4 new commits in master

[Xiaofan Chen]

On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 10:35 PM, Pete Batard <pete at akeo.ie> wrote:
> On 14 April 2012 13:27, Michael Plante <michael.plante at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Curious, I think Xiaofan indicated that he saw the need to choose a side
>>>> too.
>>
>> No, because you were responding to your own statement earlier, "it's highly
>> unlikely that contributors will waste their time submitting patches to both
>> projects".  You proceeded to say, "he's been feeding items back and forth,
>> and he's probably going to continue to do so".  Choosing sides is mere
>> semantics compared to the original point about the actions on patches.
>
> Notice how I used "items" and not "patches" in my statement. I'm not
> wanting to diminish his contributions in any way, but Xiaofan does not
> produce patches (apart maybe from a couple of elementary ones if I'm
> not mistaken),

That is a fair statement. I am not a programmer myself and I
will mainly contribute from testing side and technical discussion
side.

> so the "contributors will (not) waste their time
> submitting patches to both projects" does not apply to him. The
> contributor from the statement above is someone who produces code
> patches from the git repo(s), as these are the only persons that
> matters in *your* problem of wanting to keep libusb and libusbx close
> in terms of code diffs.
>
> So, I stand by my statement that Xiaofan would have been a better
> example than Hans, but still not the one you are looking for to try to
> prove your point.
>

>> And Peter, for one, will never take our side.
>> So we lose his expertise.
>
> Yes. And when Hans Reiser allegedly killed his wife the Linux
> community lost his expertise. I'm sure he was/is a great technical
> guy, but that doesn't detract from the fact that some bad deeds will
> trump otherwise good deeds or qualities.

That is a bad comparison...

>> I know you don't care for his review, when he
>> occasionally chooses to offer it, but I do.

I do care about his review too.

> Peter has been a catastrophy for the maintenance of libusb, and
> despite requests from many individuals, he has both refused to
> acknowledge it and work on it. Whatever good qualities he may have
> eslewhere, they are not enough to redeem his far more disastrous
> actions for libusb users, and I will assert that this is the position
> anybody who is serious about this fork will take (else, it really
> doesn't make any sense to fork).

That is true. Peter is not doing a good job as the sole active
maintainer now that Daniel Drake disappears from libusb project
and does not want to be involved.

That being said, he does some good jobs at reviewing and applying
some patches in libusb.git (often a burst from time to time). That is
where you can pick some good patches and I think that is good.

Unsubscribing libusb-devel is not necessary a good thing. The
experts there (Tim Roberts, Alan Stern, etc) are very good resources
to make use of. I think they will be neutral to the fork and that is one
of the reason why I think libusb-devel can well be the best place
for libusbx discussion as well, not libusbx-devel, at least not for
the short term.

> If you think they do, then please contribute to libusb only and ignore
> this fork.

I am not so sure what you mean here. But I do not see a problem
to let Michael try to contribute to both libusb and libusbx.


-- 
Xiaofan