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

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 18, 2013, 12:05 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s2Vc0b-DBnExFCwfZX2a5om5z_NasBFZNTRfuPte75hXg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CALkWK0nOp_w1LXnN9SoAS9zvhwb5W37csx42KKau5aYCqdwTkQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 6:31 AM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> 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.

If the people that matter most are given the worst prioritization, it means the prioritization is wrong.

> That's how people are connected: how can I care about distant unknown
> people I'm not connected to?

It's called empathy.

> 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.

To the detriment of the project.

> 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.

The users are real, the developers that will look retroatcively to the commit message of this patch are not.

> If you think these users are more important to you than we are, then
> why are you posting your code on this mailing list?

What other way is there for this code to reach the users?

> Start your own
> project that's focused on satisfying these users.

Start a new project so I can include a patch that hasn't made it yet into the "what's cooking" in one week? That's ridiculous.

> It doesn't even
> need to be open source or have a community of reviewers, because all
> you care about are users.

Who said *all* that matters are the users? And even if somebody did, ultimately a closed source proprietary software doesn't benefit the users, so either way it has to be open and active to benefit the users.

-- 
Felipe Contreras