Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: how to add comments to revisions

[Thomas Lord]

Mikahel:
  > Ack on Tom being a bad maintainer [as opposed to a scientist]. :)

Half-ack from me.

I had occasion recently to review the guidelines for GNU maintainers
and they contain a surprising number of comments about not letting
users push you around.  In that narrow sense I was at least not 
out of bounds :-)

I don't dispute for a second that my strengths are in taking broad
perspectives and getting new, interesting, valuable things going.
My weaknesses certainly include being a one-man support team and 
maintenance staff.  That's what practical R&D largely is.

Another part of practical R&D is "technology transfer" -- helping
to smoothly move a project out of R&D phase and into production.
The Arch project flopped during the technology transfer phase.

I tried my level best.  I advised on how to begin to construct
a support/maintenance infrastructure that would last and that
would preserve the value in Arch.  Unfortunately I had only
minimal authority ("That isn't going to be a release of GNU
Arch" was about the extent of my available moves, under the rules) and
no incentives (aka budget) to offer.   And, unfortunately, 
some incentives that I considered (and in retrospect seem
objectively) to be destructive were on the table from a third 
party.  So here we are.

-t