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. Autocratic rule by just forcing decisions through does not invite buy-in and ultimately will narrow the community; not grow it. 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. -- 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/b0ad7478-d963-4446-bce4-6f4edbbd810an%40googlegroups.com.
