[pacman-dev] Pacman has been forked (WAS: Re: [PATCH] libalpm: new config option - maxtries)

[Roman Kyrylych]

Hi!

I really don't want to flame here.
I really appreciate your contributions to Pacman development.
While it may look so, don't think that I'm in aggressive position here.
Just wanted to say my opinion on some statements, which are, IMHO not
correct or not fair.

2006/12/6, VMiklos <vmiklos at frugalware.org>:
> On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 11:56:16PM -0600, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The patch is no longer valid.  Please provide a valid patch.
>
> Sorry but I won't.

I understand that you don't care much about CVS branch. So it's your right.

> This fork has the following goals:
>
> 1) It provides a stable API.

So I suppose pacman and fwpacman will have incompatible API in future. :-/

> 2) It has a stable release in every 2 months (at least).
> 3) We _are_ interested in contributors' patches.

I don't fully understand 3rd point. I haven't noticed that Aaron is
_not_ interested in contributors' patches, so don't see a reason for
emphasizing on this. :-/

> This is guaranteed as we already has a patch queue for almost a year
> with the same goals, just finally we lost our motivation to submit
> patches to the cvs.

> Pacman has been forked because Aaron Griffin, the current "maintainer"
> of pacman3:
>
> 1) requested to do so.

Because he felt that your branch was fork already. I mostly agree with him.

> 2) always says there will be a pre-release soon, but there isn't any for
>   more than half of the year.

This depends on his free time. He is dealing with the new installer
too (I don't count package maintaining at all). And he is is only one
person doing this (oh, and Tobias is improving old installer and
developing mkbootcd).
I'm sure you remember that he did nice work with porting libfetch to
Linux and replacing libftp with libdownload in libalpm. That's not
just cosmethic fixes, agree?

> 3) likes cosmetics changes even with changing the API so developing
>   frontends are almost impossible.

Honestly, I don't think that small cosmetic changes make developing
frontends "almost impossible".

> 4) regularly ignores contributors' patches, then after he did his own
>   changes, then requires _you_ to port your patch to the changed api,
>   so it really does not worth submitting patches to him.

Even kernel devs do this. :-p
Seriously, that's more like personal things, so I don't want to
comment on this, instead of Aaron.

> We plan to pull functional changes from the cvs regularly. Till the
> current destructive approach does not change, we do not plan to submit
> patches to him. The queue is too long already, he has some stuff
> already to merge. (Unfortunately probably he won't.)

This is blackmail! ;-) (until ... we ...) Don't you think so? ;-)
I suppose we can poll your changes freely too, directly from darcs
repo. Posting patches here is/was more like notification anyway.

> Of course this does not means that we hate the other contributors of
> pacman or Archlinux, we have a problem with the current "development"
> model of pacman-cvs. We are interested in any co-operation if the
> current approach changes.

This is blackmail, really. ;-)

IMHO you are blaming Aaron for everything, and too much. Honestly, I
thinks that's simply not fair.
But you don't talk that some problems were created by you, like those
copyright/authorship issues, that are still not resolved properly
IMHO.
And in that case your messages contained some blackmail stuff too
(that's how I saw this).

> The next release will have the "pacman-ng" name instead of the "pacman"
> one, so that users won't be confused.

IMHO it would be better to call it fwpacman. Because there's not much
"ng" things in it, comparing to CVS. And things may change in future.
;-)
+ I always thought that fwpacman was more popular name :-/




IMHO all those Arch Linux vs. Frugalware talks are a bit childish...
And blaming only one side is not fair.
That's how I see all this. And I'm sad because of all those issues.
Of course you may just ignore my message and think that I'm trying to
only defence Aaron and blame FW devs. IMO I've tried to be objective
in all my messages regarding ALvsFW Pacman issues.


I really hope that things will get better. But this blackmailing
behaviour, this "let you do that first then we will be happy to
cooperate" is not a step forward for better cooperation, don't you
think so?

I would like to hear Aaron's opinion on this too.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)