Oracle's post first. I realise what Oracle is trying to do and I want to answer it before I answer Nao's more complex and more involved post. Replying to Oracle, essentially, is replying to the community as a whole before I address specific issues with Nao.The key is communication and ones ability to air any grievences as they arise and clearly, so the other half fully understands where he or she is coming from.
The need to sit down and discuss matters in an attempt to resolve issues and to reach compromise is the only way
From an outsiders perspective the communicae between you has been considerable, but neither have really attempted to delve further when you sensed something had possibly gone wrong. What happened?.. a grey area was allowed to fester because of a lack of REAL communication between the pair of you. And to this day there is still is no resolve. Sure you appear to have gone your separate ways but deep down is that what you REALLY want?
No, it's not what I *wanted*. What I wanted was to not have to have gone through this in the first place. To have worked alongside Nao as an equal, but however it's perceived by anybody else is irrelevant. I do not consider myself to have been considered as an equal in this partnership. I feel like I'm on the wrong end of a D/s relationship and I couldn't say stop loudly enough to be heard.The triumphant sense of completness and fullfillment that is unparalleled to anything you have experienced before.
In fact, of the features I've added, I actually don't see myself using most of them. I added them because I felt Wedge needed them, which is something quite different to 'because I wanted them'. I don't mind this in principle, I did it a lot for SimpleDesk too.The common denominator in this is WEDGE and it is on the verge of becoming something worthy of your talents.
The community appeals to you to try and raise above what has happened.
You'll see throughout this forum that all the time I work on the backend - which includes the admin panel - it's absolutely fine, but woe betide me if I want to put something visible on the front end. See, alongside the stuff around rewriting the JavaScript, the comment about how Nao now has to rethink how mobile works didn't go unnoticed... here's the thing: if I have an idea, I want to implement it. I thought that was a particularly good idea but shit, it means that other things have to be rethought.
I've had that problem for months, where I've ACTIVELY felt like I can't touch the front end because I know it'll upset Nao. Seriously. Even something as minor as making the search function offer 'this board' and 'this board (and its sub boards)'. Even though Nao raised it as a bug that it was not how he thought it should work, I was still uncomfortable adding the change because it's something on the front end - and that's not even a thing that's on every page (it's loaded AJAXively)
When I get to the point where I'm *afraid* of adding a single item to a dropdown that's already there because of how it'll affect the rest of the user interface I know something's wrong.Think of how far youve come and attempt to move forward as an invigorated new team hell bent on proving that 2 guys can succeed doing it alone.
If you want to see what happens when two guys can succeed going it alone, don't look at us, we're a bad role model. Look at XenForo. Two guys and a business manager. And they've come a helluva long way in 3 years. Now you can argue that they're paid and all, but the point still stands, they're just two guys who've come a long way in 3 years. Far further than we ever did as far as I'm concerned.
History lesson #1: 3 years ago, I was already working on my own software from scratch. Seriously, I probably even still have the SVN repo somewhere. And the things I was going to do with it... I had unique ideas about ways of doing things - and not one of those has emerged into Wedge, not in three years. Not ONE of the things DragonBB was going to be able to do has materialised. Some of them I realised weren't worth it, but some of them were simply because I don't feel I can introduce them.This after all was you prime motivation that spurred this project into what it is today and how it could be should both of you follow it through.
Combine that with the way SMF was going - we remember January 2010 only too well after the management held the project forum hostage from the team unless they signed an agreement. This was when SMF was still in RC times, on the way to RC4, we were genuinely concerned that SMF wasn't even going to get that far and we had grand ideas about being the torch bearers for the spirit of SMF if not the name.
The prime motivation wasn't about seeing how awesome we could make it, it was saving the project. And in hindsight it did to a degree - though SMF is still a long way from redemption. In the very early days it gave them competition and motivation of sorts. It still took them almost a year to get SMF 2.0 out through another RC (and RC5 was mostly about a security issue I told them about, some may remember the fact that I had to work out whether my sense of ethics overrode my distaste for their politics, and ethics won)Show each other a greater level of compassion and understanding so that you may rejoin forces for the greater good.
My point, which I am most assuredly getting to, is that I could show Nao all the compassion in the world but I doubt it would make a lot of difference going the other way.
I have made it known on multiple occasions that I was not keen on the constant rewriting. I make it clear that I didn't like committing things knowing they were going to get rewritten, to the point I flat out said that he should just write things on the front end instead because I felt like I was submitting half-assed work all the time.
None of this was commented upon at the time, if I remember rightly. Communication relies on both parties talking and both parties listening. I've done enough talking, and I'm not being heard. And I haven't felt like I've been heard for a while. The problem is, were I to rejoin now, one of two things would likely happen, either things would quickly be how they were (which is unacceptable to me)
Where was that? What message?
Do I need to..? Do I want to?
Is Wedge everything I need to know about in life?
Do you want to? Having a general sense of understanding about these things can be important. It is why I want rid of the Flash based uploader, very badly, because it's a form of vulnerability, and I'm not sure how badly it can be exploited, I've never tried it.just like I'd never expect you to work too much on the frontend area.
The thing is, you didn't just 'not expect me' to touch it, you ended up making me feel uncomfortable about touching anything in the front end.
But the thing is, there were times when you didn't want me to touch the backend either; I made it clear I had very real concerns with the way Aeva's code is structured, as well as usability issues. All of the latter were documented (this thread(http://wedge.org/pub/8223/posting-from-mobile-including-aeva/msg290661/#msg290661)) and you even replied to them. Your response was basically, "Well, I've never done it so it's fine for me". Now, I can understand that, you're very passionate about Aeva. Which is why even now, three years on, even after you've given me express permission to change the admin panel, I still never touched it because I felt you wouldn't like the results (the entire admin panel area needed a rewrite to make it consistent with everything else)
And as for the mainline code in Aeva, you said that you wanted me to tell you the issues so you could fix them. While there is a valid argument there, there are valid arguments in the other direction too: I'm never going to learn about a system if I never touch its code. In the real world, it's good practice to have people that don't know a piece of code go work on it so everyone knows at least a bit about everything. For situations like this.
Let's say, hypothetically, I got hit by a bus rather than quit. You wouldn't have a choice but to either learn the system or find someone that could work on it. Like, incidentally, a large chunk of the code we inherited, we can't exactly ask who wrote it, we have to figure it out as we go along. But I felt that even within 'the backend' which was my domain, I couldn't even do that.I've never been into MySQL... That's the thing with me. To me, a GOOD system is a system that optimizes each of your queries, regardless of how you write them.
The thing is, the odds of a large forum owner being able to help you optimise queries? Slim. The biggest SMF forum out there cannot do anything with the database to save her life, which is why various people from the SMF community, me included, have been involved with her issues.You did very little rewrites to it. Only fixes. Most of the time you'd leave them to me, actually...
What I'm saying is, that's how I work in a team. I tend to supervise all code and try and make it look unified. My changes were mostly suggestions, or optimizations. I never felt that your code was sacred, and I never asked you to consider mine as sacred either. That was your problem to solve, not mine.
Then you have a strange way of showing it.
"My life fell apart today... Thankfully, I have Wedge to focus on, so I can change my mind...
- Just what I was waiting for! I'm leaving the project!"
Yes... But in a friendly manner, right...? Like last year, when you'd pretty much left the project for several weeks... I was in the dark at that time, didn't really know what to expect from you, so I started considering that you had unofficially quit... You didn't, but if you had, at least it would have been better than your last dramatic exit. (I'm not exactly sure why you're still dropping by, either...?!)
I dropped by to offer up an observation that struck me after a day of hacking away at the SMF 2.1 codebase, that seemed relevant and worth mentioning, especially as it validated something I'd already told you, which was that a friendly fork of Wedge on my side couldn't have worked, at least not in a contributory fashion.Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
I PM'ed him asking why he did that, and got no replies. I guess he felt I had nothing to bring to the table. Nice.
There are some people who would have been here because they're fans of mine, just as there are some people who would have been here because they're fans of yours, and some just following the dream. (I don't know whose dream any more. Someone's dream.) I also know Antes is contributing to 2.1's codebase. Maybe the combination of the two just meant he had nothing to contribute.And my girlfriend -- she doesn't have as biased an opinion as you might expect of you; still, she thought that you considering our multiple invitations to come visit us, the fact that you never even talked to me was proof that I should have been more careful. And that you weren't very honest with me, and worse, with yourself. :-/
Well, there are always people you're not going to name... <_<
I only mention what people tell me if I can *actually* name them and quote them on that. Otherwise, it doesn't mean anything to me (or you). You know, like "Pete, I've heard that some people thought you were a jerk and were planning to hurt you... Oh, sorry, I can't tell you whom. I just thought you might want to know. Good night."
What I want to say is -- saying this kind of thing; it's not nice to me or your 'friends', and it doesn't help.
Not nice to my friends? It's not ideal, no. But in an ideal world, they wouldn't have had to say it, I wouldn't have had to agree, and I wouldn't have had to paraphrase to try and make my point.
Not nice to you? No, no it's not. But it's not a pleasant subject we're dealing with.Err... By saying I got to choose..?
Okay, so, I choose to keep the current Wedge license. What now?
As for me... this is one of the reasons I chose to explore my ideas with SMF rather than Wedge. It means I don't have to be concerned by the licence you choose. Heck you could legitimately have modified the licence to prevent me forking Wedge if you wanted. (Remember, we did originally have exclusions again certain people. I considered the possibility you'd add me to that list.)Can I change the copyright to just René-Gilles Deberdt, or do I have to keep Wedgeward alive, even though I'm the only one in it? You didn't tell me that... Do I have to add your copyright to all files you wrote?
However, I said the contributions were licensed under BSD. In this respect you can do with my contributions as Dragooon's are - under whatever copyright the whole package to whoever and just leave me in the contributors file. You don't even have to list what features if you like, just under the contributors.What if you want to make your own fork?
How awkward would it be that you have to ask me whether you can re-use some of my code that ended up in one of your features? Etc...
Yes, I'd rather go the long way around and make my own life more difficult to avoid complicating yours any more than necessary, and to avoid tripping on your toes. For example, my project doesn't have Aeva, this is a significant loss in the scheme of things to me, assuming I keep it up.But since I'll be relicensing it, and it's not released yet, how exactly are people supposed to know what code is BSD and what isn't...?
I'll also add -- what is the legal value of the message you just posted? What legal authority could ascertain that *you* posted it, and that I didn't manipulate the database to make it look like you posted it?
We didn't really care about the legal shenanigan because we didn't have anything to lose or gain from it. Once you left the project in a bad mood, so many things became obscure.
Ah, the bbc parser... Remember how I used to hate the fact that you moved them codes to the database without adding an editor somewhere..? Well, if I had to rewrite your code, it's not the first thing I would rewrite...
- First, you told me you were leaving web software behind for a long time. It only took you one week to come back and, err... Basically tell me that you're forking SMF again?! Whether publicly or privately, doesn't matter... Wedge started out as a private fork. If you want to work on a SMF codebase and be your own boss, why didn't you just agree to my suggestion of splitting the project in two and try to keep it in sync as much as possible (and as we'd like)...?
I seriously considered forking Wedge. But the fact that within a day's commits, I went in a direction that screwed up compatibility, I realised that it's a noble goal that just wouldn't work. I mean, I've been shifting between the SMF and Wedge codebases for months and they're quite a bit different but I can keep it straight in my head as to what the differences are at the code level, so I'm only too familiar with the number of problems it causes and to be honest that's just something I didn't want to entertain - and I even tried to tell you that before I left.
Then we have the licensing stuff. Let's say I did fork Wedge and went off and made my thing with it. Let's say I get more popular because of the changes I want to make and my 'gallery' is cited as a major plus factor. How pissed off would you be with that? It'd still be Aeva, but a modified Aeva. Modified a long way. Trampling on your nice thing.
On the other hand, if I forked, I'd inherit the CSS preparser which is very cool but I still don't understand 80% of it and thus it's a feature I can't really use, I certainly can't advertise it and we all know my feelings on trying to keep skins in functioning fashion.- Each of us worked separately on what we thought would be best to implement in Wedge. That is, if you were to remove all of your contributions overnight, I would certainly be devastated, but that wouldn't mean Wedge has become a piece of shit.
Neither of us single-handedly hand Wedge the best SMF fork out there.
but I'm also of the opinion that it should be released now, and that anything else we want to add later, we can always write a converter to deal with. It's never been impossible.
Because I'm well known for my attitude, of course... And you're not. :whistle:
I asked you not to flood the thought system with our discussions, and that it was best to centralize them into a single topic. I don't think anyone will complain about that. They're free to ignore this topic, while ignoring the thoughts is harder when you try to follow them all.
I still don't get why you came back to post this... You're free to do it of course, but I fail to see what pushed you to do it. I'm not surprised you came back; I'm only surprised your return seemed to be lacking any reason.
So, I'm not sure you'll answer this post either, but just let me tell you that it's hard to follow what's in your mind. You really should take a break. From code, from anything.
Oh wait, that's what you did last month...
Truth be told, I'm still probably on the wrong side of 'depression' but everyone around me seems to think I'm fine. I'm just not that honest a person, I guess, hiding who I really am inside from everyone. Everyone here thinks I'm a cheerful person with a hint of cynicism. None of them know the truth and I don't feel I could tell them.2013: I'm not even going to make $5K from it. But it rocks, and I'm proud of it. It'll be buggy when it's out, but it'll still be the best free forum software, and I'll be happy to add this to my résumé once I have to move my ass and find a job. And I suspect you will, too.
Well, Wedge is competition to WordPress, technically, so... :^^;:
Protendo is competition, too. Doesn't mean I can't have a good relationship with Bloc. He knows how much I respect his talent (and how disastrous it would be if we worked together... Still, I had to offer him the job, out of principle ;)).
See what I mean..? We can be competitors, that's okay, but you need to be clear about all of this. By keeping everyone in the dark, you're only making things easier for yourself. And yes, I believe I deserve to be told, anyway.
Competition implies that there's actually a project to compete with. Right now all I have is SMF 2.1 with less features and a new title. That's not really competition, is it? Will it still remain that way in time? I don't know.Whatever you may think of me right now, whatever I may think of you right now, it doesn't change the fact that we both had tons of fun during the last three years, and that I contributed to yours, and that you contributed to mine. It would be just plain sad to leave it at 'we're not compatible as a team' when effectively, we've done great team work for so many years.
See, as I said in the thoughts, I'm between a rock and a hard place and I'm basically fucked whatever I do.
As I see it, based on everything that's been said:
* work on SMF core - upsets you, means I have to work with Git
* work on Wedge - upsets me for all the reasons I've given
* fork SMF again - upsets you, gives me a lot of work to do
* fork Wedge - hassle because it will very quickly become unsynchronised and go in a vastly different direction
* do nothing - accept defeat and write off everything as a waste of time
Had I not left, my choices would have been different:
* carry on - getting more resentful of the relationship being wrong
* try to raise issues - feeling stupid in so doing, feeling vulnerable in so doing, suspecting nothing would change anyway
* quit - cause hassle in the interim while things get transferred and moved on
As I see it, I did the best thing I could for both me and the project; this way you get rid of someone who is probably capable but flakes out under pressure and has temper issues, and while there's pain in the initial phase, that'll pass. If this were a company, you would have fired my ass by now.
Posted: September 3rd, 2013, 04:44 AM
Let me just clarify one thing: I'm not saying no to a reunion because I don't want to work on Wedge, Wedge is not and in itself never has been the problem as such. I'm saying no to a reunion because 1) I'd hate the working environment and grow more resentful of things, 2) I think Nao would hate it and 3) Wedge is very awesome but I just don't see that where I'm going and where Wedge is going are the same place.
Guess I'll have to reply this, at some point...Pick a CLA, if the terms aren't unpleasant, I'll sign it. E.g. the Apache CLA will be fine.
The reality is that I'm just not the same as you, and as I've said before I can't live up to your standards.
If you remove themes, 1) it absolutely prevents themers adding their own language strings
Although I have yet to figure this one out, I had in mind something really, really simple...
/wedge/
/wedge/sources/
/wedge/skins/my_skin/
/wedge/languages/my_skin/
You just upload multiple folders to your site.
The skins folder contains your CSS and PHP stuff, and in your PHP code, you can simply declare a loadLanguage()...
It may not be super-practical, but it's no more unusable than the SMF way, I'd say.
And, knowing myself-- I'll probably even add a setting allowing for skins to load some language files automatically on every page. I already have a <language> setting IIRC (determining what languages the skin accounts for in the CSS files), so I'll just have to add a new one like <loadLanguage>, or something. As long as it's in beta, I can still change that kind of thing, and update all skin files manually...and 2) it absolutely prevents replacing templates on a large scale. Sure, there are some nods made in the other direction with <we:cat> and <we:title> but a themer simply isn't going to be able to go to town and really change up the look.
If it's not, then it's unlikely they'll simply update all template files for the sake of updating all template files.I see from the changelog you've made some more strides, but let me ask you this. You've seen Crossing Overland, with the menu down the side, with the other stuff that's in the theme. The ONLY thing managed by the sources code is the extra subtitle on the menu, everything else is in a custom theme.
Can that be recreated with just skins?
Answer: no because the JavaScript would have to be reworked to make the menu work differently.
And even then-- <script include="mycustomskin">, and you're done... (??)
If someone needs an object method to be rewritable, I can declare it outside the scope, so that it can be redefined/overloaded/prototyped.That's the point I was getting at: killing off themes and pushing it to skins means a designer can only change the markup they're given, they can't really go to town with new markup which is a considerable hit on flexibility.
Custom JS
Custom PHP
Custom CSS
Final HTML raw replacement
Dunno what can be done with themes, that skins could not do.
Of course, it's another way of handling things. And it needs documenting. That's where skins are weak. There's a basic documentation in Warm/skin.xml (the only thing I actually really worked on documenting, unlike Wess!), but it could be better, I suppose. I'll improve it as questions come and go.We did some good stuff. And I'd love to see some good stuff from this project in the future because you don't need me. You never needed me, not really.
You have the power to take Wedge in any direction you choose now, whatever works for where you want to take it, and for those who will undoubtedly follow you.
Anyway!I'm free to go away and think about what I want to say, and how to say it. I've read this post half a dozen times this evening before I replied to it.
So, I guess my posts tend to be seen as hot-headed, more spontaneous, unlike yours. Figures.Firstly, accept the notion that you're going in a direction where you're loading stuff only on demand. In my world, primarily a CMS, I don't need a censor all the time. Inside the forum, perhaps, but not more generally. So I can hive it off somewhere else. And then only load it when I actually need it.
Keeping the files a bit smaller, then, is a major difference. Especially when you typically already consume 10MB per page load just in general approach.
Look, the best example is skin CSS... Originally, I only had suffixes. Got plenty of files for each browser or action or whatever. Then I added @if support. Suddenly I removed most of those extra files, because it was much easier to maintain similarly themed CSS in the same file, rather than in multiple index.ie6.css-whatever files. Made my life easier...This last year we've both had stuff going on that has made it hard to focus. I'm sorry I wasn't more forthcoming either, because this might have ended a little differently otherwise.
Eh, I don't know that they'll love it. They'll deal with it, simple as that.
Having a release out means that we can start considering things like whether to keep maintaining it. If it's a success (generating buzz, even negative buzz), then great. If it's a failure, then we stop, simple as that.
Okay, this post is so long, I'm gonna have to finish it another day, because... Because! I'm really tired.
Posted: September 13th, 2013, 12:12 AM
Firstly, there is evidence to suggest that themers don't like having to deal with specific CSS variations for a given system due to preparsers - like XenForo discovered - but I think Wess is strong enough that it'll overcome the issues.
I was against the idea for reasons I'd explained multiple times, including earlier in this post. I'm skeptical of the claim that you can do 'pretty much everything skin-less themes could do' because there are an awful lot of things that just aren't covered in that.
(If the theme system is removed, I'll probably be even more aggressive in splitting important templates into more functions and macros.)See, that's the problem... I don't like face to face meetings. I much, much prefer online communication. I'm rather inept socially in person,
because my brain thinks faster than my mouth and I trip up on words so much.
Heck, I'm not even on Skype.
That said, I think it might be nice to let this stuff go, and in a while when it's all settled and we're doing what we're doing, to just meet up, shoot the breeze. Not as would-be/wannabe/former partners in crime, but two geeks that are just friends, you know?
Anyway, I might be coming back to London within the next few months; nothing set in stone, but my girlfriend discussed the possibility of staying at her brother's over there, as he's expecting a new kid soon.Seriously though, there has been a mass defection to Facebook and Google+ over the last few years. All the forum packages are in decline, I've even heard from phpBB and MyBB folks that are seeing a decline in users for this very reason.
That was a factor for me, more than the salary that came out of it.For a lot of discussions, a group or page on Facebook will be enough, especially in response to something like a band or similar because they'll already have a presence on FB and don't really need to open up a forum for anything else.
I can register on a forum and be effectively anonymous should I choose. It's not a single overarching thing where my family, my friends, my professional acquaintances and whatnot all get smushed together unlike Facebook.
Not that you CAN'T hide your identity on FB. One of my best friends has 'Yeo Wren' as his FB account, and that's actually his nickname. He never gave away his real name on FB, even though he's very active on it, and all of his RL friends are linked to his account. It's not that he's hiding his name... He just doesn't like revealing himself to anyone he doesn't know.
That's why I still have in my to-do list this item that says, lemme find it, "per-item privacy in profiles, e.g. real name". That means applying the usual privacy flag (contacts, members...) to individual entries in your profile area. For instance, you could put your real name in it, but only have it available for your conatcts. Or your e-mail address, etc.Getting back on track though, more and more requests on sm.org are about bridging to WP or using it alongside an existing site, rather than it being the site as a whole.
(Possibly because I don't think saying "CMS" is gonna help make Wedge popular. If you'll look at cmsmatrix.org, they have over 1200 CMS systems listed... And they're almost all dead. To most people, CMS = what?! (and to them, WordPress is just a blog platform, only web developers/designers would really think of calling it a CMS); to a minority of them, CMS = WordPress (.net and Web Designer Magazine readerships :lol:); and to some of them, CMS = Drupal/Joomla/ExpressionEngine/SilverStripe/whatever CMS had a relative amount of popularity at one point or another. Doing a great CMS won't really help, as there are so many CMSes around already. What is going to help, though, is getting at least ONE great/popular website to use Wedge, and then popularize it by actually keeping using it. Again: one by one...As for people coming back to forums, I've been saying since 2011 that there's going to be a shift back towards forums as people start to reclaim their privacy. While I didn't predict PRISM, since 2011 I was speculating 2014 as the time when forums would reclaim some of the lost ground. While the PRISM stuff has died down a touch now, there is a swing back towards forums. I'm just expecting it more en masse next year.
Oh, I've never doubted that the software needs to exist. I'm just challenging the notion that it has to be the primary focus of the software.
I'm asserting the notion that a piece of software that allows you to run a website should allow for a forum but not be a forum with some other stuff integrated in to it.
Well, if anything, there are already plenty SMF forums that do exactly that. It's not new -- it's just not really advertised, is all.
Bloc is focused on doing that with Protendo, too. Noisen.com has done that from day one, of course -- I'm not really hiding the forum, but if you tell someone your blog's address, they don't really have a reason to go outside of it, so...The point where I suggested it, I forget where it was but it was on this site, and you were very hostile to the idea of having a CMS with 'the best forum plugin' and would much rather have the forum as the core and content stuff around it. At least, that's how it seemed, and after that I just dropped the idea.
A blog is a very different beast from a forum. A forum is essentially a democratic concept, where anyone in the community can have a say and speak their mind, whereas a blog only allows for the privileged few to speak their mind and let everyone else comment. True, a forum board can be used as a blog, and that becomes mostly a matter of permissions and UI juggling, but it's a very different beast to market and to work with as a whole.
Messages are what a forum is *made* of. It's not what a forum is *about*. There are other components to a community, where messages don't necessarily make a huge difference. I look at the site I use to discuss development; the shoutbox has nearly 400,000 entries, while the forum has barely 3,000 posts, mostly which just summarise and formalise what the shoutbox had in it at the time.
The main reason I didn't want to run a release at this stage was simply because of how much stuff I felt was unfinished - not 'waiting for perfect'. The permissions stuff is still a mess.
The media area still needs a serious (IMHO) overhaul,
and to me that seemed like it needed to be done before 1.0 but I didn't know what to do with it. I just knew I didn't like it.
It was a good idea in a lot of ways, but I'm sure it would have failed for the reason above, we would have tried to keep things in step enough to be able to reuse each other's work and we would both have been hamstrung by it in time.
It would have gone one of two ways, either it would have meant a complete separation much as we're at now, or it would have ended up diverging and converging after a while and a ton of work to bring them back under one roof (which would invariably have lead to a lot of rewrites)
The idea was simply to find a solution to the issue where we were drifting apart, and to allow you to focus on your other software projects, while giving me free reign to make decisions when you wouldn't be available for advice, that's pretty much it...Oh, I know that. At least, I think I know that. But my self esteem doesn't really care *why* it's being pulled apart, simply that the end result is a B-minus grade.
I couldn't really find a better analogy, and I did want to make some kind of a meta reference, knowing one of the largest topics in the private board. It made me smile a little to make a private reference.
Oh, it required team work, but I didn't entirely feel like I was doing good at being in a team.
But therein lies the problem. Committing something subpar was wrong
and trying to commit perfection meant I committed nothing while trying to make it perfect. My best just isn't the same level as yours, ultimately.
Maybe it was a homage to you, I don't know... :PTo a point. Certainly when working alone I don't have the feelings of inadequacy. I can just enjoy working on code for its own sake and it doesn't matter if I don't commit it, and it doesn't matter if I don't finish it and it doesn't matter if I abandon it.
Let me show you something. This wasn't public knowledge. Some months ago I made a mod of some of the anti spam stuff in Wedge and released it to sm.org.
I'm above that, but... Well, I prefer when people who have something serious to tell you, do it in front of me, rather than vent on the side.
If you already had a problem with me back in April, then you should have told me, because there's no reason I wouldn't have worked on this on my side, or at least talked you into understanding what I'm doing has never been against you, rather I was just trying to contribute.Interestingly the commit log from 21/4 (r2066) does actually mention that I was AWOL and had been for a day or so at least... This would have been in the middle of the thousands of lines of warning system rewrite that as I tried to tell people was close to giving me a breakdown all on its own.
Why do you think I never took it upon myself to do a complete overhaul of AeMe... :PThat comment wasn't actually directed at you, but everyone else who seems to say that I should just man up and accept that this is how it should be.
But then I just slowly drifted into the world of the adults (mostly due to real life) -- where nothing ever happens because you fear you have more to lose than to earn. I just played the Passion game with myself for so long... I can still be angry at injustice, but the difference is that now I realize I can't do much about these. Last time I saw one, I started a fork. Look where I am, three years later... The only thing that remains of the initial spark is the passion for building something so incredible. The anger, itself, is completely dead. Not that I love the SMF team or anything-- I just don't feel anything when I think of these stories, I see these things as childish. Childish that I played into the game of joining the SMF dev team, and especially childish that they themselves played with me and were frightened of losing control over me. Seriously-- this is free software we're talking about. Nobody should ever give a shit about having 'power' over something. What matters is what they bring to the project, not the aura they get out of it. Being happy with what you did in the past, is better for your karma than some irrational idea of being important. So, yes, everyone was being childish at that point, and I should have seen that. It wouldn't even have stopped me from starting Wedge, actually. Just... In a different state of mind, I guess.
Oh well, I'm seriously drifting off-topic. Sorry, I was typing as I thought it up.It is slightly ironic that Wedge itself was founded on the notion that we shouldn't just accept how things are being on the wrong end of a team relationship that wasn't working, but that's what I'm being asked to accept 'for the good of the project'.
The last few days have been very interesting. There are people that believe I should go and be lead developer for SMF in the hopes of rescuing it but I don't really see that working for much the same reasons, and I feel bad about working on my own project in light of the comments made here, but I still love the idea of doing different things with the forum and CMS concept. I guess I'll just have to bend over and accept something in the end :(
PS: I wanted to use the word "short of...", but I couldn't find any place. Any suggestions where I could have put it, short of here..? Oh, good, I managed to use it, yay!