Hi,
David Chisnall wrote:
I believe this attitude is a great way of convincing potential users and
developers that GNUstep is a dead project. I am usually in the Étoilé IRC
channel and a number of FreeBSD channels on efnet. When people log in and ask
a question, they may not get an immediate response, but they do get a fairly
timely one and, more importantly, they get an impression that developers are
active participants in the wider community.
That is, indeed, the precious part in it. Sometimes, with luck, you may
solve a problem within a short time.
IRC is not a telephone call. It doesn't need an immediate response - its major
benefit is that it is a low-latency, lossy, asynchronous communication medium.
If you want someone's attention, then saying their name will give them a
notification, but (unlike a telephone call or in-person meeting) etiquette does
not demand an immediate response from them. All of the participants can decide
how much or how little attention they pay. I typically poll IRC periodically
while code is compiling or while I'm thinking about a problem (a little
distraction is good for letting the hindbrain work) and ignore it when I am
focussed. When my IRC client tells me someone said my name, I note the fact
but typically don't interrupt my work - I just make a mental note to find out
what they said when I next take a short break.
For FreeBSD, LLVM, and Étoilé, I would have no hesitation about recommending
that new people connect to the IRC channels. They'll find developers and users
(well, not so many users with Étoilé...) and get the impression that the
project has some kind of community surrounding it. I would not make the same
recommendation about GNUstep. I stopped connecting to the IRC channel some
time ago, because it has a toxic atmosphere: few (if any) active developers,
and a lot of people who seem overtly hostile towards the project. It either
needs moderating or for us to stop recommending it and start recommending
something else (which can just be another IRC channel).
Sadly, I can't connect to IRC as often as I used to - I do it only
during evenings and it is mostly silent.
One must also add that compared to a couple of years ago, work
environments are very closed, blocking connections of most chat
protocols, like IRC. Often skype is open.
However, I remember too how "toxic" it has been. It was populated by a
group of person, also quite vociferous, essentially an "IRC" camp. Of
course there were also just the normal developers, but few of them.
I may add, in retrospective, that some core people were absent and the
"IRC camp" based regularly certain people emphasizing errors and bad
choices to the point that I got prejudices against certain persons.
Discussions were possibly heated!
The good think is I was able to meet most of these persons personally
and all anger waned and actually discovered talented developers. If
there were errors or problems, they could be analyzed and solved! And
some of them became friends.
Also, I may add, many of these persons were very actively speaking, but
did very little in concrete bug reports, patches or even less real coding.
A successful open source project needs more than good code, it needs good
communication and a good community. GNUstep has a great community, but does a
very good job at hiding this from the world. I don't think this necessarily
requires using XMPP (I probably won't join an XMPP chat room until Alex
finishes implementing multi-user chat in XMPPKit, as I have failed to find time
to do it in the last few years).
Yes, we are not easy to catch, but we do not hide. But we need also to
acknowledge we are quite spread over the world, have busy jobs (student
times are long gone) and different time zones. Greg will ofr example
know how the combination of these two things made it difficult to
productively catch lately.
Riccardo
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