Wedge

Yes, there's room. But it's not fun. It's hard work, it's stress.

I just figured out what I was going to, I then set out a post saying that it was what I was doing, and kicked off on it while waiting for feedback - I already knew where I was going in general but deliberately allowed for feedback to change it. But there's not one or two layers of bureaucracy that I have to wait for before I can do anything - because I'm not going to burn time if I can help it on something that I might not be able to use.And why? Agile is easily the most approachable form of development for something like this, IMHO. It allows people to make small and focused changes. If you look at the features I add, a large number of them are easily characterisable as agile.I won't argue that a is a huge problem. No-one with history wants to touch it with a barge pole, and there's not even anyone coming through with the maturity as well as the skills and experience to make that happen going forward. There are some wonderful folks coming through like Yoshi (because as much as he can irritate me at times, I can't fault him for enthusiasm, what he just needs is some structure to what he does, followed by a little maturity and a couple more good years at it), and then there are people like Lab.

b is a much bigger problem. Norv is very much one of the all-or-nothing people, and that's not going to work. I'm much more in the middle; I've never advocated the devs having *all* the say even if they're doing *all* the work, and that's the route we take - we have the main say but we do navigate the path of what people are suggesting too. I'm fairly certain we wouldn't be where we are without some of the discussions and ideas from outside 'us'.Yup, no good model there. I agree on where SMF needs to be going, but because of all the past stuff, the only people who ever stood a chance of being the people SMF needs up top have been pushed out because they didn't fit the way things were going. I will admit to being one of these - at the time I left, Amacythe's power grab was just about to land, and all I've seen in the intervening time is essentially what amounts to closing ranks against the people who might make a difference.

The folks up top have to have charisma. They need to be people people as well as coder aware people; the lead dev needs to be a strong coder with a strong personality, while the PM needs to be a person with an even stronger personality, and ideally with some grounding in code, but I wouldn't make that a requirement. Ideally the PM should be an active contributor, not just from the sidelines - a PM that is a coder is almost ideal.

I think that's why Nao and I work as well as we do, because we're both essentially both roles. We do move back and forth between the two, but ultimately we cover both roles.

See, here's the problem... I've been trying to figure out how to overhaul the ban system for that long. It's needed an overhaul and it's only now that I figured out how all the elements of it have to work together. The equivalent is saying at the start of 2.1 "Hey folks, we need to fix this, any ideas?"

I have the freedom to do the most insane things here - and if you read my notes on the package manager replacement, you'll know that some of them are pretty freaky indeed...Mature or stale? :P That was a bit catty, wasn't it? True, we're not working on a currently stable release. But the goal is to refit enough that we can be 'stable' for a while without needing to get into major overhauls later on.

I honestly don't know. There's been so much in the past that it's hard to actually imagine writing code for SMF that is fun any more, especially when I consider, for example, the comparative joy I have of writing code for Wedge to anything I ever wrote for SMF.

For example, I can go off and if I decide it's necessary, I can go away and rewrite core routines and do all kinds of crazy. I'm in the midst of rewriting the ban system, most of which doesn't look like it's been touched since 1.0 or 1.1 other than visual changes in 2.0's templates, and I decided I was going to up-end it and redesign it to cope with all the things I wanted to throw at it. Would I *ever* have been able to get away with that in, say, any part of the 2.1 development? None of it is 'strictly required' and being conservative was not on the agenda, it's a huge rewrite, and it's been a lot of fun in doing it.

-sigh- The bit you're missing is what has happened every single time in the past with the project - and I went through the entire team history.

Every time the team decided on a date historically, it was management saying 'we'd like it done by x', usually without actually consulting the devs to see whether it is feasible/practical/doable or not. This is where it starts.

Then when it doesn't happen, there are recriminations, guilt trips etc. and then developers decide that contributing to a volunteer project becomes worse less and less.

If you ask the devs what date they consider feasible, you might get a meaningful answer. However, in the build up to that date, there are going to be 'is it ready yet' questions and in the aftermath there are 'why is it not ready yet'. That's what happened every time in the past, that's what will happen in future. Which then makes you wonder why you bother with a date because everyone who is not a dev fixates on the date and harangues the devs to try and make that date.Me three ;) But yes, this is where we're at. Too many times it's happened and the fact there is this shock/horror response to it being brought up says almost as much in itself as to how much of a problem there is.

This is the part I'm trying to hammer home, so to speak. If everything is supposed to have changed with the introduction of the NPO, why is it people are still leaving at a horrific rate, and *still* saying the same things about why they're leaving? The only conclusion I can draw is that it isn't the name of the organisation or even particularly the way the organisation is run, but the way in which the non-devs interact with the devs.Devs are stubborn. That's par for the course. I have never met any developer of any standing who wasn't stubborn, because it takes stubbornness to learn the skills and do the job. Drama llamas? Yeah, I'll agree with that, with one caveat. I do drama a lot, and only some of it is pure drama, some of it is a baiting tactic to provoke change. I recall doing this in October 2009, threatening to leave the team without any intention of actually doing so, specifically and clearly to try and unite everyone in something approaching a common cause, and for a short time it did actually have some small improvement in unity and working together.

Thing is, devs aren't like everyone else. We do what we do because we enjoy doing it, like any craftsperson out there. Our passion is there - but the nature of what we do as coders implies that we don't bring the drama out, the passion, in the code itself. It's like we have all this emotion built up from doing it, but we have no release mechanism from actually coding, if that makes sense. Or at least, that's the theory that's made sense in my head and the folks I used to work with at Lehman Bros had much the same take on it, those that cared about the code, anyway; those who didn't, were there purely to earn their daily dollars, in which case you just sit down, shut up and get on with it. The result is code that is workable but nothing wonderful.

As I said, devs - and I do include designers in that - have egos. We put ourselves into what we do. I won't go as far as to call our projects our 'children' but there is a progeny thing going on, they are the product of us, our time, our energy, our passion. Excuse us for caring about what we do and wanting to see it done how we feel it should be done.Wedge is one of the strongest standing - but also the longest established of the forks, and the two do go hand in hand. A number of them fell by the wayside, partly because of life concerns, partly because of a lack of appreciation for the scale of work required to make a fork.

And you've hit the other nail on the head. When we're the ones at the rock face, we like to set our own path to an extent, to go where it takes us.

I'd be forever feeling like features I could add to SMF would be not entirely in keeping with the 'I'm a forum' aspect that SMF has, so I'd be very much of the feeling of being steered, into building what someone else wants and not what I want.Yup. It isn't a business, it shouldn't be run as if it is one. But it suffers the same problem I've see in a number of businesses. Dilbert strips come to mind.


I would reply further to what's been saying but I get the impression I'm talking to a brick wall. Already today someone has asked me why you can't take your blinkers off. You're not able to see it the way everyone else is. So let me turn it around a bit. Has anyone told you how to do support? How many topics need to be done per day, or that you need to approach them in a certain fashion, or asked you to concentrate on a specific subset of support? Anyone asked you about there being a certain number of unsolved topics?

The answer to the above should be no, no-one tells you how your contributions should be given. And you get appreciation for what you do. Devs don't get appreciated, it's just a round of complaints when things go wrong, and all the things we've talked about that as far as you believe aren't happening.

Alright, so let's say they did. I'm not certain that was what happened, but let's say for the sake of argument that they did.

No-one thought to get legal advice? No-one thought to double check? No-one thought to clarify the differences?

From where I'm standing, they would have to be worse than second-hand car salesmen to misrepresent it so badly that it was accepted on the basis you're implying. I realised on first reading what the problem would be... and I only play a lawyer on TV.

So if we agree, why are you complaining about what Norv did, which was essentially an attempt to enact what we've been talking about? I won't argue it wasn't done correctly, but the sentiment was there ;)

Mind you, I'd love to see what a legal person makes of all this, because I'm not convinced your DCO gives SM the rights they think it does, and I'm fairly sure that there's legal issues with claiming copyright even over the entire package.

Even we can't claim copyright over the entire Wedge package, only the differences in code between SMF and Wedge.