On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 9:25 AM, James Byrne <li...@ruby-forum.com>
wrote:
Pat Maddox wrote:
You are completely out of line even suggesting that David is selfish
or unprofessional. Do you have any clue how many changes he HASN'T
made because it would break backwards compatibility? How much effort
goes into sensibly deprecating stuff? The work he does to keep RSpec
working with old versions of Rails (only very recently *announcing*
discontinued support of 1.2.x), as well as consistently keeping it
working with edge Rails even with all of its internal breakage.
I did not believe that what I understood from the choice of words used
with respect to removing part of the RSpec API could be correct and
so I
asked whether or not I was mistaken. Evidently because of my phrasing
this was somehow turned into a slur on the people who work on
RSpec. I
regret that but no insult was intended, it was just a statement of
how I
understood what I had just read incorporated with a request to have my
interpretation corrected. If this had been raised in person and not
via
email I venture that my question would have been answered directly and
without rancor.
The initial response that I received from Mr. Dennis was uncalled for.
I have to take some responsibility for his initial response. Zach and
I were chatting in IRC when I read your initial comment, to which I
had a very strong and negative reaction. He was really just trying to
take the heat off me at the moment.
If you take away the reactionary nature of it, however, he did have
good points about the nature of open source, as did Nick Hoffman in
this thread.
It would have been enough to say that there exists a compelling
technical reason to remove the item. It would have been useful to
outline briefly what that technical reason was. Bear in mind please
that those outside of the inner circle of contributors generally are
not
conversant with all of the issues facing a project. We nonetheless
may
possess reasonable concerns with respect to its future development.
I am well aware that Rails is a moving target and that Ruby is about
to
go through the convulsions that will accompany the move to 1.9/2.x in
the near future. I expect that in consequence a vast amount of
software
presently in use will either have to be revised extensively or
abandoned. I am not dogmatic about backwards compatibly. On the other
hand, I also have first hand experience with OSS projects where
backwards compatibility appeared inconsequential.
I hope you understand now that this is not the case with rspec.
Instead of advising people who raise issues like this to go fork their
own project, perhaps a brief statement as to why the action is deemed
appropriate might be better. Compare the response from Mr. Dennis to
that from Mr. Chelimsky.
Again, I had the benefit of time to step back and try to be
constructive. Zach's response was reactionary, but he was channeling
my reaction.
In accepting reappnsibility for this, btw, I'm not trying to dilute
it. I still feel that there were some insults thrown at me, and I'm
grateful to Zach and Pat for coming to my defense.
I also agree that this would all have been much smaller face to face,
with pints of beer in our hands.
You may now have the last word.
I think we've all said our piece at this point and would love to move
on.
Are you clear now about the particular change that started this whole
thing?
Cheers,
David
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