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Re: What about tommorrow?


From: Greg A. Woods
Subject: Re: What about tommorrow?
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 18:16:37 -0400 (EDT)

[ On Thursday, July 19, 2001 at 17:22:39 (-0400), Steven Rosenstein wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: What about tommorrow?
>
> So.... If we, the community of CVS users, decide that we would like to see
> "non-mergeable" files handled differently than they are currently, then it 
> will
> be made so?

No, that's not how it works.

If you, or someone, writes the code; and you, or someone, champions it
to the community, and the community likes it, then it might be made so.

But it might not.

The best way to get better support for unmergeable files is to write
some new tool that does what you want it to do (or directly support
someone willing to do the work for you).  You can obviously use CVS as a
base if you want (though CVS is in such bad need of a full rewrite I'm
not sure that would be the wisest thing to do).  Then you can then
release your new tool(s) to the world.  Call it what you will, but
please don't call it "cvs".

"open source" is not a democracy.  at best it's a dictatorship.  at
worst it's anarchy.  often it's something in between.  sometimes the
dictatorship is a shared committee with often hidden lines of power and
little consensus building.  if you're lucky the dictator/committee in
charge will try to act more like a benign monarch and hear out all sides
before declaring what the consensus is.  truly free software
(eg. *BSD-like, or partially "free" eg. GPL) gives you the guarantee
that if you become unhappy with the current state of affairs you can
take a copy away with you and create your own new version.

more often than not people who whine and complain about the lack of
support for features/ideas they feel are important don't write new tools
(or even directly support their creation), or fork the development of
existing tools -- they just wander off and try to get the dictator of
some other similar fiefdom to lean more their way; or they do what I've
done and just continue maintaining their own private variant (thus in
fact depriving the community of their input -- even the GPL can't force
someone to release completely private and unpublished changes).

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <address@hidden>     <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>;   Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>



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