Re: [gentoo-catalyst] Migrating man page to asciidoc?

[Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se>]

Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto wrote:
> I feel I should point out that catalyst is Release Engineering's
> team release tool and not a "toy" for people to tinker with.

Toy? Saying that other people's use of catalyst is only play, while
releng is the only serious user, is really spitting in the face of
everyone who uses catalyst. Maybe not so helpful.

Meeting you I think you seemed sensible enough that you of course
understand that catalyst is equally much a tool for all it's users.


> I appreciate the interest all of you are showing for the tool and I
> appreciate any improvements, but I and other releng team members need
> this tool to work for us to have releases.

No problem. Like every other consumer of open source tools you simply
need to pick the version you choose to use carefully, so that it
works for you. This case is not different from any other tool issue.


> >> For a significant change like this,
> > 
> > "significant" is so subjective though.
> 
> It did made a significant change to the dependencies of catalyst.

No, not really. It added one dependency, which is hardly significant.
As has already been shown (by others than William, might I add)
further indirect dependencies are really a bug in the asciidoc
ebuild, and should be fixed there. Since you are all developers
(while I am not) you could actually *already* have eliminated the
point of contention - but noone has bothered and instead you're
writing email complaining about how a little bit of progress is
ruining your workflow. (This is how it looks anyway.)


> I haven't checked it closely yet,

Maybe that's actually wise, to determine how significant the change
is?


> William is not the only one to have concerns about this change.

He was so far the only one who voice any, and they weren't so nicely
expressed.


> this list probably had little if any releng members. As this is a
> releng tool,

Either "your" catalyst is an open source project or it is not. If it
is not then you need to hide it away in a secret internal repo so
that noone else in the world can access it. Or you can just do what
the rest of the world does; verify your tools before expecting them
to work.

I understand that you want stable tools, but if you want frozen tools
then you need to do that on your own - because other catalyst users
can and will want to change things. Absolutely not very often, but
apparently often enough that it's a problem for releng to continue
be part of the catalyst community. Or?


> not having us around to "object" doesn't make it ok to commit
> changes without ensuring releng is ok with the changes.

If so, that in itself is reason for forking, as was discussed.

I would have zero bad feelings about that, because the wants and
needs simply seem to be different between releng and all other
catalyst users.


> This is about making sure that the people interested as well as the
> direct consumers of the tool are ok with any proposed changes.

You are neglecting every other user than releng. That means me. That
sucks.


> I'm sure no one wants to risk causing a split that could lead to either
> releng assuming control of catalyst again or worse causing a fork in the
> code.

Actually, forking is indeed the one and only productive step when
different users have different enough requirements and expectations.


//Peter