Yeah I don’t really pay him much mind anymore. This feels like the guy who’s “totally over their ex” and meanwhile is tracking their new boyfriend on Instagram and scrolling through their vacation photos at 2am and getting resentful. It’s just a recipe for poor mental health.
I get things not working out and some folks have different visions but IMO the healthy thing is to just move on and don’t dwell on it. Ansel has been forked for nearly a year now, let it be its own thing, especially if the point was to free it from the baggage. Perceived baggage or real. I worry about people who get stuck in that cycle be it over a relationship or a past project.
Look man, internet drama has been gold mine for decades. Just consider it an engagement boost.
Yes, a few years ago Kdenlive did a few refactoring release cycles IIRC. Did wonders for the program’s stability and didn’t require a ground up gutting and rewrite.
Hmm, now that is a nice litte bit of drama i seem to have completely missed.
Having been contributing to darktable for 10+ years now (since 2017 to RawSpeed)
i must say that, while, as far as i’m aware, i don’t sleepwalk, but alas,
i had to recheck two times that said post was not written by me.
I would be lying if i i said anything other than: i fully and wholeheartedly agree
with 60%…80% of what is said in that post. In fact, back before i got a lucky chance
to switch to maintaining RawSpeed (i.e. before 2017), i’ve brought up a certain
amount of those issues, and was effectively laughed out of #darktable.
The codebase was not particularly maintainable 6+ years ago, even after
i had spent an extreme amount of time to stitch it up into some semblance of
working during 2014…2016, squashing many hundreds of bugs,
and many many memory corruption (buffer overflow) bugs,
but it was abundantly clear that no one else shared my views.
The atmosphere was not particularly nurturing to new developers, either.
The best darktable i ever used was darktable-1.4. Every release, every day since,
it has been actively and gradually decaying. I do not understand why the UI is
two to three times less responsive on a hardware that is ten times more powerful.
… Have i mentioned GTK yet? That thing needs to die. Whole Gnome worlds does.
darktable very much looks like a chicken with it’s head chopped off.
The head is gone, yet it continues running, kind of. Until it no longer will.
And you can’t sew the head back on. One day the reality will caught up.
Its not the points he brings up that is the problem, but the way he communicates them. This has been his issue nearly the whole time. The manner in which he communicates with others is completely unacceptable.
Well, there’s certain value with putting it in perspective. After all, he’s waxed poetic on a program widely discussed here.
I’ve been involved quite a few codebases evolve over time, both “commercial” and open-source. Every one of them most certainly was stuck in its seminal design decisions, with varying levels of impact to the most recent use cases. Command line programs and process control software fare best in that regard, UI is simple-to-nonexistent. Early days, hardware architecture also weighed heavily; I was the software evaluator on a inspection team for a military mission system written in IBM 360 assembler; it was a wonder they kept up with mission needs at all in that environment. I also witnessed the kicking-and-screaming drag of that application into the Unix/Motif world; similar diatribes were uttered, but not with the diasporadic dispersal characteristic of our similar dialogues these days…
IMHO the single really constructive aspect of our current discussion is to recognize the potential of nascent vkdt. A migration of the processing core of which we care so deeply into an environment tailor-made for image processing, the GPU. Enough of a UI to expose its potential, not so much that it can’t be supplanted with something more “mainstream”. Where AP rails lugubriously about the past, @hanatos just quietly forges on into the future. Let’s discuss that…
Yes, that amounts to 10% out of 20%…40% i do not agree with.
While it makes for an entertaining reading material,
actually having to interact with someone like that
would get really old really quickly.
So this brings up something else I’ve mentioned in the past. His LibrePay was his and while he’s clearly an big contributor I personally prefer to donate to projects to see the funds spread around more. I know accepting donations opens up a whole new can of worms but as someone who donates to other FLOSS projects I use I’d rather donate to darktable proper than one person. Mainly because I don’t like cults of personality but in the event something like this or some other rift happens my original intent of supporting the project stays in tact.
The rants about us being cheap I did not appreciate at all TBH. I’ve donated to Thunderbird, GNOME, KDE among others. I also am a member of the EFF and was for the FSF until I started questioning their relevancy anymore. Cutting a single dev a check for a project that is clearly bigger than one developer just doesn’t sit right with me.
Amateur can mean someone who is not paid (not professional) but it can also mean someone who is incompetent/inept. Personally I’ve met a number of professionals who I would consider to be incompetent/inept, so I stick to the “not paid” definition and use other words to describe how competent they are.
Regarding code quality: There is no correlation between it and commercial/open-source, in my experience. No matter the organization, it only becomes evident if it is made an explicit priority…
Actually the whole piece at the end with the Vignettes of all the Players’ Characters, as if stereotyping people you claim were once coworkers in the field into pigeon hole personality quirks we haven’t really thought about since our college days… which brings me to what the quaint pièces variées reminds me of… there was a composer called Frank Cooper… ahem… François Couperin, a keyboardist who published various sets of harpsichord pieces peppered with the nicknames of his most flagrant of acquaintances in the titles… the visionay… miss mistery… the victorious muse… Today they are considered masterworks, but in their time they were felt as powerful missives mixed in with typical programmatic titles: “Reflections” “Thoughts” “Waves”. Some people mentioned musically… we now only know them by their personalities. In their passing, maybe they did decompose and become food for a few dozen worms, push up some daisies and call it a night… but they did manage to become food for thought like morsels of time encapsulated lying in wait to be devoured by millions upon millions of future keyboardists.
Did Couperin use his power for political gain? He worked his way up to “The King’s Official Keyboardist”.
This has been my experience as well. I ran into a similar puzzled look from some Japanese friends when I said I was doing some of my own plumbing at the house. Especially in America work quality by professionals is highly variable.
“Don’t you just call someone?” “Well I could but I want it done correctly.” I learned a lot of that stuff growing up in a rural farming area and don’t think too much to tackling my house, cars and so on. I’ve fixed a number of things the previous owner had done by pros. Turns out the plumbers/AC guys were present on “water only flows downhill” day in their schooling.
I don’t really follow sports so @ggbutcher I’ll take your word for it. Well, outside of how much it impacts my day job at a university.
@Claes yes my understanding of the root of the word is the same as amour. Hence I think the American understanding is a bit more accurate than equating it with incompetent.
I understand this fully. However, as a user I actually prefer that people are vocal about being frustrated with an (open source) project. Then I am in the position of being able to evaluate their claims.
The alternative is that people leave quietly and the project starts to languish, but I learn about this much later, after I have invested more in using a tool, instead of moving on much earlier.
