I approved DIP1036e

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 03:27:34PM +0000, Dibyendu Majumdar via Digitalmars-d 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?

I've already said this before elsewhere, but in short: an eager
contributor shows up, submits PRs which are merged, then is given commit
access to Phobos. He and I worked together to clear up Phobos' backed-up
PR queue.  Then suddenly out of the blue, Andrei shows up after months
of being MIA (or just giving 1-word responses) and drops on us like a
ton of bricks, saying that we did this and that wrong, we let things
through that shouldn't have been let through, Good Work vs. Great Work,
etc..  A bunch of PRs were reverted.

Now, perhaps Andrei was right, and what we did wasn't up to the D
leadership's standard.  But here's the point: we were never informed
about this beforehand.  We were not told what exactly was expected of
us.  There were no guidelines, no list of things to watch out for, no
overall direction that would guide our decisions, nothing.  Just
unwritten rules that we were expected to know, perhaps by clairvoyance,
lest the fury descend upon us from on high.

In the aftermath, said contributor walked away. Who could blame him?  I
stayed, but greatly scaled back my own contributions.  Not because I was
upset (I wasn't), but I thought, since my work wasn't good enough, I
should just let somebody else more qualified to step up.  Guess what?
Nobody did.  In the end, the DLF had to pay someone to work on the PR
queues.  I guess that's about the only way anyone would be willing to
work under such circumstances.

This isn't the only time something like this happened, it's just the one
I know better because I was personally involved. The same pattern has
been repeated throughout the time I was with D.  Clearly, something
isn't going right here.


[...]
> I don't see a solution - unless you want to fund D so that a large
> team can be hired!

This is perhaps the crux of it.  We're trying to run an open source,
volunteer-driven project -- and a *small* one at that -- like a large,
proprietary enterprise, and it's not working very well.  Andrei's
reaction above?  Not entirely unexpected in a large corporation.  You're
being paid to do the work, so you just swallow it and do your job.  But
in a volunteer-driven open-source project?  Well, we're seeing the
consequences unfolding right before our eyes.


T

-- 
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power. -- Abraham Lincoln