FYI

From: David Abrahams (david.abrahams_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-08 09:44:45

Here is correspondence from me to Richard Geiger at Perforce from 1/7:

> Just FYI, according to my notes, Christopher hadn't yet looked at
> the Boostjam changes individually yet, so don't loose all hope for
> this go-round. On the other hand, he wasn't inclined to take all of
> the FTJam changes, and of the ones he was, wants to do them
> differently.

I can understand that. I rewrote and fixed most of the FTJam
features. I don't use the HDRMACRO stuff, so I've left that alone.

> I haven't contacted anybody about the "take/don't take" list yet.

Oh! I got the impression from your postings that if I hadn't heard
from you by now, you had decided that my changes were too radical to
consider.

> I'm telling you because you're seeming to put a lot of time and
> effort into Jam just now, and it's much appreciated. I hope to start
> doing that once the Perforce internal changes are out there for
> everybody; I'll work hard to have that done this week, but I'm
> sometimes also interrupt driven on other stuff, so I can't promise.
>
> Question: would it be better for me to just post the raw notes about
> the "take/don't take" triage Christopher's already done? Or contact
> people individually?

I think the notes would be very useful, to let people know what the
philosophy is, and what sort of changes are likely to be
accepted. They would also help people understand the reasons their
particular changes were accepted or rejected.

> I'm concerned on the one hand about people getting so frustrated
> with the pace at which Perforce is willing to integrate external
> changes that they'll decide it's not worth working together; and, on
> the other, I share Christopher's concerns about maintaining a
> certain "Zen of Jam". He's a very smart guy, and I have a lot of
> respect for his judgment on such things. Fortunately, it's Open
> Source, so people should be able to get where they want to go one
> way or another, if they want it enough.
>
> One suggestion here has been to try and publish guidelines that
> "document" Christopher's technical sensibilities and approach, so as
> to make it easier for external contributors to make changes in ways
> more likely to be scarfed up wholesale. I guess this is a learning
> experience for all of us.

That would also help. A LOT.

BTW, if you want to encourage contribution from the outside, one very simple
thing you could do which would help a lot is convert all of your tabs to
spaces. Source code formatted with tabs doesn't travel well ;-)

-Dave