Well, today was certainly interesting. With Schwern as my roommate, I've listened to quite a number of PREFIX rants related to the difficulty of adding PREFIX to Module::Build and how people seem to not believe him. Today, he lost his temper about it. Given how many times this issue has been raised, answered, raised, answered, etc., I can kind of understand him getting upset. Whether or not his response was appropriate, though, I'll leave for others to judge.
This problem with Open Source is the same problem with Anarchy: who will clean the sewers? (No, I'm not equating the two.) You see, everyone wants to work on fun stuff and no one wants to work on grunt stuff. Unfortunately, some of that grunt stuff is important and the Won'ts get upset and yell "Why haven't the Wibbles been Frobnicated?" And the Can'ts reply "We'll Frobnicate them when we have the damned time, thank you. In the meantime, grab a Wibble and have at it!"
And things go downhill from there.
The Wibbles languish, the Won'ts yell at the Can'ts, the Can'ts get angry at the Won'ts, morph into Schwern and let loose with profanities.
We should be grateful that there are those out there who volunteer their time to help. However, if you can figure out how to get everyone who's donating their time to be as productive as, say, a paid employee, then you're a God and we need more people like you. In the meantime, if you're on the outside looking in and you have questions and criticisms about a process, that's quite valid. But please, line up your questions before your criticisms. Those on the inside looking out understand quite well that you want them to work harder. If it's really that important to you, your help is needed.
I'm sure I picked this up from either TorgoX or Schwern:
Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later...
I recently received some input about the Better SCM site. Someone claimed Bazaar-NG has nothing to do with Arch, despite the fact that Bazaar is a fork of tla, which is Tom Lord's Arch implementation in C. Since I grouped them all under the Arch page for convenience, it may have been incorrect to do that. I told him that I am quite busy and also have many other priorities for the site, and a patch will be much appreciated. He said, "I'd rather work on Arch or Bazaar-NG". Then he continued to accuse me of spreading "lies" (not inaccuracies, "lies") etc. As an icing for the cake, he quoted and criticized a lot of paragraphs from my page, but still without a patch.
The First rule of The Rules of Open Source Programming used to read "Don't whine unless you are going to contribute". I afterwards changed it to "Don't whine unless you are going to implement it yourself.". Someone told me it still should be "Don't whine at all.".
I am also bothered by the PREFIX thing, but hopefully I'll find the spare cycles to contribute a patch.
