On Oct 11, 2011, at 1:47 PM, John J Barton wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Brendan Eich <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Oct 11, 2011, at 12:49 PM, John J Barton wrote:
>
> > We don't know what the standard will be so we need some why to try out
> > different features.
>
> That's not how the committee has worked since 2008, and even before then
> (pre-Harmony), with a split committee, we still had two groups working on
> consensus by drafting proposals and prototyping them.
>
> The way we try to work is to propose before implementing, including prototype
> features. Individual vendors don't deviate from proposals unilaterally and
> silently.
>
> If old proposals were implemented, and then the proposals changed, we may
> have some work to do adjusting implementations (certainly true of
> SpiderMonkey, and we will do it). But we do not go off on our own, as
> individual vendors, and try out features never proposed on the wiki.
>
> You're making something out of nothing.
Somehow I suspect the shoe would be on the other foot if other vendors did
likewise.
But I'm tired of arguing in favor of keeping consensus. If it's not important,
let's all go off and run our own experiments and see what happens. Biggest
company wins, best two out of three in case of a order-of-magnitude market cap
tie :-P. That will be fun.
> If you have a beef with how Google works with the committee, then contact a
> Google rep on the committee and complain to them.
I already have, but that's not the topic here: you just wrote "We don't know
what the standard will be so we need some why to try out different features"
(cited above) and I wrote back arguing with you, not with anyone else.
> But don't paint the Traceur project as some weird plot to derail your work.
I never said anything like that ("weird plot" -- come on!). I don't know why
Traceur was developed the way it was, and then abandoned (I have some theories,
but really, who cares?).
Maybe it's someone else's turn to maintain Traceur, and Google has done its
fair share. The problem is no one else knows the code and Jake said he got no
response when he asked (but maybe he asked in the wrong channel or something).
It's hard for others to pick up where things left off.
> It's just like a thousand other open source projects, a risky labor of love,
> a gift to the community of engineers.
There is a lot of abandon-ware in open source, but that's a very low bar to
meet.
> Well we don't have a Mark and Tom for Traceur. We just have some great source
> code. If anyone here wants to try to match Traceur up to Ecma consensus,
> please step up.
So you, another Googler, exhort anyone, or Jake, to "fix it" and "step up" (but
thanks for the "please" the second time :-/).
I think it's fair to ask why anyone would do that, instead of choosing to work
on other projects that seem to have active maintainers and open source
communities going back to their genesis.
Beyond this, I'm still picking a fight with your "We don't know what the
standard will be so we need some why to try out different features" line, which
you have not defended. But we can table that, or forget about it if you prefer.
Something's wrong here. Jake cited specific concerns about Traceur and got a
lecture to be grateful for it being open source, and to get to work fixing it.
Is that really the best answer?
/be
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