From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Neil W. Van Dyke" Newsgroups: gmane.lisp.guile.devel Subject: kudos and observation Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 02:25:21 -0500 Sender: guile-devel-admin@gnu.org Message-ID: <15525.26721.978797.441772@winona.neilvandyke.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.gmane.org X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1017473248 28025 127.0.0.1 (30 Mar 2002 07:27:28 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 07:27:28 +0000 (UTC) Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([199.232.76.164]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1 (Debian)) id 16rDGp-0007Hu-00 for ; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 08:27:27 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=fencepost.gnu.org) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 16rDGc-0001DD-00; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 02:27:14 -0500 Original-Received: from dsl092-071-029.bos1.dsl.speakeasy.net ([66.92.71.29] helo=winona.neilvandyke.org) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 16rDEl-00019q-00 for ; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 02:25:19 -0500 Original-Received: from nwv by winona.neilvandyke.org with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 16rDEo-0003UN-00 for ; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 02:25:22 -0500 Original-To: guile-devel@gnu.org X-Mailer: VM 7.01 under Emacs 21.2.1 Errors-To: guile-devel-admin@gnu.org X-BeenThere: guile-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.8 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Developers list for Guile, the GNU extensibility library List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.lisp.guile.devel:229 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.guile.devel:229 I appreciate all the work that the developers have been putting into Guile, especially in the last year or so. The work that must be done is not as glamorous as it was when RMS first announced the Guile project. The current developers also have the burden of numerous legacy compatibility issues. This makes their persistence all the more admirable, and 1.6 will be a huge improvement over 1.4. I'd like to vocalize an observation I suspect many people have had... But first, a quick story: Last week, a friend who is an especially productive contributor to the CL free-software community expressed frustration with the latest round of flamewars there, and half-jokingly asked about converting to Scheme. I reminded him of Guile, and he went to skim the Guile email lists for not the first time. He quickly decided that Guile still had its own suboptimal organizational issues, and his interest in CL was renewed. My observation, as a relative outsider to Guile, is that not all the people who are doing the bulk of the work on Guile are having a proportionate say in Guile's direction. Lack of say is a disempowerment of programmers, and, once there is the inevitable disagreement on points that the disempowered programmers care about, this creates morale problems. All of which seems antithetical to the spirit of free software. The "chief programmer" organizational model for development teams can sometimes work well. But, if that's the model the Guile developers are trying to use, there's morale evidence that it's not working perfectly. Given Guile's sometimes pained history, it seems all the more important to encourage the people who are enthusiastic about contributing to Guile, and to make sure that everyone is working together well. -- Neil W. Van Dyke http://www.neilvandyke.org/ _______________________________________________ Guile-devel mailing list Guile-devel@gnu.org http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-devel