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Comment by emiller829 | Hacker News Reader

Greg,

I'm nobody special, to the Ruby community, so I'm not going to claim my opinion carries a lot of weight, here. That being said, you have to see how characterizing Loren's work as a "hostile fork" isn't the most neutral thing to say.

It would appear to me that you've definitely moved past the role of mediator, but when you say things like "I must at least strongly consider the opinions of the current maintainers of RubyGems" it sounds as though you're now casting yourself in the role of judge, instead.

You're doing great things with RMU -- we thank you for it, and I'd hate to see the fallout from the role you're attempting to play here overshadow your great contributions to our community thus far.

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As a mediator, I never intended to cast myself as non-biased about SlimGems. I started my involvement by specifically calling SlimGems a really bad idea, and I still stand by that point. Here's my first post:

http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/rubygems-nerd-rage-is-op...

What I said is that I'd collect the concerns of the Ruby community and present them to the maintainers and try to get changes made on their behalf. I've done that, and will keep doing that.

As for no longer being a mediator, I also already made it clear that I can't be unbiased about this, because after investigating, I've seen enough to form some strong opinions:

http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/the-rubygems-drama-conti...

In the end, I'm not worried about how this makes people who think a hostile fork is a good idea feel about me. I've received more thanks than criticism, but most of it was quiet and private, rather than loud and public. I believe in the work I'm doing, and will keep it up, but hopefully through more code and less talking.

I hope you realize that by titling your first piece on the matter "RubyGems: Nerd rage is optional (and discouraged)" and then following up with "RubyGems drama" that you were never really mediating. Maybe you brought people together over Skype and got some discussions going. Maybe you were just trying to be sensational. But I immediately discounted everything said from that point forward, as did many others I know, for the simple reason that you continued with the same attitude that we were all tired of. You were perpetuating the very thing we wanted to see changed.

The RubyGems matter isn't a technical one; SlimGems effectively dispelled that notion. It's a personnel matter. It's a cultural matter. The only way I'm ever going to have faith in that project again is when the guys running it value running, working software over theoretical, idealistic improvements. And I simply don't believe that will be the case until Eric & Ryan leave or are otherwise removed.

The sad part is RubyGems is so critical to the ecosystem that it really started making me question the value in using or relying on Ruby at all. The egos didn't help either. I can take a certain amount of crap if the system works and I can put up with broken software from nice, responsive people. I can't deal with both failings. In that regard, SlimGems has done more to restore my confidence in the Ruby ecosystem than anything else.

It was forked in anger. A fair assumption is that there is at the very least some animosity on one side of the equation.

It was forked because while performance improvements are great to have, API breakage with no replacement for long-standing APIs is not.

At the end of the day, people need a working environment and not everyone has the time of day to be updating every library out there that used a previously stable RubyGems API to use the new "better" ones (though I've yet to see a case where the API changes were little more than renaming a class and adding a couple class methods).

I know little about the API changes, but have been burned by just about every single release since 1.3.7. So much so that I now have to patch RVM every time I bring up a server so I can lock down the version. One could argue I should have been doing this right along, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to believe that new versions of your library loading software will continue to load your libraries.

We're working on ways to solve this problem. Did you check out the new release policies?

I sure did. And then 1.8.5 came out and my Rails app broke again.

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