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) Unfortunately, that is precisely the argument that was made (namely, whoever is doing the work gets ownership) with some other design decisions that other people disagreed with. Words similar to autocratic were used with respect to those decisions, perhaps ironically, perhaps just sadly. Inevitably, the sewer analogy breaks down on both sides (though I am very impressed by several contributions to it in this thread!), because here the users may also be developers and vice versa, and more importantly there are the *end users* who are, in some sense, not represented by the analogy at all. Or, to continue it inappropriately, they want a usable sewer, but might be confused when they are told they need to first switch all their home interior plumbing to PEX because copper is overhauled. (Please no one compare any OS with lead plumbing ...) In any case, this argument might cut too many ways to use it without some substantial nuance. 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. That is a classic "Raymondian" argument, of course, and has a lot of value. But where it does break down is when other volunteers are discouraged from contributing (not necessarily to the same components, of course) because of disagreements around this. Anecdotally in the governance meetings (which did bring up OpenDreamKit), it is a significant factor in "people" (which is intended to mean a wide variety of Sage contributors, not including some of the most active, or previously most active, ones) just getting on with their mathematics. And in particular there was a recognition that we do need people with software engineering expertise, so that's not at all to downplay the contributions to the build system being discussed. But I do think it's more than a "vocal minority" who are, perhaps not viewing all recent changes negatively, but are at least confused as to whether they are all more necessary than trying to maintain that overall community in so doing. This discussion makes it clear that such confusion exists, and I believe it should be taken seriously. -- 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/40acc69b-b8e2-446b-870e-97bebd8dd77en%40googlegroups.com.
