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Solderpunk solderpunk at posteo.net
Tue Oct 26 18:17:59 BST 2021
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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 *least* contested approach amongst the broader community and also the *least* likely to result in big changes. It may not be perfect, but it's probably going to work pretty well - hopefully like Gemini itself. :)
Cheers,Solderpunk
PS: Don't worry, I've got plenty of gum.