On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 02:13:50PM -0500, Benoit Grégoire wrote:
> Neil has always been polite and argued with you on technical grounds.
>
I agree that Neil's public emails have a certain tone of civility
that I can't bring myself to reciprocate. I also recognize that to a
casual observer this may appear to be a technical discussion. I
assure you it is not. It is completely political. Anyone who desires
can verify this for themselves. I made a precise and concrete claim
about the behavior of code that I modified. The function is correct C
code with well defined behavior. Its return value if completely
determined by its input. Is this claim important to Neil? Apparently
not, as he consistently ignores it and argues as if I had changed the
bahavior of some external programs. Why would he do this? Because
whether or not the function returns TRUE or FALSE given input of ZERO
for an unregistered logging module is IRRELEVANT to Neil's point.
That would be a technical discussion quickly resolved upon a simple
reading of the line:
if(!log_table || log_module == NULL || log_level == 0) { return FALSE; }
But it simply doesn't matter. So, consider please, if this doesn't
matter, then _what_ is this whole flamewar about? It's not about
compatibility. It's about control. I gave careful thought to a
solution that would fix the brokenness Neil created while leaving all
other programs unaffected. What more could Neil want? It's clear
that he doesn want _something_ more, and it's pretty clear to me that
I'm not willing to give it up.
> But it seems that in every two messages you write you have to put some
> sniping
> remark about Neil's skill level, or some other Ad Hominem. This just isn't
> acceptable. But Neil doesn't attack you back, he dutifully ignores those
> parts, extracts the technical content, and responds. Guess who looks more
> mature looking from the outside?
I'll leave that for the observer to judge.
> Neil has shown his willingness to bend over
> backwards to help make changes in QOF as unobtrusive as possible for
> GnuCash's development process,
This is simply not true. How is disabling GnuCash's logging facility
and leaving it broken for months "as unobtrusive as possible"?
> despite being frequently treated like an unimportant incompetent.
>
> His patient responses certainly earned my respect. If I had been treated
> like
> that when I joined GnuCash, I would have left long before I contributed
> anything usefull. I don't know how good his code is/isn't, and right now I
> don't care, he still deserves to be treated with respect.
I completely agree that Neil deserves to be treated with respect. I
even would say that that respect doesn't need to be "earned" but
should be afforded to anyone by default! But, that needs to be
balanced against the benefit to the users of GnuCash. Neil's recent
behavior has been to make rather invasive changes that were not
approved of by any other developers, and which broke functionality and
introduced subtle data corruption bugs. Now, he's using the _ruse_ of
maintaining library compatibility to claim exclusive ownership of QOF.
So, how would you balance Neil's deserving of respect in this case
with the user's deserving a GnuCash whose core is developed by more
than one person? I struggle with this question, so if you have a
suggestion I'm interested.
-chris
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