I think you're very wrong about my intentions and my character in this situation and I regret that.

I think that this reply shows that you are correct that I have misjudged you. For that I too am regretful, and offer an unreserved retraction and apology of that part of my comment. Your rationale about vacations is very true, and one that I've heard from many a wise person.

That's exactly what Linus does. Larry is much less involved in the day-to-day decisions and he has amazing powers of compromise that nearly always lead to better decisions, but I've seen him shoot down ideas and implementations that he doesn't like.

I still believe that both Linus and Larry are very mature about these things. Ive seen Linus shoot things down, and fwict its with a rationale and a replacement. I know that he is very conservative in some respects, (I found his point of view on interfaces to be very illuminating,) but I do believe that he has strong delegation skills and does not insist on overseeing the very minutae of everything being done.

"Merit" was obviously the wrong word, and I think that explains your interpretation of my comments.

Yes I believe it does. I think I now understand what you were driving at. I think however that for open source to work properly the guiding lites need to be as encouraging as possible of new sparks. Its very important to encourage people to contribute, even if their contribution is below par. A person only capable of patching the perl documentation for typos and clarity one day will be the pumpking. (I make this as a general observation.) The newbie reading this with 1 XP in the bank right now will in two years be a core member of pmdev, etc...

Your point about not enough patch checking and application is well taken — I think that's the most productive discussion we could have.

I agree heartily. Another discussion is providing a dev/test enviornment for experimenting on. Since PM seems to be its own beast such an enviornment seems critical to any kind of serious collaborative efforts. As would of course an expanded group of people able to post patches. (Its a pity there is not some way to graduate such access rights.)

I could be misinterpreting his intent very badly.

Personally I think you have. I do think that to a certain extent his node was designed to have some shock value. And personally I agree. Its long been a minor frustration that pmdev isn't more coherent. I think that underlying theorbtwos comments is that frustration. More people with access to the code would mean more patches. More patches would mean more coordination and patch applying was required.

Ultimately I think the question comes down to what type of site this is. There has always been an open kind of sharey vibe here. We share our knowledge and our skills and our time and sometimes even our personal lives here. Does this also mean that we share in the development of the site? I say it would be better if it does. As I said earlier I also realize that this is a question of balance and risk, and that the answers are not easy. I just hope that the gods want this to be the kind of place that I do and so make more or less the decisions I would.

Cheers,

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demerphq