Walter's annoying habits

[John Reimer]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 04:01:59 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For  
Email) <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> Manfred Nowak wrote:
>>> I intended this to be a serious, potentially constructive
>>> criticism of Walter's way of operating.
>>  It is a known phenomenon in organizations, especially charity
>> organizations, that all attributions to persons considered to be
>> leading characters of the organization will immediately bring up
>> all toadies of that organization against the attributor.
>
> Ionno. I might have a wrong or simplistic image of the situation, but to  
> me things are simple: Walter is creating a product. He is motivated  
> mainly by community building and approval. The community uses his  
> product and provides useful feedback and suggestions for improvements.  
> In doing so, they invest time and talent in the product to various  
> degrees.
>
> The question is, how much improvement comes from a specific member of  
> the community, and what amount of entitlement should derive from that? I  
> don't know much about the historical contributions that people have made  
> to D, but my perception (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that Walter  
> holds an overwhelmingly high percent of the shares. In that case, it's  
> hard to make the case that a community member can behave as if Walter  
> owes him something.
>
>
> Andrei


Andrei, I think you were responding to my thread, rather than Manfred's.  
I'm not completely sure.  The context just sounded like you were answering  
me. :(

I don't disagree with what you say here.  It's just that I found your  
one-liner in the previous post rather cheap ("no one put a gun to yer  
head"), and perhaps lacking background on D community drama.  Your post  
above elucidates your thoughts more fully, so I can appreciate that  
contribution better.

Nonetheless, there are people here that have made copious contributions to  
D.  Yes, Walter does own large entitlement to the work that has gone into  
the reference compiler and libraries, but that's mostly because he  
controls it and there's very little that people can do to make large  
contributions internally: they very likely would if they could.  Most  
contributions, therefore, are relegated to periphery tasks or identifying  
bugs (fixing them is not often accepted).  This has been the way Walter  
has preferred to run things, and for the most part people have accepted  
this.  Although every once in awhile flair-ups occur because members get  
frustrated when contributions are refused, rejected, forgotten, or ignored  
despite the same bugs being brought up repeatedly.  The reason for this is  
more often because Walter is already overloaded with work, and he cannot  
manage to review and implement all contribution.  This is not to say this  
Walter is absolutely horridly wrong in the way he runs things... it's more  
about posing the question on how efficiency might be improved concerning  
internal workload distribution and organization.  But repeatedly such  
suggestions have been rejected as infeasable (or simply ignored).

Meanwhile, some members have indeed contributed copious amounts of time,  
energy, and money to external facets: dsource.org, bugzilla, gdc, and  
several large projects consisting of many man-hours of work.  I want to  
point out that none of these areas constitute a small percentage of the D  
landscape or contribution pool.  Naturally, that doesn't justify any sort  
of rudeness on anybody's part, but it may explain some of the concern that  
important members show, now and again, in how D is managed and organized  
 from the inside:  any inability of Walter's to be able to keep up with  
work flow engenders frustration in those that would like to help in  
improving administration efficiency, division of labor and such; Walter is  
incredibly productive despite all this... but it's very easy for community  
members who have stuck around the last few years not to feel frustrated  
with the pace when there is a perception that, organizationally at least,  
the whole D movement could churn out fixes faster with the right  
arrangement.

Despite these dramas, most community members continue to cheer Walter on  
in good-natured fashion and continue to appreciate his incredible  
steadfastness and self-motivation.  Supporting him remains important in  
one way or another.  And seeing you arrive here from the C++ community  
publicly supporting Walter is also a good sign, I suppose. :)

Anyway, Walter is back, so we can stop talking about him now. ;)

All the best,

JJR