weekends, when people find some inspiration to do a particular task. What sustains productivity is the feeling of progress when code gets submitted or when you can share your work in the form of e.g. a new library release. It's very gratifying to spend a weekend hacking on something -- making something better -- and then share the results with your fellow human beings. Having to wait weeks (i.e. the length of the discussion period) hurts productivity. By then end of the waiting period whatever enthusiasm you had at the start is likely gone. Even if you manage to keep yourself motivated through the waiting period there's a "pipeline stall" effect, where new changes you want to make are stalled by changes still under discussion. Entitlement and open source ======================= I was quite put of during earlier library discussions and often left the discussion annoyed. There's much more arguing for argument's sake: some discussions were up to 100 messages long and disproportionate to the magnitude of the proposed change. I haven't had a single unpleasant experience discussing changes with people outside the libraries process where discussion so far have been short, to the point, and almost always start by someone sending me a patch. I think there's a much stronger sense of entitlement around the core libraries. The libraries process implicitly says that the maintainer has to spend time talking to anyone that feels like having an argument. This is not the case in open source at large, where the size of your contribution, your prior "work" (in a very wide sense), and the relevance of what you have to say decides how much attention you get. Cheers, Johan _______________________________________________ Cvs-ghc mailing list Cvs-ghc@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-ghc