Hi Esteban,

I'm not sure my answer will please you or stef, and maybe I shouldn't voice it, staying being a "customer" instead of contributing "the way you want it". Hard words, but yours are hard too.

I'd say simply that Pharo is successfull, fairly successfull for someone like me. It allows me to engage in complex work, in what I do best and what affords me to be paid and have the freedom to use Pharo. Some of those things suppose that I maintain and extend fairly complex packages on top of Pharo, and deal with permanent, multiple overlapping interruptions (meeting, administrative work, travels, etc...). Pharo is great, it allows me to build a significant activity on top of it.

Some of the consequences of that success? I'm looking at things that works now, not in Pharo 5, 6, or 7. I'm a bit frightened by grandiose rewritting attempts which will be usable in a version or 2, at best, and leave an unsatisfying "now" situation. I'll carefully evaluate what new stuff is integrated. New stuff I look to see if they are usable (libcgit integration, TxText) and what I see is stuff that builds on unstable core libs extensions (NativeBoost, Athens) on top of an already unstable version (4.0), and I'm really not impressed by the software development process.

The end result is, when I see a bug, I'm already at least two versions behind you guys... so there's nothing worth reporting. There is some progress on the way things are being done (thanks Marcus for doing the deprecation API backporting on 3.0) and not much on others (and I speak of methodology, not of new features being added on).

If you have the feeling that I don't contribute the way I should or the way you would like, step back and ask yourself if this is not my "unspoken" way of me saying that I don't find a way to contribute, or that contributing effectively is too costly.

And look! This is not a matter of resources, but maybe a matter of slowing down a bit, so that the poor community members with limited resources like me that are not full time on Pharo 4.0 development may catch up :) And please, no more rejection of feedback, even negative. It just gives me the feeling you are overstreched, and that Pharo has a problem setting its goals.

Regards,

Thierry

2014-10-03 13:44 GMT+02:00 Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com>:
Hi,

I’m writing this because I’m sad about what is happening in this list.
I’m seeing a lot of general negativity and non constructive ways to discuss things.
I’m also seeing more and more people using Pharo for their particular interests (which is of course a good thing) but less and less people who contribute back to Pharo.
Finally, I’m seeing more frequently an attitude of “customer”, more than the conviction than this, Pharo, is also yours…

Please people, we (the pharo “core” team) cannot do everything. We do not have the manpower or the resources to hire manpower. We would like, but we just do not have the resources (is already a blessing that we can work on this, for now: INRIA is paying, but what it pays is *research*, not “pharo the language”, so this is a collateral advantage….)

So, having an OPEN SOURCE project, with limited resources means that there is a lot of things that depend on the community.
It depends on the community not just to fix, but to enlarge the ecosystem in general too.

So, I refuse to believe that we cannot be a cool and helpful community.
I refuse to believe that general negativity and bad humor can overcome the joy of participating in this collective effort.

So, here some recommendations for enhance the way we participate:

- Be positive. Just “this is a s**t” does not help. Even if it is.
- Be propositional. Just “this is a s**t”, and not telling what you want/prefer does not help.
- Be proactive. Just “this is a s**t”, and not report, discuss and (at least time to time) provide a fix/enhancement does not help.

In conclusion: not helping does not help :)
After all, this is the “pharo-dev” list. I mean, the list of people wanting to participate from this great, community effort.

cheers,
Esteban, still grateful of belonging to this community