On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 09:51:26PM -0700, Nathan Kurz wrote: > I have no particular opinion on this matter, but please take the rest > of this conversation to private email. The tone is poor, and I don't > think it reflects well on Lucy.
Thanks, Nate, for stepping in and noting something I had thought as well, and thanks to the participants for bringing us back on track so swiftly, because the content of this exchange has been welcome and productive. Mattmann's JFDI bulldozer spirit prods an awful lot of progress in the Incubator and around the ASF. In this case, it has elicited a useful critique from Torsten. Regardless of whether Lucy's graduation needs to be gated on increasing the diversity of commits, it's true that it would be in the project's best interest if we improved in that area as much as we have in others. I think it is wise for us to stay on top of this issue, and that we shouldn't relax the pressure until it is truly behind us. I'm going to continue to work on tearing down barriers to participation. A few months ago, someone contemplating a C host binding would have had to address JSON parsing and UTF-8 validation by figuring out how to integrate external libraries; those are both solved problems now. And since Parse::RecDescent, the last of our CPAN dependencies, is history as of yesterday, all you needs is a machine with Perl 5.10 and a C compiler on it to build Lucy -- no CPAN expertise or configuration required. This work will pay off sooner or later. I know Peter is pretty time-constrained, but we have the advantage that since he is already expert on many areas of Lucy, less bootstrapping is required than for a fresh face like Brad or Torsten. Fun times ahead! Marvin Humphrey
