Re: Guile foreign object interface

[Andy Wingo]

On Fri 10 Mar 2017 08:38, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Andy Wingo <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès),  address@hidden
>> Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2017 20:56:09 +0100
>> 
>> > That's what I'm trying to tell you: there's no aggression.
>> 
>> I understand that different people can have different reactions and it's
>> great that you can look through "style" to the substance.  I and a
>> number of other contributors (evidently including Ludovic) find it hard
>> to do so, and the only reason we try is because we care about Guile.
>> It's really weird though to try to ignore this "style" when the style
>> often says precisely that we _don't_ care, in those words, and other
>> times in as many words.
>
> Given the certain amount of frustration over the real problems that
> didn't get solved until now, you can understand that, don't you?

Oh sure.  Lots of frustration going around :) However I know that if I
need help making something better, then I should avoid antagonizing
other people working on it, especially the maintainers who will be left
maintaining the code.  That's all.

> I had my share of problems reported here, mostly with working patches,
> some of which took many moons, sometimes years to get solved upstream.

Yeah sorry about that :/ For the record I really appreciate your work
and have always enjoyed working with you and I definitely sympathize
with your frustrations.  I also think that it would not have been the
right thing for Guile to simply apply some of the in-line portability
fixes that were the starting points for many of your excellent patches
-- it took work on both sides to get them applied, and that work on my
side at least competed with many other things.

I would like to focus less on individual people and more on behaviors
though.

> So maybe the project leadership should try to improve the efficiency
> of handling bug reports and of catering to the problems raised by
> projects using Guile, as a means to lower frustration and make the
> environment friendlier?

Certainly, I hope we do that :) Of course that depends on good will on
everyone's part, maintainers and contributors, and I think there are
"styles" that create good will and styles that don't help.

Happy hacking,

Andy