Re: Offer for taking over maintainership

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

Hi Jonathan,

Jonathan Leech-Pepin <jonathan.leechpepin@gmail.com> writes:

>  Either there's some
> underlying reason for your apparent dislike for Bastien and his
> approach to maintaining
> Org, or some argument in the past that I am not aware of.

For the sake of clarity (and history), here is how I understand why
Jambunathan thinks I am not a good maintainer: he was frustrated with
the way I handled the merge of the ODT export feature.

The very first ODT exporter was based on two libraries: org-lparse.el
and org-xhtml.el.  org-lparse.el implemented a new export engine that
org-xhtml.el was using to produce HTML, and org-odt.el would build on
top of both librairies.

This approach was not satisfactory to me.  First, because I found
org-lparse.el was ugly, mixing the wrong line-by-line approach for
parsing an Org buffer, and the better "recursive" approach (have a
look at org-lparse.el to get an idea of whether it is ugly.)  Second,
because I thought having org-xhtml.el along org-html.el was confusing.

Nicolas already started to work on his new exporter, encouraged by the
first modest proof of concept I had for the recursive approach.

I took the decision to delay the merge of the ODT exporter until it
didn't rely on org-xhtml.el anymore, because I thought that relying
on org-lparse.el for two export formats (HTML and ODT) was a wrong
move, giving the wrong signal to Nicolas.

When org-xhtml.el was not in the game anymore, and when I was
confident Nicolas was deeply committed to the new exporter, I went
with the merge.  I was happy!  I even received kudos from Jambunathan
when I managed to solve possible copyright issues wrt merging .xml
files into Emacs (there was a confusion on whether those files were
copyrighted by OASIS and "mergeable" into Emacs.)

Maybe Jambunathan thought all this was too slow, and based on stupid
decisions.  He was on a sabbatical year at the time, and had plenty of
time to work on the exporter and to put the pressure on me.  I was
maintaining Org in my spare time, and tried to handle the pressure the
way I could.

I hope this is faithful to the facts -- all this is publicly available
on this mailing list anyway!

> Regardless, Bastien is doing a fine job from what I can see, he is
> certainly actively assisting
> users who post with questions or bugs, even when they occurred during
> a time where he was
> absent (with prior notice).  Perhaps he has not contributed to
> certain aspects as others have,
> however his presence and monitoring of the smaller aspects does allow
> for further development
> to proceed without being interrupted by every issue.

Actually, one of the reasons I want to step down in the long run is
that I'm a bit frustrated of not having time enough to focus on big
new features.  But the flow of new users and new contributors is
rewarding enough so that maintaining Org keeps being fun :)

All best,

-- 
 Bastien