Hello Juergen; ----- Messaggio originale ----- > Da: Jürgen Schmidt
> > On 2/14/13 2:29 AM, Andrew Douglas Pitonyak wrote: >> >> On 02/13/2013 02:46 PM, Pedro Giffuni wrote: >>> Independently of the vote result I will be effectively stopping the >>> development work I intended to do on Calc as I have lost all >>> interest on improving it given the current situation. >> I totally understand. >> > > I don't understand it. You are doing great work and the project > appreciate what you are doing. > Now a fix you have made is controversial which is understandable when > taking the discussion into account. We have an old behaviour which is ok > from the spec and we have a new one which is also ok from the spec > perspective. You prefer the new one which reflect your fix, which is > fine. Others see a potential risk to break backward compatibility which > is fine as well. By the way I have personally no preference here ;-) > First of all, I am not stopping from doing other changes in less controversial areas ... updating python to the final 2.7.4 version of fixing the java7 build seem to be reasonable uncontroversial and necessary tasks. The work I was planning to do on Calc involved a much deeper revision on how math is done. The idea was only sketched in some of the patches I left in Bugzilla and meant: - Replacing the native implementations of most functionality with the Boost counterparts. - Implementation of new functionality: including more complex functions, better statistics support and several random functions in line with what gnumeric does. Now, this meant quite an investment of my time to ensure that we move from something that works acceptably well to something that works better. This small change that caused the bikeshed is in those same lines: the POWER function we have works, but it can be better. As it is now POWER (x, 0) is a no-op (always 1), in my enhancement it regains it's mathematical value. This particular change had to be done only before a major release or not done at all. > Now it is our responsibility to find consensus for the solution we want > support in the future. Many opinions and less who are doing the work, > not really surprising and a general problem of such a big project. But > we need to find consensus. > The thing is, and it is, I suppose, normal in any project, that I was willing to the work, I am not willing to spend time on the bikeshed part of it: mathematics is not something that should be left for democracy. > I am sure you would accept the result of vote (if necessary when no > consensus can be found) but at the same time you say that you will stop > all your intended work in this area. And that is something that I don't > understand. Well it's your decision and you can do what you want but is > this the right approach? I believe not. > I am OK with losing the vote: for all purposes people won't even notice the effect of the change. The lack of consensus is worrying though. It is a clear signal that work on Calc is not really welcome without an incredibly expensive discussion process and my time for such things is really limited nowadays. Pedro.
