From: Jonathan Gordon <jdgordy_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2011 20:17:38 +1000

On 28 September 2011 21:54, XavierGr <xaviergr_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28 September 2011 10:15, Jonathan Gordon <jdgordy_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm saying this publicly because I don't want anyone to think I'd
>> simply lost interest in the project or found another itch elsewhere. I
>> very much have stuff I want to keep working on and am leaving because
>> of (mostly) 2 individuals. I'll continue working on rockbox on my git
>> repo, and of course you're free to cherry-pick the changes you want,
>> but I wont be pushing changes back anymore (not regularly anyway).
>
> If you are going to continue working on Rockbox on a personal repository,
> why do you have to leave? Your contribution to this project has been huge
> all these years, why deny future features from the userbase for just 2
> controversial people.
> It is certainly frustrating to have to develop under the pressure of such
> thankless and sometimes aggressive behaviour, but we are talking about a
> very small (albeit vocal) minority. In the end, it mostly sounds like you
> want to avoid further controversy and not that you just lost interest to the
> project, which for me seems rather unfortunate.
>

If I continue fiddling with rockbox it will be outside of the main
repo simply because it means I can do the changes I want without being
accused of pushing horrible aggressive agendas. It feels like every
discussion I've been involved in the last 6+ months has simply turned
to poo-flinging with the same few individuals. I'm not saying I didnt
throw my share too but untill recently I did my best to keep emotion
out of it. After however many months of trying to keep things civil I
just don't see the point anymore.

Probably the biggest frustration was the majority of devs who simply
said nothing. Obviously the constant arguments reflect badly on the
community but noone seemed to want to throw in their weight and force
an outcome (whether it be "drop it" or "let him do the change"). The
RSB is supposed to be a post-crisis response but it has failed in that
by the time it is called it is already too late.

My second biggest annoyance is the loud minority of non-contributing
devs who stand in the way of progress. (of course "non-contributing
dev" is a bit of an oxymoron, but people who did some work
months/years ago and do little more than chat in irc really should
learn to shut up and get out of the way of the active developer
group).

Finally, the general aggression amongst some of the regular devs. This
includes a disturbingly high level of passive aggression in irc.
Until people can be trusted to keep an aggressive tone out of simple
discussions there is simply no point talking to them. (case in point
is kugels reply to the playback gsoc thread, or the amazing response I
got to the *suggestion of talking about* of code reviews in gerrit).

I know for sure some people are reading this thinking I'm begin a
massive hypocrite, but then those people are the very reason I've
left.

So, To the people nice enough to say thanks and try to try my mind,
fix the above and we'll see (I'd be incredibly surprised if anything
changes).
I do apologise for the timing a bit, I know the font commits brought
some instability which I feel a bit bad about (Another issue with the
group is the tiny proportion of devs willing to test other devs'
patches), but it looks like there is always someone else ready to pick
up the ball.

I'll continue to be in IRC and I'll happily reply to rockbox related
emails for the code that I wrote/maintained.

Jonathan
Received on 2011-10-01