consensus and discussions

[Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>]

I think the 'file prefix' discussion brings interesting comments:

1) Forrest kinda lacks a recognized person that helps settling down 
discussions.

Some might think that would be me, but I disagree: I've been away from 
this project too long and people might feel I'm kinda too 
cocoon-oriented to seriously help around here, even if I started the 
project.

2) Jeff and Nicola had the good old 'theory vs. practice' discussion. 
It's a mindset discussion and will never end: some people like bottom-up 
approaches more some top-down.

I'm a big time top-down guy. Lots of paper coding before even getting to 
write the code.

But software darwinism helped understanding that evolution is a 
inherently bottom-up approach.

But mixing bottom-up incremental evolutionary models with top-down 
thoughts-aggregating discussions can *boost* the evolutionary rate by 
orders of magnitude.

Look at the history of Cocoon: several big design discussions happened 
to be proven wrong by the environment. The Cocoon1 reactor seemed 
wonderful on paper, it sucked in practice. The flowscript seems 
wonderful on paper, would it suck in practice? the Cocoon CLI seemed to 
me a beautiful and elegant solution for a very complex problem... can it 
be improved for speed or we need to rethink its design like we did for 
DOM vs. SAX on Cocoon1 vs. Cocoon2?

I don't know, but I'll tell you something: more than vetos, one thing 
that severely hurts a project is 'idea ownership'.

Nicola learned the hard way that feelings of code ownership are bad: he 
did got upset when he submitted this first patch and I modified it 
before committing it. He god mad, the cocoon community kicked his ass 
big time for having reacted that way. He learned.

But feelings of idea ownership are bad and evil but subdle to spot.

Jeff, -1 are needed. -0.9 are stupid.

Nicola, if you can't get your point across, let them play. software is 
*never* carved in stone and Forrest doesn'e even have a release with 
contracts that people expect to work on.

Reverting a -1 to a -0 is *A GOOD THING*. It's always a good thing.

It's the *only* sign of 'I don't take this personally, I just wanted to 
let you know something'.

I didn't like Cocoon actions. I hated them. Should I have hold a -1 
until Ovidiu came around with the idea to use scheme continuations?

We have at least 6 more committers on cocoon *due* to actions. Actions 
will go away, it might take years, but then those 6 committers might 
write code that attracts 10 more and those will help even further.

See how much community damage a *theorically rightful* -1 would have done?

Food for future thoughts, people.

There is no right or wrong, no clear-cut solution, no theory vs. 
practice winner, but there *is* community dynamics and the understanding 
that we, as a community, as smarter than each single individual and even 
smarter than the sum of our single capabilities.

Let's try to keep that in mind and work toward maximizing *that* 
thruput. Not your personal ego's.

I'm not pointing fingers. I'm just expressing my feelings.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi                               <st...@apache.org>
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Re: consensus and discussions

[Jeff Turner <je...@apache.org>]

On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 10:54:19AM +0100, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
> 
> 
> Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> [...]
> >Reverting a -1 to a -0 is *A GOOD THING*. It's always a good thing.
> 
> Yes, it is. It can be done on solution or on community pressure, but 
> it's a good thing nevertheless.
> 
> >It's the *only* sign of 'I don't take this personally, I just wanted to 
> >let you know something'.
> 
> I saw that it was getting personal while I didn't want it to.
> I first tried explaining that it wasn't personal, then when I saw that 
> it was not helping I decided to revert the -1 for the reason you outline 
> above.
> 
> But the fact that it somehow did get personal, even if that was not the 
> intention, was too much for me to bear ATM. I have a personal life too, 
> with feelings and all this stuff, and this episode, in this difficult 
> period for me, really hit. This is not an accusation or anything, just a 
> constatation. I am perfectly aware that no harm was intended by anyone here.

The only sentence in the email that was specific to you was:

>> From observation here and on avalon-dev, I think you treat them far too
>> much like candy.

Which is wrong, and I apologise for.

I still believe all the rest about the harmfulness of -1s, and the
importance of solving real-world problems instead of driving for
theoretical perfection.  Stefano's Cocoon Actions example illustrates the
point nicely.  Frustration at spending 10 days debating a tiny issue with
no end in sight, gave an edge to my points that you interpreted as a
personal attack, which it sincerely wasn't.  Again, I apologise.  Turns
out I have a lot to learn before attaining the dizzy heights of OSS
cluefulness that Sam, Stefano, Craig McC, Stefan, James Strachan and
others have.  I'll start by resolving never to send a non-technical email
after 2am ;P

--Jeff

> As I said, I'm not going away, just getting off the stage to help in the 
> backstage for the moment.
> 
> Which could be a good thing nevertheless.
> 
> -- 
> Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nicolaken@apache.org
>             - verba volant, scripta manent -
>    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> 

Re: consensus and discussions

[Nicola Ken Barozzi <ni...@apache.org>]

Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
[...]
> Reverting a -1 to a -0 is *A GOOD THING*. It's always a good thing.

Yes, it is. It can be done on solution or on community pressure, but 
it's a good thing nevertheless.

> It's the *only* sign of 'I don't take this personally, I just wanted to 
> let you know something'.

I saw that it was getting personal while I didn't want it to.
I first tried explaining that it wasn't personal, then when I saw that 
it was not helping I decided to revert the -1 for the reason you outline 
above.

But the fact that it somehow did get personal, even if that was not the 
intention, was too much for me to bear ATM. I have a personal life too, 
with feelings and all this stuff, and this episode, in this difficult 
period for me, really hit. This is not an accusation or anything, just a 
constatation. I am perfectly aware that no harm was intended by anyone here.

As I said, I'm not going away, just getting off the stage to help in the 
backstage for the moment.

Which could be a good thing nevertheless.

-- 
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nicolaken@apache.org
             - verba volant, scripta manent -
    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
---------------------------------------------------------------------