Re: [Caml-list] The madness of ignoring people

[malc <malc@pulsesoft.com>]

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:

> On Saturday 20 November 2004 20:17, malc wrote:
>> I had hoped that this will
>> result in some reaction, if not from Inria developers then from OCaml
>> users, alas this was not the case.
>
> I don't understand why academic environments producing free software
> often tend to deliberately ignore people contributions. Maybe it is
> normal that your feature has no users (yet), and so there is no people
> interested, but it's absolutely NOT normal that people at inria just
> ignore it - just like it's not normal that they sometimes don't answer
> at all nontrivial technical questions about ocaml that _only them_ can
> answer.

Maybe i wasn't clear enough. While working on the patch i (obviously)
asked questions (and was given quite comprehensive answers) from Xavier
Leroy for instance. I also learned his position on the subject. I think
there were maybe 5 people who contacted me personally, 2 of them had some
feature request, one actually reported bugs (thank you Vitaly)

There was/is one/two groups of people really interested in functionality
provided by the patch, one of them offered help, when it became clear i
can not provide enough resources to bring the patch uptodate w.r.t 3.0.8

But in general, most of the people fall into 'wouldn't it be cool to have
native dynamic loading/linking' category. And - yeah it probably would
have...

>
> I know, compilers and mailing lists are for free, but there is not a
> wide support network for ocaml, as there is, for example, for many
> software projects such as gcc, or the GNU operating system and so on,
> so the only place where somebody can ask for help about ocaml is here.
>
> And to get back on your issue about the patch, I see it's frustrating to
> be just ignored, and it's a pity to force people, who might have worked
> hard, and for free, in _their_ free time, to stop contributing, because
> they get frustrated by being ignored, without at least explaining the
> reason. I've seen this on other mailing lists in the past, and in case
> someone is going to ask, no, it's not about contributions I made (there
> is no such thing :) ) - but of course I asked unanswered non-trivial
> technical question which I think is the other side of the same coin
> (wondering if this phrase makes sense in english, translated in italian
> it does).

I wasn't ignored by Inria, i expressed my opinion, asked theirs, got it.
What's a little bit disappointing that nobody (after all those years)
presented any alternative.

Sincerely,
malc

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