Christopher Oliver wrote:
<snip/>
Let's face it: your code is dense as a neutron star and dense of comments and tests as the the outter space around one.
For what it's worth I do like _your_ writing style above.
Me too, both because of the humorous tone and the message is conveys. Now you should remind that for most people here, english is a foreign language, and that not everybody is able to express jokes in a language they're not intimately familiar with. I for one am always afraid that funny expressions I know in french could be wrongly perceived when translated to english and read by non-english speakers. Cultural and language differences require the message to be more universal and therefore less original.
Your respect/care for the complexity of the social dynamics that originate around it is close to zero.
Now, let me tell _you_ a story:
I play basketball 3-4 nights a week at the park by my house - "streetball", not organized basketball. Now basketball is a fast paced game that requires split-second decision making. As a result even the best players make mistakes in virtually every game. When an experienced player commits a turnover, misses an easy shot, misses a defensive assigment or whatever, there's no feeling of embarassment because it's known to be part of the game. However, inexperienced players tend to take their own mistakes as a personal reflection on their ability and tend to get embarassed or angry when one of their teamates points it out.
Now, since this is streetball and anyone can play, many different people of different skill levels show up. However, in this case there is a harsh reality that if you don't know how to play the game well enough, you're likely to get embarassed by getting scored on, having the ball stolen from you, or your shots rejected. The only way not to get embarassed is to improve your game, to learn from your own mistakes - persevering through those embarassing moments - and to learn from other players. Anyone who has achieved any skill at basketball has gone through this process.
If you consider this story to be comparable to OSS development, then you are very far from the values of this community, and this explains a lot of things regarding how you behave and answer people. Developping Cocoon is not a competition. Developers don't try to bash each other, but work together to build something in common. Yes, there are some less experienced people. But if they are here and if they have been voted in as committers, it's because they have something to bring, and because they have the ability and the desire to learn. And more experienced people are happy to help them on this way.
The avalon project was taken over by peop le like you, that considered "consensus by friction" a better way to achieve progress and reduce the noisy babbage of social interaction with "inferior" talents. Result: social entropy expansion that lead to thermal death.
I don't agree that I am anything like them and I don't think you would say that if your really knew me.
You're right: you went away rather than manipulating people like what happened in Avalon. Now people having met Stephen Mc Connell IRL said he is a pleasant person, and I heard the same about several people that are ususally rude in mailing-lists.
People can have very different behaviours in the virtualized world that is a mailing-list and the real world, when physical bodies are in front of each other. Unfortunately, we only know you through this list.
Technical problems are way more trivial to solve than social ones.
Personally, I find both types of problems hard to solve.
Which explains the current situation: you're not happy to see people criticizing your work and wanting to refactor it so that it is more understandable and more easily adaptable to the evolution of its surrounding environment. Time goes on, and things have to evolve and adapt or die. That's what is happening currently with JXTG.
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects }
