Re: [Gnu-arch-users] community spirit

[Amit Shah]

On Sun, 31 Oct 2004 19:36:41 -0800 (PST), Thomas Lord <address@hidden> wrote:

> If the ubuntu crew were working with /anything at all/ that might be
> called /community spirit/ then I would not have been surprised by
> their recent public announcement of a fork of tla by Canonical.
> 
> Yet I was surprised.
> 
> One can conclude, therefore, that the ubuntu crew were not working
> with /anything at all/ that might be called /community spirit/.
> 
> They did not make even the slightest attempt to alert me before
> announcing a fork.  Whether they describe that fork as "friendly" or
> not, the creation of the fork was not only not conducted in a friendly
> manner, it was not conducted in a civil manner, given the way they
> have presented it on the GNU Arch lists.

All IMHO:

I believe forks should be encouraged, if Arch has to grow. Look at the
Linux kernel -- there are hundreds of forks, no one bothers to tell
Linus about it, and Linus wouldn't want to know about all of them. If
there are things that are better in a fork, the community itself would
ask for such a feature to be merged into Arch / tla.

And such forks aren't uncommon otherwise as well. Each distro patches
almost every package for numerous reasons. Distros obviously are more
concerned about their users, since they intend to provide a
user-friendly package for each user. So it's great to be picking
suggestions from them.

'bazaar' might actually be a good sign, as (I believe) it's the first
distro to advocate the use of Arch as the primary VC system and hence
we'll get a bigger user base. If this helps Arch in any way (which I
believe it will), all the better for us.

> Now, let us examine some questions:
> 
> Q. Does Canonical's uncivil behavior mean that their project is
>    without value to the community at large?
> 
> A. Obviously not, however, it would be reasonable to regard the
>    Canonical project with a substantial skepticism because of the
>    uncivil manner in which it was started.
> 
> Q. Should average user's cooperate with Canonical over a tla fork?
> 
> A. Only with extreme skepticism and, with the question in the back of
>    their mind, "Why did Canonical choose to be so rude to Tom?"

Yes, I know it hurts, I've been involved with such things in the past
as well (although on a smaller scale). However, in the best interests
of the project itself, I think we should encourage a "user-friendly"
fork and review their changes every once in a while.

> 
> -t

Amit.
-- 
Amit Shah
http://amitshah.nav.to/