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List:       mutt-dev
Subject:    Re: The future of mutt... - intermediate aggregation
From:       "jpacner () redhat ! com" <jpacner () redhat ! com>
Date:       2013-10-24 13:02:36
Message-ID: 52691A6C.1000201 () redhat ! com
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Hi Holger,

> This sounds so awesome!  No need for maintainers.  The community will
> just magically take over all their work.
> 
> Of course, in practice, it doesn't work this way.  Occasional
> contributors add their favourite feature or fix a bug they stumbled
> over.  That's it.  They provide patches, they don't do patch review.
> 
> Maintainers do.  They fix or reject code that's slow, insecure,
> duplicated, inconsistent, non-portable, undocumented, useless, badly
> designed, badly formatted, and so on.  They reject features that are out
> of scope or duplicate existing functionality.  They decide on
> controversial issues.  These things require a level of motivation,
> knowledge, commitment, and authority that occasional contributors lack.
> 
> Occasional contributors are good at taking care of issues that cause
> obvious harm to everyone immediately.  The problem is that the negative
> effect of applying low-quality patches often doesn't become obvious
> until many such patches pile up, or just for some fraction of users.  If
> the performance of reading a local mbox goes down by 2 percent, nobody
> will notice.  When it went down by 20 percent, it might well be too late
> to fix the mess; at least for occasional contributors.  It would've been
> the maintainer's job to make sure the 2 percent loss doesn't kreep in.
> 
> If you just ditch the concept of long-term maintainers, you _will_ end
> up with more features, and with a lower-quality code base.  So this is a
> trade-off, and your preference might differ from mine.  But denying that
> we're talking about a trade-off seems like a highly unrealistic view to
> me.

I've tried to not exaggerate the problem and it might be I've written
the example too loosely. I've mentioned, that "the others" would solve
such occasional problems. By "the others" I've meant first of all the
core developers who release the stable versions.

Anyway, you sound like a usual mutt user, who prefers stability over
new-features (this is the trade-off you've mentioned) and therefore you
can stay calm - you'll get the same quality of stable releases like up
until now (no changes in the stable release management and it's
requirements).

> As far as I'm concerned, I'm afraid of having to pay too much for new
> features in terms of quality (e.g., stability, performance, saneness,
> and accuracy of documentation).

According to my last paragraph above, you don't need to worry.

>> Of course, many "distro guys" are also highly interested and/or involved
>> in upstream development, but at the end, they anyway deliver what users
>> want.
> 
> As a Mutt user, I'd expect both upstream and package maintainers to not
> blindly deliver whatever I want, but only those changes that seem
> feasible given the maintainer's knowledge (that I don't have).

Of course, the "distro guy" doesn't take the user complains literally
(in your context "blindly").

Regards

-- Jan Pacner
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