I don't care how much anyone dislikes Cantrill, but standing up for Ben about this is a mark of shame.
> You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision.
Whereas just above:
> it's that when he was overruled by Isaac some hours later, he unilaterally reverted Isaac's commit. (And, it must be said, sent a very nasty private note to make clear that this was no accident.)
I don't know why you thought you were privy to all the communication that went on in this situation, but that sentence ought to indicate to you that you are not, in fact, omniscient.
The fact that Ben remains absolutely unrepentant on this issue, and sees "I was following the project's rules to the letter on an issue which I myself dismissed as trivial" as a valid excuse should be to his lasting shame, and you should be ashamed of perpetuating it.
It's always been amateur hour over there. The 'official' install was `curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh`[1], package checksums aren't uniformly checked, the list goes on.
But don't worry guys, they had a security audit[2].
No, because it's perfectly clear. But perhaps I can restate: indutny's behaving in bad faith, which should be perfectly obvious to anyone. Max Ogden (the original and unofficial author of the opinion posted above) would like to believe there is no antagonism here.
If this were just some third party, perhaps this wouldn't be significant. But indutny's on node core, the technical committee, the advisory board meetings, and is the original forker of io.js. His actions are central here.
Ah yes, Mikeal, whose capability of double-think is so well-developed that he can claim to not understand what "fragmentation" means while at the same time advocating to do precisely that - https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/9
I swear Chris Dickinson is the only sane one in this whole mess. Possibly because he's new. Possibly because his employer is the only one involved that's not beholden to VC money and expectations of return.
The author seems like an optimist, but "many core contributors will help maintain both node.js and io.js" seems to disagree with reality, since indutny has been landing PRs to node only in the forks. He's a core contributor.
If he needs sign-off or whatever, it's not like he doesn't have friends in all the forks. I'm pre-emptively calling bullshit on anyone who invokes the Joyent bogeyman here; tons of PRs land without their involvement. What's the difference here.
> actively seeking input on new features like better numerical comp libs
That is one of the most comedic issues on github. Worth a read, but tl;dr:
"all we need is to compile these ancient libraries! It should be easy, they are ancient and I am async!"
...
"I failed to compile these ancient libraries."
> Joyent, the current project stewards, have not been able to deliver a stable release in that time and don't share public plans / aren't communicating very much.
They probably don't want to publicly call out one of the core committers whose promised work is lagging. Or admit that the previous project lead was a poor choice who let it stagnate (but yet is inexplicably in the "Joyent did a bad job" camp). What good would that do anyone, apart from satisfy our boundless curiosity?
Ben's answers on this have always been deeply unsatisfactory:
1) a) the merge was accomplished trivially by another maintainer; the idea that there was "more work" required of ben is demonstrably false.
1) b) he undertook more work to revert the existing commit, also see 2)
2) a) at the time he reverted the commit, there was substantial explanation on the issue on why it was important.
2) b) because Ben failed to check with his own colleague, he was unaware the commit had in fact been signed off - there was no rule problem here, apart from "not telling Ben".
3) lots of people do nice things and are assholes in other circumstances.
Apart from the sarcastic tone of his post ("if this gets us scores of female contributors" indeed), the grapevine says he was pretty deeply offensive to Issac over the issue as well.
> You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision.
Whereas just above:
> it's that when he was overruled by Isaac some hours later, he unilaterally reverted Isaac's commit. (And, it must be said, sent a very nasty private note to make clear that this was no accident.)
I don't know why you thought you were privy to all the communication that went on in this situation, but that sentence ought to indicate to you that you are not, in fact, omniscient.
The fact that Ben remains absolutely unrepentant on this issue, and sees "I was following the project's rules to the letter on an issue which I myself dismissed as trivial" as a valid excuse should be to his lasting shame, and you should be ashamed of perpetuating it.