Jonathan Revusky wrote:
I guess you and I think quite differently about certain things. In
another part of this discussion, you mentioned malice as a reason not to
give people commit access on an "on-demand" basis. However, this is
something that hardly occurs to me as being much of a reason. In the
above, you mention the idea that your secret voting mechanism could be
"cooked" or people could suspect it is. This also never really occurred
to me. I guess I just have a certain basic trust in the ethics of other
open source people, and it does not occur to me that someone would cook
the voting or that anybody would think that I would cook the voting.
No question I tend to take a pessimistic view of things until I have
reason to believe otherwise. I dare say all you have to do is look
around the world and you will see more evidence to support that
perspective than the more positive perspective. Sad, but I think true.
But you say "...certain basic trust in the ethics of other open source
people..."... do you mean that you would allow anonymous, full commit
privileges to anyone and everyone? In other words, a situation where
anyone who wants to, whether they have ever seen the project before or
not, can commit to the repository. This I absolutely think is a bad
idea. A very bad one at that.
But look, if somebody distrusts your ethics to that extent, why would
they be in your community?
I guess it could be more me expecting people to be expecting the worst
of me :)
Well, you know, it could also be that a public vote is preferred because
project leaders are (at least vaguely) aware that if the vote is public
people are less likely to disagree with them. (Of course, that is not
exactly a legitimate reason.)
That could be part of it, sure.
But now, which one of us has the basic distrust issue here?? ;) LOL
Well, if it comes into play at all, it should be considered.
I would generally agree.
Well, maybe (just maybe, I'm not really *so* presumptuous) the next step
of evolution of your thinking is to move more towards implicitly
trusting people. I mean: trust people to be acting in good faith until
proven otherwise. Trust people to be at least moderately competent until
proven otherwise.
With the potential of major effort to clean up a corrupt source
repository, I don't think you can do that. Just my opinion.
In general, in this kind of collaborative internet model, don't you have
to make a leap of faith and implicitly trust (until proven otherwise, of
course) people you've never met?
To some degree, yes. But what that degree is, well, that's where we
don't completely agree :) I think there has to be *some* vetting that
takes place, no matter how minor.
Look at it this way... let's say you have 20 people actively working on
a project, doing fantastic work. All of a sudden, you let the 21st
person in, and they proceed to commit some less than stellar work, or
maybe even break code because they don't yet have a good understanding
of the project. Is that fair to the 20 others? Even if it can all be
undone, is it fair for any of them to have to take the time to do so?
I could quote Spock here, but I probably don't need to :)
You see, what is the alternative? If you don't trust people by default,
then how is trust established?
I mean, this seems to be related to the catch 22 problem that you become
a committer by contributing a lot, but it's practically impossible to
contribute without being a committer in the first place, Craig never
responded to this basic question. (Somehow, I suspect he won't.)
But this is where the attitude of the committers (of any project, not
talking Struts specifically here) comes into play. They have to be
willing to accept contributions that don't come from themselves. If
that is the case, a person can build up that trust and build up that
reputation that leads to an invitation to join. One could even envision
a situation where a person submits 10 things, none of them is accepted,
and the person is still invited to join. That obviously would require
the existing committers have a very open-mindedness about them, but it
could happen. This serves your point of view and mine: there is a
vetting process that I like, and there is a basic trust by default for
you, maybe not quite to the degree you like, but I think its a
reasonable compromise position.
But the real problem here, that just about everybody seems to be
skirting around is that, given the utter failure of the Struts community
to compete with Webwork technically, there surely is a need for an
open-minded exchange of ideas about these project management issues. And
the people who lost the technical competition (the Struts people)
should, by the basic logic and structure of competitition, adopt a
fairly humble attitude about these topics.
Can you point out where Struts has "utterly failed" to compete with
Webwork technically? I've looked at Struts 1.3, and I've looked at WW,
and I don't see them as being light years apart frankly. I certainly
think there are pluses and minuses both ways, but the one thing that
struck me the most when I was reading about WW was how essentially
similar to Struts it was, and I didn't see anything that made me sit up
and go "oh wow, that's SO much better than Struts".
Well, it's like the alcoholic who has to admit that he has a problem,
this community would have to admit that it has certain problems for any
improvements to occur. But of course, since they won't admit it, no
improvements will occur and.... well,... look, it's obviously a lost
cause.... (I quickly came to that conclusion after reading some of
Craig's (and Ted's) recent comments.)
Hehe, ironically, we've flipped positions :) I actually have a great
deal of hope for the Struts community. Firstly, I don't think it's in
quite as much disarray as others may. I think there is room for
improvement, but I don't think it's doomed or anything like that.
I actually am not somebody with strong opinions at the moment about web
app development. I don't know so much about Spring and other frameworks
and so on. However, just from what I observe lurking in this community,
I would have one recommendation for anybody who asked my opinion on
these matters. And that is: Whatever else you decide on, do not use
Struts (I mean, don't use Struts Classic, don't use Struts Action, don't
use Struts Shale) because the community is dysfunctional... major league
FUBAR...
This I can't agree with. The 1.2.x branch of Struts is in pretty good
shape... one of the reasons there hasn't been a lot of evolution is that
it *is* stable and does the job for a lot of people. The 1.3 branch
brings a lot of power, but it almost feels superfluous with the pending
WW merger (I have my suspicion that it hasn't gotten the attention it
should have ever since the merger decision was made, but that's just my
suspicion). Shale, however you or I may feel about it, continues to
evolve and get better, and again, putting our feelings about it aside,
there is no doubt more and more people are finding it interesting.
I really don't know either. I say that this kind of thing is something
not to be approached dogmatically. It's like the question of how much
strictness and discipline to use in child-rearing. You need some but you
can also overdo it.
Agreed. It's all a question of degrees.
I think a lot of what has to happen revolves around common sense, and
common sense, like intuition and so on, is going to be quite hard to
formalize into a set of rules. Personally, I don't take the idea of
formalized voting that seriously. I think an open-source project is
surely more like a dictatorship. But the dictator needs to listen to
people. It just occurred to me that one basic difference between a
dictatorship and this is that in a dictatorship like Sadam's Iraq or
someplace, the Iraqis just had to keep living there. In an open-source
project, everybody can just leave and you're left dictating to nobody
but yourself.
I think a "benevolent" dictatorship in an open-source project is only
ever appropriate in the early stages of a project. In many cases, a
single individual has the original idea, has the original vision, and
they get the ball rolling. After that though, they should give up that
power and let the community drive. This is the path JWP took.
The one argument against my own position is in direction-setting. One
of the things that has made Linux so successful is Linus still kind of
guiding things. Part of me really hates that he hasn't given up his
control (and, contrary to anything he might say, he *does* have more
power than anyone else), but another part of me thinks that Linux would
never have gotten as far as it has without him as the guiding force.
If I have a choice though, I would rather a democracy fail than a
dictatorship succeed. There is something at a very low, fundamental
level that I just abhor about not giving people a voice, freedom and
choice.
I say that no formalized voting system will substitute a basic need to
be able to listen to people in an open-minded way (that means,
considering seriously the possibility that you are wrong) and being
flexible and so on.
I agree.
This actually reminds me of the various attempts to set up democracy in
backward, third world places. These countries do not have the basic
institutions or culture of democracy. Having the formal vote does not
make them into democracies.
I agree again. But what it DOES give them is a vote. There is no
trusting that the leaders will be open-minded. You have clearly stated
you don't feel the Struts committers are being open-minded, so in the
case of Struts, from your point of view, your own philosophy has failed.
If there was at least a formalized vote, the closed-mindedness you
perceive would have far less impact, and possibly even none.
Jonathan Revusky
Frank
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Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
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