On Monday, September 29, 2025 at 3:34:44 PM UTC-5 Nils Bruin wrote:
It seems to me there are two things that arise in conflict here: - some people who see, unannounced, big changes and failures happen. - developers who see certain changes as necessary to keep their maintenance burden manageable and other changes as desirable because there are benefits to be had. The first group are not automatically opposed to the changes that the second group want. It's just that their first encounter with the changes is a negative one and therefore they react negatively. If there had been a discussion about the proposed changes, it is very well possible that the consensus would have been that it's worth to make the change (that is mainly: embrace meson and/or, change when docs are built due to cost) and at the very least, after a course of action was converged on, people would have at least had some warning that instability in building was imminent due to some large changes being merged. Whether "make all" builds docs, or not, isn't worth the time spent on discussing merits and demerits of it. Sagelib build system has been reborn, mainly thanks to heroic efforts of Tobias, and it has been reborn this way. Perhaps it was my oversight, as I reviewed a large chunk of that work. Mea culpa. Autocratic rule by just forcing decisions through does not invite buy-in and ultimately will narrow the community; not grow it. No, no autocratic decisions. The authority of the community to do various unpleasant plumbing and swamp draining on the system is, de facto, delegated to whoever volunteers to get their hands dirty. The community normally appreciates the work done, and tolerates minor hiccups which always arise. Certainly major hiccups cannot be tolerated, and that's OK. But hiccups like an unannounced change on whether or not "make all" builds docs are truly minor. Aggrandizing minor hiccups is not welcomed by aforementioned volunteers, obviously. Well, yes, you can complain that it's volunteers' dictatorships - but instead you can tell yourself that it's great that you didn't have to spend you precious time on that plumbing assignment. An unpaid volunteer's labour of this sort is donation to the project (obviously there is no direct benefit to the volunteer here, as it's not something interesting from scientific or engineering point of you) It would probably help if we get a more well-defined governance structure in place for sagemath (mainly because it will help to still be able to act in situations where consensus cannot easily be reached) but we won't be able to avoid the discussion to see to what degree we can reach consensus. That step is necessary to maintain a welcoming community. I don't think sagemath is viable by running it as a collaboration of a small group of maintainers and release engineers. So we're stuck with the politics of making decisions in a large group of people. The only real way to get any classical governance is to get some funding, then one can organise around the grant, like it happened in OpenDreamKit times. (then at least some volunteers can get paid and thus be more thorough in their work). Otherwise it's, as I explained above, a volunteers' dictatorship. Donate your labour, and rule with thus earned social capital. Dima -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/3c86cfae-7ac4-41cc-bc76-2dbf97f5cf73n%40googlegroups.com.
