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mith__

30 karma · joined April 12, 2021

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mith__··on Freenode IRC operators now engaging in routine abuses of power
the primary argument here is one of trust

the original creator of the channel gained trust by their userbase to not do untowards things with the feed, like filtering out certain things

then they moved their project elsewhere and left a redirect in the old location

now rasengan has deleted the redirect and pretends nothing has happened, and as for trustworthiness ... note how in the screenshot at the end of the article, humblebot is killed after posting a link to this submission here

mith__··on Freenode IRC operators now engaging in routine abuses of power
It is impressive how little time it took for the abuses to kick in.
mith__··on I am stepping down from Perl Steering Council and Core
pretty much the opposite happened here

sawyer had decided some time ago that the p5p mailing list wasn't receptive to his ideas and moved things into secret decision making with like 2-3 others in the know, culminating in his announcing perl 7 as a complete surprise to the entire community. with only some people having been asked questions about topics related to it, without even being told that the questions were about a perl 7 plan.

this lack of communications then led to both massive amounts of criticism of the secret process (with some community members even being misrepresented by documents written by sawyer's colleagues in this) and MASSIVE amounts of technical issues being discovered directly after the announcement and people trying to educate about it. sawyer however basically went "i call the shots here", resulting in an election that upended the "pumpking" model, replacing it with a "3 person council" who still have private meetings, but now operate much more publicly

mith__··on I am stepping down from Perl Steering Council and Core
> > Depends on what you mean by cruft

As the one who asked that:

That wasn't even aimed at sawyer for one.

For the other it was an honest question because Perl has a LOT of cruft both in the code, in the tooling, in the docs, in the design and the syntax. As such it was important to ask which cruft the person was referring to before being able to answer.

The existence of cruft is not in any possible way in question for anyone involved. The only questions are: Which cruft are you talking about? Why do you think it's a problem? Do the people who touch said cruft daily agree it's a problem for <implementation of x> at the current point in time?

Now note also how the above compares to sawyer's central claim in his email:

> I had dared to say that people in Core recognize there is cruft in the language

And consider that such disconnects marked his communications for almost a year now.

mith__··on I am stepping down from Perl Steering Council and Core
not quite?

the longer story is:

last summer a plan was revealed (and hatched in secret) to change the default behavior of perl's interpreter. perl not being a language where binaries are distributed in a compiled manner, but code is and then compiled on the system, this would break a LOT OF STUFF.

9 months were spent on trying to explain this, and how versioning the language is the only way forward without causing linux distros to drop perl

part of the disagreement was "but if we can never remove cruft, then adding new features is impossible". several core c developers opined "this is not true".

now yesterday it was announced that instead of changing defaults, `use 7;` would be implemented to collapse several lines of boilerplate and make code marked such behave more friendly.

someone asked about the cruft, and the above discussion ensued

imo the primary issue appears to be that sawyer took a lot of the criticisms of the perl 7 change defaults plan personally

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i'd like to reply, but hn thinks waiting 50 minutes ain't enough

sawyer was a manager, not a c developer of the perl core, and he replied to a thread mst started, so i disagree with your characterizations

vvvv

mith__··on I am stepping down from Perl Steering Council and Core
i did so because i disagree

that said, yes, i am involved. sorry, i forgot my github account doesn't use my usual username

mith__··on I am stepping down from Perl Steering Council and Core
which sock puppet, this account?

i didn't have any other account to be able to use on hn, feel free to ask the mods

mith__··on I am stepping down from Perl Steering Council and Core
here is the full context of the event sawyer cites as the last incident of "harrassment"

https://gist.github.com/wchristian/4e1bcdb761f20985b0a5c97a4...