[Texmacs-dev] Developers frictions

[David Allouche]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 11:44:46AM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> > I do not know really much about the free software community, and I do
> > not know much about the TeXmacs community. It seems to me, that with
> > free software is done a great job, and this is especially true for
> > TeXmacs, like the lot of "I'm really enthusiastic about the
> > program ... " messages of newbies show.

That is one of the reasons why people can feel very involved in their
work. When one has the feeling of doing a good job which is
appreciated over the world, one really wants the project to become as
good as possible.

> > I'm a little bemused that in such communities there is often a
> > tendency of discussions to run into aggression. Maybe this is because
> > of the amount of work that done by developers.

It should also be pointed out that free software development tend to
concentrate independent and smart people with very strong opinions.

I read no other dev mailing lists, but from the lwn.net weekly kernel
summary shows that Linux hackers regularly have technical "flamewars".
I do not know if that is conter-productive, but that does not seems to
unusual.

> > As far as I see, David and Joris are the most active people in the
> > development of the program. So I think that any kind of annoyance
> > between them is really counterproductive.
> > 
> > I don't feel in the position to give anyone an advice. But I wanted to
> > say that is a pity if argument about minor things (compared to the TeXmscs
> > project!) is done in that way.
> 
> I agree with you. In fact, it is not surprising that there are
> frictions from time to time in any community where people work together.
> Now griefs can either be discussed in private emails or on public
> mailing lists. I hope that David will agree that private emails are
> far better for this and act likewise in the future. As a general rule
> I think that direct discussions can be good, but that one should always
> avoid to make them personal.

Joris is right that I sometime blow steam at him w/o a real
justification. Generally I try to convert some frustration I can feel
in productive work (notorious example are the Wiki, the nogencc
project and the changelogs).

On the current topic, that made me realize that "read the mailing list
archive" is not a good anwer because I know no adequate tool to easily
extract the relevant information.

Overall, we all high expectations one another work and that is a good
thing. But our diplomatic abilities are not always adequate.
 
> I also hope that all this does not frighten you;
> in fact, David just has to blow of steam from time to time,
> but in average we get well along together.
> So there is no reason to be intimidated :^)

Yep. No need to be frightened. We core contributors can sometime have
strong arguments, but we are always nice to new contributors. ;-)

And when read in retrospect, some apparently "aggressive" discussions
do produce some good things. The first examples which comes to mind is
about the menu reorganization (one topic that I am going to restart
soon).


-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.