On 5 January 2015 at 18:44, Waldek Hebisch <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> My policy was that comments are as author of the code wants
> them to be.  Rationale for this policy is simple:
>
> - normally the author is the person who will fix problems,
>   so his/her needs should take precedence
> - it cuts various bikesheading discussions
>

I think we all want to get new and interesting things done in FriCAS
and now waste time on useless discussion. So rather than
"bikeshedding" as such I think this may be more like the variant known
as Sayre's Law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

But really I do not have anything very useful to add as to how to
encourage continued participation of productive people.  I think
"people problems" are in general much harder than mathematics and
computer programming problems.

> I am not sure what you or Ralf would propose, but it seem hard
> to find better rule.
>

It seems like a good idea to focus discussion on document standards.
In that vein, I am not sure that your policy is the best possible.
The problem is that it is rarely the author of a change who is the
best suited to determine what comments might be the most useful.
After all, once the analysis is complete to the author the change
itself seems mostly trivial.  I think it is good to encourage some
kind of review process with someone else trying to understand the
change and provide suggestions for suitable comments and low level
documentation.  In fact as I understand it this is more or less what
happened in this case.  As I mentioned originally I thought that maybe
you were a little too "heavy handed" in reducing the comments in
Ralf's patch to a single line.  Some sort of compromise might have
helped.


> Concerning GPL, we have GPL-ed component now (efricas).  But
> due to nature of GPL a single GPL-ed component in main part
> of FriCAS effectively means that the whole project becomes
> GPL.  So this is not about GPL-ed components, it is about
> licence of the whole project.

Yes. I think in this case we should simply ask Ralf to to please,
please! do not insist on GPL for the new version of texformat.  I much
prefer to keep the main FriCAS license as simple and unrestrictive as
possible.  In this case I think the provisions of GPL do not have any
positive benefits for FriCAS nor for using licensing of FriCAS to
promoting open source as a whole.

Bill.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"FriCAS - computer algebra system" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to