I am now aware, after receiving messages from Gary Kramlich (grim) in private
communication, that I may have overstepped or sidestepped the wishes of the
current Adium community. It also possible that this is a misunderstanding and
the community is not, in fact, up in arms at me. This certainly wasn’t my goal.
I will not be responding to any further private emails about the current
roadmap, individuals’ involvement, etc in the immediate future. I will respond
to any messages sent to adium-devl or to the private leadership-only channels,
though. This is because I would prefer to keep the whole conversation fully in
the public to avoid any further misunderstandings.
I understood Robbie’s unanswered request for help moving forward with a
Catalina release, in the context of zero Adium commits since 4/23/2017 (with
the exception of merging in the fix-sFlags and fix-autoscroll branches from
@trolan who I believe is new to the scene), to mean that nobody was involved
from a programming and codebase perspective at this point. This opinion was
furthered when I downloaded the current release branch and found that it did
not compile successfully with current version of macOS and Xcode.
This is, of course, separate and distinct from documentation, AdiumXtras, user
support, and website infrastructure, the status of which I did not assess in
detail (but recall that the last message about it that I was privy to was on
4/13/19, when Colin wrote that:
> A few of us are working to get the behind-the-scenes infrastructure repaired
> and restored so we can proceed with development and releases
I stepped up to try to resume a leadership role to bring this back to a level
that someone without nearly 20 years of experience in the Adium codebase could
work on it.
With extremely limited time resources, I felt the best move for Adium was to
provide Asher, who offered to help and who I trust as much as I trust myself,
with commit access to help directly after he offered to do so. I felt that
“unilateral decisions” were the only decisions likely to move forward in a
timely fashion given the apparent radio silence. We’re all the heroes of our
own stories, right?
It is clear that regardless of the radio silence at the code level, Robbie and
Mathew should have been involved in this discussion. That was an error, and it
was my error. Gentlemen, please accept my apologies. The most I can protest
is that I haven’t done this in a long time. Small excuse.
Nothing destructive and nothing permanent has been changed through any action I
have taken or Asher has taken. Asher has proposed (in his characteristic
direct way) that Adium’s code base should move to git rather than mercurial,
because he is the only person stating a plan to work with the code in the
immediate future and is much more comfortable with git. If the community of
those who are working with the Adium program code disagree with his proposal,
let’s have a discussion about that. Worst case he takes whatever patches he’s
made and rolls them back into the hg repository, and if desired the new branch
in the GitHub mirror is kept as a mirror (via git-hg mirror or some other
mechanism) rather than becoming canonical.
What was perhaps destructive, at least to espirit d’corps, was taking a call
for help to be an invitation to do more than submit a patch or pull request.
The Adium team page lists me as ‘lead developer emeritus.’ Honorary titles
don’t necessarily confer any control.
I don’t have the time-bandwidth to get into long debates, so I have several
simple questions:
1. Thijs, if you’re still monitoring this list, I handed the reigns over to you
quite a few years ago. I have no intention of staging a coup. If you intend to
return to programming Adium, and you would like to take a lead role in
welcoming Asher as a potential new developer for the project, and you’re
willing to take responsibility for reviewing and accepting his patches in a
timely & collaborative fashion, please speak up. If you wish it, we can
together ask Asher to follow a more traditional path to having direct commit
access in the official repository. With the advent of distributed version
control, this isn’t the hardship it once was, since he can work exactly as he
currently is, within his own fork of the project, until changes are pulled in.
- On the other hand, if I’m to act as lead developer for a time, I
deputize Asher directly to commit access, and I embrace simplifying our
codebase architecture by moving away from less-known tools and toward
widely-embraced ones. There is no reason that doing so has to interfere with
our documentation on Trac (and anywhere else it may be). We can even keep the
ticket system on Trac, either as the canonical bug system or as the historical
one with a transition to GitHub’s issue tracker.
- I poured my soul into the project for a decade. Please consider that
I wouldn’t hand the keys to someone lightly.
2. Robbie and Matthew, the two of you have in various ways served as Adium’s
stewards and project managers for many years. Asher doesn’t want your jobs. I
saw a #adium log where the phrase ‘project manager’ was used, but I am 100%
confident from talking with Asher that this doesn’t mean to him what it had
traditionally to Adium. He just wants as frictionless an environment as
possible to bring Adium’s code into 2019. He is going to need your help and
your enthusiasm to do so.
3. I have reviewed the Adium archives mailing list since early 2016. Thank you
to everyone from the ‘old guard’ who has remained on the list, evidence that
you still care about Adium. I don’t know who has been in #adium on freenode so
this is my place holder. I call out Chris and Colin, though I may have missed
others. Question 2 applies to you as well.
4. Gary, I seem to have mis-stepped with you. I sincerely hope you will rescind
your apparent decision to offer no further help to the project, which I
conclude from your statement that you’ve removed your ssh keys from the
servers. Perhaps I just misunderstand what that meant, but it sounded to me
like you’re washing your hands of it. Wearing your IMFreedom hat, I hope you
would support Adium the project — GPL’d, free, open source instant messaging
client based upon the amazing libpurple (née libgaim) library — regardless of
who is contributing and what infrastructure the project chooses to use. Let’s
engage the community of active contributors - programmers and non-programmers
alike - and figure out a professional context in which your valued
contributions can continue.
Best regards,
Evan
