Re: Gborg: announcement by 404

On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 04:31:23AM +1030, Shane Ambler wrote:
> The developers that used these sites have had more than enough time to
> transfer their work and now users only have one place to go.

Nobody is disputing that that is a good result. I am not talking about the
desirability of the result; I am talking about how we do not get to
desirable results in future using shoddy means.

Note first that the developers were never given a hard date until the very
end -- I know this, because I administered a project there, and wasn't given
such a date. (I did reply, however, and said that we wouldn't move the
project as it had been rendered irrelevant.)

Second, most of the pleas to move the projects included various suggestions
of automatic scripty bits that were going to do the moving. If I'm (say)
the JDBC developers, and I have to choose between improving the driver or
moving the project to meet some future possible gee-it'd-be-nice-if-we-could
deadline, I know what I'd do -- especially since there's the hope that the
problem will take care of itself later.

Developers are users of the infrastructure, too. And their time and
interest is a precious community resource that shouldn't be squandered. So
distracting them (especially at beta time) with a short deadline for the
removal of a service they may well be using is not good for the project.
That's why a real announcement with a real date about when the service would
end is important.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan
Old sigs will return after re-constitution of blue smoke