Re: [Chicken-users] CMake problem on Linux should be solved

[Brandon J. Van Every]

felix winkelmann wrote:
> On 9/8/06, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Ah, now I see the problem.  The banner has changed the format for how
> it presents >the version number.  My regex is surely failing.
>
> I have fixed this already this morning around 4:30 , but apparently I
> must have made a mistake and the patch didn't end up on galinha.

Well, my patch is in now.  And it is 4 am as I finish this e-mail, BTW.  
That was not my plan.

> >  Felix, it is hereby proven that you didn't touch or even look at 
> > CMake when
> > doing your recent Autoconf changes.  :-)  I was serious about not 
> > chasing
> > Autoconf, and not having things "dropped in my lap," especially right 
> > now
> > with my financial situation.  This one should be easy, but if you 
> > drop me
> > something that's hard, I'm simply not going to do anything about it.  
> > And
> > I'm going to get very, very irritated if you break things, in some 
> > kind of
> > non-trivial manner, that I've been working hard to stabilize.  I 
> > don't have
> > any half-days to throw at CMake anymore; you will have to do them.  So
> > please consider design impacts on CMake.
>
> Don't make a political thing out of this, Brandon. We are talking
> about the development repository of an actively maintained open source
> project. People involved do make mistakes, bugs appear and get fixed
> (hopefully). If I made a change to Makefile.am without fixing the 
> appropriate
> section in CMakeLists.txt right away then it was simply by mistake.

This is not a confidence I would have previously had, but I will take 
your word for it in the future.

> Please, don't go on like this. Please don't start irritating _me_, as you
> irritated each and every other open source language implementor.

Since you choose to make such aspersions public on this list, you get a 
public response.  If you want to discuss such things privately in the 
future, that is better.

I don't recall irritating Manuel Serrano of Bigloo.  Nor do I recall 
making a 10 month full time contribution to the Bigloo build system.  I 
might feel guilt for having irritated Xavier Leroy of OCaml.  I 
certainly do not feel it for Guido Van Rossum of Python, as once upon a 
time he was in the process of blasting his best web designer.  The end 
result of that fiasco is Python got a decent looking website 2 years 
later than it should have.  If you're going to buy into the "each and 
every..." nonsense that gets bandied about Usenet... well, I will 
refrain from commenting on it further.  Let's just say it leaves a very 
bad taste.

> I'm working my arse off for this fucking project, you know?

I'm skating eviction for this fucking project.  Do you have any idea how 
much real income I've lost on this?

This is a difficult stage, because I can't actually make you stop adding 
new features.  You said privately, somewhere like 1..2 weeks ago, that 
you had broken too many things, wanted a stabilization period for 
Chicken, and that you now saw CMake as a top priority.  That resurrected 
my flagging morale.  Previously, I was starting to think that no matter 
how much I fix Chicken, there will be double the number of things 
waiting around the corner to undo it again.  So tonight, when I pulled 4 
significant looking patches, with substantial looking Autoconf changes 
for cross-compiling among them, and things broke in several places, I 
was not happy.  It did not look like you had taken me seriously, about 
the impact it has on my time and finances.  But you say it's just a 
Darcs problem, that you handled what was supposed to be handled, and it 
just didn't make it in.  So this leads me to a different conclusion...

...we are not communicating with each other about what we're doing.  
Darcs is a great enabler for that.  It can in principle let our patches 
fly right past each other.  It has worked previously; it is not working 
anymore.  We need to start talking about what we're doing, because the 
basis of trust is somewhat eroded.

I have a milestone I'm trying to hit.  I've been crunching to hit it, 
thinking, if I just finish this one last item, then I'll be Done.  
Chicken will be pretty much out of my hair.  I can go get my stupid 
ditch digging job or whatever I have to do to survive right now, knowing 
that I shipped, that CMake will be Chicken's bright future, and 
everything will be O.K.

I am unsure what milestones you are trying to hit.  2 weeks ago, I 
thought I knew.  But we never made any kind of formal agreement on date, 
time, content, or anything like that.  So perhaps you think you're 
hitting a milestone 1 month from now.  Or 2 months from now.  I really 
don't know.  I worry that we don't actually share goals.  That in 
practice, you'll just keep designing for Autoconf to get 
cross-compilers, and CMake will become the biggest "eh" I've ever 
written.  (But at least a BSD licensed "eh.")

We need to agree what the milestones are.  Or, you need to tell me what 
the milestones are gonna be, if you're in a more forceful mood about 
it.  Then I can decide what I'm willing to do about them.

> This is the last warning.

I'm not at the stage of delivering ultimatums.  Be advised that I'm 
capable of them, however.  In the worst case, I do have the willingness 
to write off my past 2 years as a failed experiment in open source 
business models.  There has to be a point at which I can just use the 
results of my work, and not just end up with more work.  I know I won't 
be repeating the kind of open source investment I've made into Chicken.  
For instance, regarding Chickenizing G3D, I am very cautious.  Not 
interested in another 10 months.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every