Re: Co-maintaining Kaffe
Hi Dalibor,
I've suspended my discussion of the topic on -devel for the convenience of
other Debianers (many of whom think Java is fat, slow, proprietary and
silly).
I regret that I wasn't at FOSDEM with you, but I was inconveniently in America
at the time. I'll also agree that we haven't had many email discussions but I
do think that every one we have had has been initiated by me. But finger
pointing isn't productive. If it helps anyone, I'll point the finger at me by
saying I'm a pretty sucky Debian developer. I don't, however, totally suck
and I do have enough seniority to demand that people follow the process.
I'm not trying to make a fight out of this. I think if you sit down calmly,
read over my emails and think things over you will see that I have reason to
take issue with some of Arnaud's activities. I don't think those activities
in a productive team effort. All this corporate manager sounding talk may
drive some of you guys crazy but think over the alternatives. We can't have
anarchy.
In any case, I have decided to continue with my maintainership and have an
alarming appetite for flamemail when I've put my mind to something. In the
interest of saving everyone keystrokes I move that we get used to the fact
that I am still the maintainer and talk about moving forward.
Regards.
On Thursday 04 March 2004 12:02, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> He consulted the upstream, at least, the issue was discussed during
> FOSDEM, as well as being raised every few weeks on debian-java without
> much/any input from you, the official maintainer, except when people
> ocassionally threatened to hijack the package. I'm a Kaffe developer,
> who's working closely with Arnaud and other debian-java member on making
> some progress on Kaffe's state in Debian, fixing and tracking down the
> bugs that come up, as you can see in the bug database.
>
> I must say that I am very pleased to have found some responsive,
> proactive debian developers, who talk to the upstream and work with us
> on solving the problems as they occurr. I've rarely had any e-mail
> exchange with the official Kaffe maintainer in Debian, and unfortunately
> he was not seen very often on the project's mailing lists in the last
> two years, at least, despite Kaffe having numerous RC bugs that required
> cooperation with the upstream. Instead, we had an unpleasant duplication
> of work on fixing kaffe 1.1.x on several platforms due to gcc no longer
> accepting some broken C code a few months ago. The official Kaffe
> maintainer didn't contact the upstream to see if any work was already in
> progress, and didn't forward the work done in Debian to upstream.
>
> So I'm quite disappointed by attempts to make Arnaud look bad on
> debian-devel for trying to work around the official maintainer's current
> lack of time to commit to working on the package, and the lack of
> communication with the upstream.
>
> > The last significant change to Kaffe from a *packaging* perspective was
> > migrating it to DBS and that was my work. Your recent NMUs (which have
> > been insanely numerous) disabled DBS by simply renaming the patches
> > directory to "no-patches". That isn't adding value and was done without a
> > byte of email consulting me.
>
> He moved patches that didn't apply anymore to their own directory,
> AFAIK, after consulting with me (i.e. an upstream developer) which
> patches still were relevant. That was hard to figure out ocassionally,
> since the debian ChangeLogs for the patches are very limited in
> describing what was changed and why that was done. If he made a mistake
> there, blame me for not being able to figure out what a patch was good
> for, despite being an upstream developer.
>
> > Without sarcasm I will tell you again that I appreciate your enthusiasm
> > and want to work with you. Simply be aware that I will not be ignored and
> > will not tolerate haphazard changes that are not cleared with me first.
> > There is nothing unreasonable about that attitude and nothing that is out
> > of line with policy.
>
> I appreciate your willingness to cooperate. Maybe we can finally see
> that kaffe-strike-force truly take shape.
>
> But I don't appreciate the 'Do as I say, or else' attitude. If you think
> Arnaud's packages are inferior, please fix them and work with him on
> making better ones in the future, instead of wasting everyone's time
> dragging him through the mud of a debian-devel flamewar in order to show
> that you're still 'in control'. That's childish: either you have enough
> time to work on improving the kaffe package, then go for it, or you
> don't, but then please don't waste other people's time whining on
> debian-devel how you've been treated wrong by people actually trying to
> do the work.
>
> So if you don't want to be ignored, please try to be more proactively
> helpful instead. Get that kaffe-strike-force thing going, accept
> Arnaud's excuse, and excuse yourself for your tone, so that we can make
> some real progress on getting Kaffe into testing. Let's look ahead, not
> behind us.
>
> If you don't want that, you can still drop the package, or wait till
> you're officialy removed, this time with the protocol being followed to
> the letter.
>
> > For the time being I will leave you as an Uploader on the condition that
> > you communicate your intended changes with me first and only upload when
> > I am grossly unresponsive (ie. more than a week). My preference is to
> > receive changes in the form of a DBS patch.
>
> The whole point is that you were grossly unresponsive. I realize that
> you have other commitments beside maintaining Kaffe, and I don't blame
> you for that. I just think that maintaining a package that's supposed to
> be one of the basic building blocks for getting more java applications
> into main, is maybe a little too much for a single person alone now. It
> seems that most of debian-java developers agree with me [1] on that.
>
> > ps. Developers with platform specific experience who would like to see
> > Kaffe remain on sparc, os390, alpha and so forth should please try to get
> > Kaffe to build from source. Even if the JIT won't compile on your
> > platform there may be hope for the interpreter. Drop me a line if you
> > have interest or success stories.
>
> And they can also hop on our mailing list on kaffe@kaffe.org, and on the
> IRC channel #kaffe on irc.freenode.org for some hands-on introduction to
> the code base. Fixing the compiler warnings should be an easy excercise
> to get you started.
--
Ean Schuessler, CTO
Brainfood, Inc.
http://www.brainfood.com
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