Subject: Re: Time to flush Mr. Hammano?

From: Rogan Dawes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:18:53 +0200

Quim K Holland wrote:
> "Marco Costalba" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Reading mailing list threads it is becoming common these days to hear
>  about contributors with patches ready to be sent as soon as 1.5.4 is
>  out.
> 
> Would be a good idea to open a new branch new_stuff as a target for 
> this pending stuff?
> 
> Back when Mr. Torvalds was still leading the development there was
> not this stupid stability freeze and many useful patches were
> accepted every day.  For the past few months Mr. Hammano has not been
> adding much useful code himself, did not join interesting discussions
> such as Unicode normalization issues, nor gave much useful comments
> on patches. He has mostly been busy rejecting useful patches and
> sending not so useful comments.
> 
> Can we vote Mr. Hammano out and ask Mr. Torvalds to come back as the
> project leader?  I do not mean any disrespect to Mr. Hammano, but
> don't people think he outlived his usefulness as the project leader?

That's Mr Hamano (one 'm'), and personally, I think that only when you 
have contributed to this project yourself, would you have a leg to stand 
on when you criticise him.

As an observer, I think that Junio is doing a superb job of managing the 
sometimes quite torrential flow of patches contributed to git. As Linus 
himself has often said (Paraphrased, of course):

The role of the maintainer is often more to *reject* patches than to 
accept them, so as to maintain the quality of the code base.

Having said that, the amount of *constructive* criticism that 
accompanies those rejections is amazing. Often I have seen multiple 
pages of response to a 2 line patch, so that the contributor (and other 
observers) can better understand the reason for the rejection, and how 
to construct a better patch that would be accepted.

Regards,

Rogan