From: Urabe Shyouhei Date: 2009-02-12T14:30:27+09:00 Subject: Re: If you are unhappy with the direction of Ruby 1.8.7+, respond Alex Fenton wrote: >> But what if they want to waste their energy there? > > Then they have picked the wrong place for their energies. People should > be branch maintainer because they have pride in good engineering, not to > acquire a private laboratory for what they think are 'cool' features. I don't intend to attack but for instance _why hasn't been touching his yaml stdlib for years, in spite of yaml bugs continuously reported. If _why had such pride you say, can that be possible? Again, I'm not attacking _why. It's a nature of geek being that they get interested in a new thing than old ones. Some people like you may be able to maintain existing codes, but not everyone. Do not expect others to behave as you do. >> To maintain an old piece of crap like MRI cannot be nothing but >> boring. Every >> precious developers you can think of is precious just because he/she >> can create >> a bright new idea. No one wants to nurse a dead-ended product. > > People - including me - do, on many open-source projects. Of course it > is a bit boring to have to work with old structures, when the future can > be seen. But people do so because they see it's important work to give > confidence in the broader project. Of course not everyone ignore bugs. In fact most bugfixes aren't possible without many helps of core developers. It's hence important for us not to prevent core people to pray with Ruby. Bugfixes and new features are both sourced from a developer brain and are dripped into Ruby 1.8 source code altogether. To filter bugfixes only isn't easy, palming off that job to them should drastically decrease their amount of output. That shouldn't make us happy. > If someone thinks it's *so* boring, then they should work on the > bleeding edge, not become "stable" maintainer. I'd rather 1.8 stagnate > than change so randomly. I suspect that's why no one but me is touching 1.8.6 now.