Hi, Olivier. I just woke up and saw this message, and I'm on my way out the door to a volunteering appointment, but I'll be writing a longer response later today. I am taking these concerns seriously; I'm sorry that I can't respond immediately.
Regards, Sumana Harihareswara
On 11/05/2011 01:32 AM, Olivier Beaton wrote:
Dear Sumana,
I'm going to remove my application from consideration, this whole process has been demeaning and insulting and I've taken enough of a beating over it.
While full of optimism and excitement in mid-September, while constantly active in #mediawiki for over a month, the attitude of the developers (who you do not name, where's the transparency in this process?) and yourself have just leeched out any energy I have towards the MediaWiki community.
When I arrived, extension in hand (which is still mark in beta, I remind you, using your own template), people seemed friendly, encouraging me immediately to apply for access, so that more eyes could look at things and give feedback, which up to that point I was actively soliciting in IRC. In that time I've started two more extensions (each with multiple iterative releases, one in beta and another experimental), which is very clear given the download page for my Realnames extension which lists all three. The mere fact that here you are asking me if I've done anything other then Realnames shows a basic lack of interest in my application, my MW profile, my website where my downloads are hosted and described, as well as an ignorance to my daily presence and participation in IRC for most of September and almost all of October (I've been away on a trip at the very end).
If developers have criticism about my code, I'm happy. I want to actually receive it. I thought that was the whole point of asking for access, so you can get into the code review queue and actually receive that criticism and people can point you in the right direction. Considering I have an extension (and two more now, one beta and one experimental) that work, isn't slow even on large wikis (that I've tested, despite them not being as optimized as they could be -- perhaps if I had a chance to learn the MW Framework better and get feedback), shows that you "don't have to train me from scratch" as the wiki pages about svn access say.
At no point was any attempt made to contact me in IRC (despite my high level of participation there) to speed up this process in any manner, to ask for clarification or voice concerns. Instead it's been 7 weeks of silence with sudden burst of "produce this -- sorry no answer yet, with heavy undertones of doesn't look good".
There seems to have been concern with my original license, a BSD-2-Clause with copyright assignment so I don't lose the ability to distribute my code, this isn't the GPL, you need a contributor agreement with BSD (as I understand it). Yet absolutely no effort was made to communicate these concerns to me, or to work out what those issues were and how they could be resolved. I happen to have stumbled upon another project that had a more elegant solution to the BSD contribution problem (with a different type of contributor agreement) and it seems like that may have cleared things up. But I'm guessing here. From your emails it sounded like you were just ready to turn it down with a "Sorry we don't agree with your license". During which time no attempt was made to look at the code sample, just playing cat-and-mouse for weeks on a licensing concern to now arrive at a cat-and-mouse for weeks on code samples.
You've accused me in the past of not seeing you as a person, but just another staff person part of a bureaucratic organization, and yet in turn, no efforts have been made in this process to treat me like a human being.
To make it clear, I've never asked for core access, I'm not trying to mess up your project, all I wanted to do was be able to participate on equal footing in the community with other extension developers, to co-exist and grow and share knowledge. To take advantages of tools like code-review, the familiarity people have with the MW repo (and other who can contribute to it!) and distribution system.
You've made it painfully clear to me, and gauging from the message left by Yaron, to others as well, that despite all the smiles and nice words:
We're not welcome.
And to me, that's really sad. Olivier Beaton
p.s. I'm cc'ing wikitech-l not just out of frustration, but because I feel my feedback provides a meaningful contribution to the discussion Yaron started weeks ago on this very topic of access -- one which has seen near zero transparency in the community.
On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Commit access requests commit-access-requests@wikimedia.org wrote:
Olivier,
One of the access-granting developers looked at the code sample, Extension:Realnames, and had some criticisms, as it tries to find and replace all username links in the page output HTML, and the User::newFromName( $m['username'] ); query in the callback for each match is not batched.
He and the other developers would very much like to see more code from you in order to grant commit access -- do you perhaps have some other code samples you've written, for another project, or possibly for MediaWiki or MediaWiki extensions in the sadly long time it's been since you originally submitted this request?
Thank you.
best, Sumana
11/02/2011 01:01 - Olivier Beaton wrote:
Thanks for the update.
On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 8:48 PM, Commit access requests commit-access-requests@wikimedia.org wrote:
Olivier:
Thank you, again, for requesting commit access and being part of the MediaWiki community. The developers reviewing your application are fine with your new plan (the BSD-2-Clause license) and are now reviewing your code samples, and I expect a decision based on that code review within the week. Thank you, and sorry for the delay.
Sincerely, Sumana Harihareswara
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