On 25.10.2021 23:27, almaember wrote: > 1. Gemini has been in use by a large number of people for years now, > without a major change to the specification. > > 2. The mailing list represents a minority of the users and > implementers of Gemini. > > 3. For the vast majority of users and implementers, the specification > hosted on gemini.circumlunar.space (from now: Spec0) remains the > authoritative description of the protocol. I completely agree on all three points. > It has been proven in practice that Gemini functions well, and that no > additional features were strictly necessary. I don't currently plan to add any new features. > I believe, that in order to avoid more controversy, incompatibility > between implementations, and power struggles, we should freeze the > specification permanently. Consider it "feature frozen". There's still some stuff which I think ought to be done. But I do not anticipate making any changes which could not be fairly classed as "tidying up technical loose ends". I can't promise nobody will have to change a single line of code in their clients/servers, but I'm not going to do anything which is going to cause widespread substantial breakage. Ordinary end users probably won't notice anything changing. > Side note regarding Sp.'s return: With all due respect, I do not > believe that you can realistically call yourself the dictator of the > project. At most you can claim to rule this mailing list, which per > axiom №2 is only a minority of the actual community. While I respect > your role in the creation of the protocol (i.e., the whole of the > original design), Gemini has grown larger than what a single BDFL can > control. Especially after disappearing for months, I do not think we > should consider your opinion worth any more than that of any other > user of this mailing list. I realise you've retracted this review in another post. I'm going to briefly address it otherwise because I suspect there may be other people who still feel this way. Look, to some extent, I get where you are coming from. The folk notion of BDFL can only be pushed so far. If I had disappeared for ten years and the project had flourished under alternate leadership and then I sprang back from the void and claimed that since I never formally relinquished BDFL-status I still had the divine right to undo the previous decade of change willy-nilly, nobody would think that was fine. And I get that I haven't been a very responsible leader this year. I'm sorry. People are entitled to be somewhat disgruntled. Anybody who knows me knows I'm much more of an idealist than a pragmatist, but at this point, to people questioning the legitimacy of my return to leadership, I really have to ask whether you honestly think, as a purely practical matter, that there's an alternative which is going to lead to a better result? 10 years of bikeshedding and slippery slope expansion under "design by committee" seems like the *best* we could hope for. At worst, we could end up with warring factions and multiple threads of incompatible parallel development of dubious legitimacy. I actually think the tremendous diversity of implementations we already have would act as an effective countermeasure to drastic change happening under that second scenario - and that is exactly by design - but I don't care to put that theory to the test. Me coming back, kicking ass and chewing bubblegum seems likely to be both the
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