svn commit: samba r7025 - in branches/SAMBA_3_0/source: lib tdb

Jeremy Allison jra at samba.org
Fri May 27 20:29:45 GMT 2005


On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 04:16:40PM -0400, derrell at samba.org wrote:
> 
> Of course it was on IRC.  Everybody who's anybody is on IRC and that's where
> all of the big decisions are made.  Why aren't you there??? :-)

No, everybody who is anybody is *NOT* on IRC. Most of the people
who look at the code outiside of the Samba team are explicitly *NOT* there.
People who happen not to be around or online at the moment aren't there.

The power of open development is that people who are not in the core
team get to look at the code, make suggestions and fixes. We do that
on MAILING lists because that's a lowest common denominator discussion
medium which we know everyone has. It isn't a self selecting group of
insiders who happen to hang out on the same "channel", who produce an
echo-chamber effect of "yes men". Rather like bloggers in fact.

If the "big decisions" are made there they often turn out to be
wrong, or at least suprising to the non-insiders. Kind of like the
recent kicking we got over kerberos in fact. I bet *that* was decided
on IRC.... 

As for IRC logs they're filled up with things like :

xxx joined,
yyy is known as sillyface.
zzz said: im off for lunch

They are not a useful archive medium. IRC is like junk television,
occasionally entertaining but not a medium that requires thought or
grammer or spelling before sending a message. People vomit out whatever
thought comes into their heads, as it happens.

I prefer a slower medium where people have to *think* about things
before saying anything, at least typing it out more slowly. Email
isn't perfect but it's so much better than IRC it's not even funny.

Jeremy


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