Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: How does arch/tla handle encodings?

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Marcus Sundman <address@hidden>

    > I simply cannot believe that I actually have to argue for not throwing 
away 
    > the encoding info. Never in my life have I met such backwards-striving 
    > people as some of you are. I mean, I relay obvious conclusions agreed on 
by 
    > every person that I know have given the issue a bit of thought, and you 
    > people fight it with all you've got, claws and teeth. Unbelievable.

My happy-go-lucky GNU maintainer's take on this and similar threads?
(And, no, I'm trying to avoid much by way of comment on the technical
content of the threads other than to say it could and should be much
better...)

My take is we're going though (and actually even starting to work
past) growing pains in the project and that the "tone" established
when this list was much smaller, which served us well for a long time,
is now starting to cause (fixable) problems.

So far, all rhetoric aside, the emerging team of co-maintainers is
being pretty conservative about the changes they actually make to the
code.   There is a little more sloppiness crept in, these days, than I
would like to see (e.g., src/tla/cmdutils.[ch] is *utter*crap*!!!!!!!!
Did I slip up and tell me to "hey, just abandon all pretense of
following coding conventions;  go nuts!"?)   But.... aside from a
little clean-upable sloppiness..... folks generally get the right idea
that it's hard to change arch in deep ways without making a mess and
they seem to be suitably careful about that.

That conservativism boads very well for getting Unicode support right.
It is a necessary but not sufficient precondition.

The chatter though:  

Back in the early days, I had to push back a lot of bad ideas and the
public discussion of those got pretty bloody.   The conservativism
turned into just a general tone of haughtiness and impatience when
presented on the list.   That's not entirely inappropriate,
yes.... but as the list as scaled, that expression of conservativism
has become hinderence rather than help.

We need, in my opinion, to work more on a culture that collects
contributions to reasoned discourse about features and blithly ignores
stuff that degenerates into stupid flaming.



    > I had an "encoding handling proposal" all ready, but I don't think this 
    > community is at all interested in this whole issue, so I'd better just 
let 
    > it be.

Post it, please.

    > Good luck with these morons, Tom Lord. I truly feel sorry for you if you 
    > have to endure this kind of illogical and pointless resistance normally.

Though not functional in the current context, it has been quite
functional in others and I helped to encourage it.    They aren't all
morons, by a long stretch.....     thanks for pointing out the
buginess in the way the list is going.

-t