Re: acme-sac development list
> sorry, i was interested in the idea generally but by the time i reached
that
> message i was sufficiently tired and annoyed by something else that i
completely
> failed to accentuate the positive. instead i realised that because i'd
> be joining that list (since i'd been following the acme-sac work
fitfully),
> i'd have to suffer another stream of patches, and that
> wretched patch program; but no doubt i'll cope.
I'll try and answer your earlier question, what is the point?
The point is to increase participation. I view diff+email+patch as a
piece of social software, analogous to Wikis. Sure, there are better
technologies than patch, but no combination of tools I know of that
deals better with the social aspects. And by social aspects, I mean
it scales to a large loosely knit group, and makes it easy for people
to contribute.
There have been 100s of downloads of acme-sac. Usually over a 100 a
month. But since acme-sac has been hosted on google, two people have
joined and make a real difference, Salva and Arvindh (Big Thanks!).
What this says to me is there's a high threshold to join a project
like those hosted on google, and be motivated enough to make commits.
But from emails I receive privately I think there is a much greater
number who could contribute if it was made easier for them to do so.
In bazaar speak, I'm trying to co-opt all the users of inferno as
developers.
While a small number will still make the most contributions, it
probably follows a power law, the long tail of people who make a small
contribution can be extended very far. Right now the tail is chopped
off, and I suspect using the wrong social software to bind the group
is to blame.
Anyway, that's the theory. We'll see what happens. I encourage
everyone to send fixes. It's just a diff -u and an email.
Charles, you shouldn't need to use patch, if you don't want to. I'll
be making frequent releases of tarballs with patches incorporated, so
you can just copy the files from there.
-Caerwyn
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