I approved DIP1036e

[Don Allen]

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 15:27:34 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 15:03:09 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>
>> That's irrelevant.  Some of the people who left recently were 
>> *very* active contributors, who have had a lot of work merged 
>> and who did a lot of user support on their own free time.  
>> We're not talking here about the regular whiners who show up 
>> out of nowhere with strange or unreasonable demands while not 
>> lifting a finger themselves. (Personally I just hit the delete 
>> button for those, it's not worth my time.)  We're talking 
>> about people who have had a long history of contributing to D 
>> getting frustrated with the way they were treated *in spite of 
>> having actively contributed* to D.
>>
>
> Please would you elaborate on what you mean by how they were 
> treated?
>
> Admittedly I am not active here so I may be missing things, but 
> I don't see anyone being mistreated here by Walter.
>
> If you mean that contributions are not being looked at - I 
> think it goes back to the fact this is volunteer project and 
> everyone works on what they want to work on. In this setup to 
> get someone else to take an interest in your contribution is 
> hard! That's how it is.
>
> The fact that someone looks at your contribution seriously at 
> all is itself a miracle.
>
> I don't see a solution - unless you want to fund D so that a 
> large team can be hired!

And even that is not guaranteed to work. The kinds of conflicts 
we are observing here occur in businesses where everyone is a 
paid employee. People get upset about how they are being treated, 
or perceive how they are being treated, and they leave.

In addition to the real problems cited by you and others, I think 
there is also a generational factor. Walter is an older person; I 
can say that because I'm even further to the right on that axis, 
plus he's a classic engineer (that's a compliment). The more 
experience you have, the more you know about what can go wrong, 
so the tendency is to slow down, make sure things are thought 
through.

The bright young folks are full of energy and ideas and they like 
to move fast.

Combine these two characteristics well and you've really got 
something. This is much like Modern Portfolio Theory, where you 
can build a portfolio from multiple risky securities that is much 
less risky than any of them, due to how covariance is computed. 
It's also a "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" 
phenomenon.

It's clear that this project has not done a good enough job of 
combining the generations to get the best from both. There are 
issues, shortcomings, on both sides that I don't need to repeat 
-- they've been discussed here ad nauseam. It's vitally important 
that everyone left on the main D project try to learn from this 
latest blowup to avoid a repeat performance. No childish 
name-calling, proper attention paid to the work of people trying 
to contribute (which does not mean accepting their work just 
because they are well intentioned), etc. This is a necessary 
condition for this project to achieve more success than it has, 
however you define "success".