Re: What's cooking in git.git (Apr 2013, #05; Mon, 15)

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 18, 2013, 11:31 UTC
Message-ID: <CALkWK0nOp_w1LXnN9SoAS9zvhwb5W37csx42KKau5aYCqdwTkQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAMP44s0KW4_Q6-d-3=M7GzWmHwy4H--FcemK4UF5FS0t3wnOgg@mail.gmail.com>

Since you disagreed with the rest, I'll only respond to this part:

Felipe Contreras wrote:

> But I won't bother trying to convince you that no project is more
> important than its users (in the words of Linus Torvalds), because
> most people don't see the big picture.

I didn't say otherwise. What I'm saying is: my personal incentive to write code does not prioritize the supposed benefit of some unknown "user" somewhere on the planet above everything else. My personal incentive prioritizes me, and my immediate circle (ie. the git community). The benefit propagates outwards to extended circles until it reaches the people I care least about: incidental end-users. That's how people are connected: how can I care about distant unknown people I'm not connected to? The people in the outermost circles benefit the least, because they didn't get a say in the development. All they can do is write a rant about it on their blog, and hope that it gets fixed someday.

You just ditched us, the inner circle of people who care about your work the most, and are instead trying to convince us that we're hurting some unknown hypothetical "users" by not merging your code immediately.

If you think these users are more important to you than we are, then why are you posting your code on this mailing list? Start your own project that's focused on satisfying these users. It doesn't even need to be open source or have a community of reviewers, because all you care about are users.