xc/programs considered harmful

[Daniel Stone]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 12:09 -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> I believe most of the Architecture Board members are here - the community 
> elected us and if Daniel wanted to run, he could have.

Unfortunately I am already quite horrifically overcommitted, and the
calls are at 1, 2, 3, or 4am my time, and the prospect of doing two or
more of those a week didn't sound incredibly attractive to me either.
So I chose to remain merely as a standard participant on the developer
process, using the mailing lists to express my opinion where needed, as
per most open projects.

I am glad that the Architecture Board members are here, and I hope they
are all listening to -- and participating in -- the discussion.  I do
not believe that the existence of the board necessitates a split from
the community, and I believe that as many active contributors engaging
in constructive debate as we can get[0], the better.

Not that I see the Architecture Board using the Board as an excuse to
perforate from the community.  But I sincerely hope it doesn't happen.

> The lists are open and
> we listen to opinions from everyone, but there still needs to be someone who
> can make decisions when not everyone agrees, and it's hard to get away from
> having some group like this.   (In reality, there's been little the Architecture
> Board has had to do so far.  Most things have been working well by simple
> consensus or discussions in forums like release-wranglers.)

I absolutely agree that the group is needed; without it, projects are at
risk of turning into something like Debian, where nothing ever gets
done.  And that sucks.

> The purpose of the separate list is simply traffic management - there are people
> who want to participate in the high level architecture discussions without being
> overwhelmed by all the mail of "how do I make _____ card work with ____ OS using
> Xorg _____ ?" and similar discussions.   (There are times I think a -devel vs.
> -users split would be good for similar reasons, others I think it has problems
> in places where it lets the developers get isolated from what the users are
> actually doing.)

I agree that it's problematic, but in some cases[1] necessary.  I think
that X.Org is sufficiently sheltered from these cases by distributors,
being the first point of call for all problems, to be able to function
with a single list.

The last -arch mail was in October, AFAICT.  So I'm not entirely
convinced of the need for its continued existence.  (Despite my efforts,
I have been unable to resubscribe to for some months.)

-d

[0]: Up to the obvious limit where discussions become unwieldy and
unconstructive.
[1]: On another project I'm involved with, our -users list had over
seven thousand messages in the first week, so -devel traffic would've
been absolutely overwhelmed if we had a single list.