Tim Parenti wrote:
Nearly all of the feedback came after proposed patches were pushed
That is how it's always been done. I always maintained a private repository before, as did Arthur David Olson and Robert Elz. I pushed changes into the repository first, and didn't always post them on the list afterwards, and I assume ADO and RE did that as well -- it's a natural way to proceed. It's odd to see a complaint that little feedback was sought, given that this time every proposed change was posted to the list, including a draft release notice -- in other words, far more effort was made this time to get feedback. In hindsight, opening up the development process in this way was probably a mistake. It's slowed development, and made it less fun. And let's not discount the cost of making things less fun in a volunteer project. The large quantity of repeated discussion of trivialities has driven one valuable contributor off the mailing list, a person who in the past contributed more useful changes to the data than anybody in this discussion other than ADO and myself. That's a net minus. All specific technical objections to the proposed changes have been responded to. The remaining objections are either vague (so there's not much specific one can do), or suggestions to complicate the development process (not a good idea right now, if ever), or are about such trivial matters that no real users will care. There have been dozens of emails on the LMT transition issue, which for our data boil down down to a relatively small number of specific questions like this one: on March 2, 1912, did St Kitts advance its clocks by 10 minutes and 52 seconds at 04:10:52 UT, or by 6 minutes and 4 seconds at 04:06:04 UT? Really? Dozens of emails about a minor cleanup of what is almost surely bogus noise? All specific new objections that have come up during the discussion of the release notice have been addressed, albeit perhaps not to everyone's liking. It's improbable we'll ever get complete consensus on the changes, but the current changeset will work and is in the spirit of how the project has always been maintained, so I'm inclined to release what we have now. The process has been too messy this time, admittedly, and I will try to do better next time.