Re: Counter-ITP of doxygen (was: Re: Please upload: doxygen-1.4.2_20050410-1 (n'th take))

["Max Bowsher" <maxb at ukf dot net>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> I've waited several days to respond to this because I wanted to make
> sure that I was in the proper emotional state and didn't just fire off a
> knee-jerk reaction.

Ditto.

> Nevertheless, I remain appalled by this turn of events.  I saw nothing
> in Hans' email which indicated that he's unwilling to be cooperative
> about packaging problems so I see no reason to pull the package from
> him.  Hans is not the first person to have to go through a moderate
> amount of pain before getting the packaging right and if the biggest
> complaint of his source packaging is that it doesn't contain the cygwin
> README, then that is not a big deal.
>
> I don't know how to resolve this situation but I do know for sure that
> neither Corinna nor I are going to "reward" someone by making them a
> package maintainer after essentially publicly insulting another
> volunteer.

I feel a bit annoyed by the above, since I did not intentionally insult 
anyone.

After multiple rounds of email dealing with a single, particularly visible, 
issue - version numbering - which is documented in the Package Contibutor's 
Guide, I took a more in-depth look at the packaging, and discovered that the 
source package did not contain everything necessary to recreate the binary 
package, it did not conform to either of the packaging schemas defined as 
acceptable by the Package Contributor's Guide, nor reasonably documented 
alternative, that it did not strip the binaries (required by the Package 
Contributor's Guide), and that the version number formats were still 
incorrect.

Considering the difficulty involved in getting to that point, and realizing 
that fixing all of the above would amount to an almost complete rewrite of 
the packaging script - or, indeed, replacing it with the g-b-s - I concluded 
that this was not a review process that I could guide to a successful 
conclusion.
There wasn't anyone else who was reviewing the later iterations of the 
packages, so I felt that if I was to simply back away, the package would 
left in an unapproved vacuum.

Having involved myself with doxygen to the extent that I had by then, I felt 
obligated to seek a successful conclusion if in any way I could, and saw 
packaging doxygen myself as s possible route. I recognized that there was a 
certain potential for emotional upset, and after spending a couple of days 
wondering how best to phrase things to mitigate that potential, I opted for 
a simple, brief, matter-of-fact presentation. Evidently, that misfired quite 
spectacularly.


At no point did I intend or imply any disparagement towards Hans.

I'll try to avoid sensitive conversations in the future, since I seem to be 
somewhat inept at translating my intentions into text.

Max.