I agree with Charlie. There should be one maintainer who calls all the shots. I'm not too familiar with what's going on here with the politics of procmail and smartlist -- I just use them. I don't even know who Stephen is and how he fits in. But I do know that I don't want procmail and smartlist to disappear. I can help him out if Philip wants to take over, either with hosting, paying for hosting, maintaining, etc. On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Charlie Summers wrote:
At 4:13 AM -0400 8/17/00, era eriksson is rumored to have typed:
I think we should have another IRC chat with Stephen and the other folks who originally were interested in the procmail.org idea, perhaps in early September. I can volunteer to write up an agenda, based on earlier messages in this thread. I can also call Stephen and ask him what day and time would be suitable (or Philip, if you're going to call him anyway at some point, can you bring this up?)
Don't take this personally, please, but this is _exactly_ the kind of nonsense that happens when a committee attempts to do anything. Darnitall, one person should be making the decisions for the future direction of procmail/SmartList, so that things could actually be _done._
I mean, look at this; you're now talking about holding an IRC chat, sometime in September, with an adenda to be written (and possibly voted upon before the first meeting) no less, when all that reall needs to be done is for Stephen to admit he is no longer interested in any of this, give it over completely to Phillip, and then Phillip make any decisions he sees fit for the future of the software packages and the mailing lists. (Again, if he chooses to leave them where they are, that's fine. But he should simply decide and move on. Not us, him.)
What you proppose consists of spending _months_ spinning wheels and accomplishing _nothing,_ where what I propose takes about 20-minutes and simply accepts the reality of the situation. A committee simply CANNOT deal with software development, and to pretend otherwise does nothing but validates the Microsoft model.
I'm sorry, kids, but procmail and SmartList are not major software projects - they can (and should, and indeed MUST) be maintained by ONE PERSON, who accepts or rejects the bug fixes/feature requests of the users at his discression, and who understands the internals of the code - I certainly am not qualified, and I'm betting there isn't much of anyoine other than Phillip who is. (And if you don't like the direction he is going, the source is open and you are welcomed to alter it to your heart's content.)
Turning this into a committee simply bogs down the software in unnecessary nonsense.
Charlie
_______________________________________________ Smartlist mailing list Smartlist@lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/smartlist