Hello Benjamin,
Excerpt from Benjamin R. Haskell:
-- <snip> --
> I concur completely that a team of runtime file maintainers sounds
> better. Back in January, I started composing an email wondering whether
> having maintainers still made sense as a development model.
> (Personally, I also find it very odd that even after switching to
> Mercurial there are still hundreds of individual patch-files that can be
> obtained via FTP, but that's probably a much broader discussion.) In
> addition to the issues with maintainership mentioned so far:
>
> - Maintainer might not be responsive, creating more work for Bram and/or
> the maintainer later
..or a random patch submitter.
confirmed.
> - Maintainer can't make Vim-wide changes (like the '&cpo' changes from
> earlier this year)
confirmed.
>
> My main concerns are that:
>
> - (it seems) Many maintainers are never really all-that committed.
IIRC a maintainer has committed himself to be reachable via email 3 years after
his last change. (I must have read that in vim help somewhere, but need to seek
that out again first where exactly that was).
...but
$ recgrep -c "by Thilo Six" . | grepinvert "0$" | wc -l
28
basically all of those files have been changed last time by their original
maintainer a decade ago!
> Probably similar to the above concerns, but it makes perfect sense.
> Over the past nine years, the main programming language I myself use on
> a daily basis has gone from Perl to C# to PHP and now to Ruby. It's
> hard to find someone to be a long-term maintainer for {Language X} where
> that user is also well-versed enough in Vim to keep the syntax
> well-maintained.
>
> - Having a maintainer makes bugs last longer, especially for minor bugs.
>
> Since even minor changes have to go through a maintainer, (it seems)
> that changes don't immediately get sent back up to Bram. Often versions
> seem to linger until there are enough minor updates that the maintainer.
I know currently patches go lost!
> Just for some data points, at the time I was writing the email in
> January (which I never sent), I was able to very quickly find four
> instances where having a maintainer made things more difficult:
>
> Date | Subject:
>
> 2012-01-31 | ruby.vim does not work with greater than rubygems 1.7
> Patch was mailed to maintainer, possibly didn't get back to Bram.
>
> 2012-01-17 | [patch] indent/java.vim: the line after @Override should not
> indent
> Java maintainer has resigned.
>
> 2012-01-16 | spellcheck in mail: Subject header key is incorrectly underlined
> Lech Lorens reported to maintainer long ago, update didn't get to Bram.
>
> 2012-01-08 | [patch] vim: runtime/syntax/jam.vim
> Email bounced trying to send to maintainer, so sent patch to list.
--
Regards,
Thilo
4096R/0xC70B1A8F
721B 1BA0 095C 1ABA 3FC6 7C18 89A4 A2A0 C70B 1A8F
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