Re: [ros-dev] My attitude

[Thomas Weidenmueller]

Witukind wrote:
>   I think the project would stagnate without Alex.
I doubt that'd be a problem as it didn't before he joined, so why should
it now? People join and leave once in a while, no reason to stop. It's
not like he's the only person with knowledge. This does *not* mean that
I want him to leave.

Arrogance certainly is an issue but I don't really care as I usually
ignore those moments and don't comment on them, everyone has his/her
flaws. What bothers me more is the "ownership" of code issue. These
large "rewrites" of functions/files is annoying, especially when holding
everything back for months and then committing everything in one single
huge commit (I'm not talking about headers fixes, because those
certainly do require loads of changes in one commit). This of course is
a reason then to claim (full) ownership of the code, and dare you touch
it in such a way that it's less close to windows. For me, I do *not*
want to clone internal things 100%, there are many reasons why this is a
bad idea. However, since I'd write code that wouldn't be "perfect" in
this aspect, I no longer work on the kernel as I'd interfere with this
attitude. I wouldn't want to submit a patch and seeing everything gone a
month later just because it wasn't a next to perfect clone of the
original code, even if it worked perfectly and as expected. That's also
one of the reasons I abandoned win32k, i just wouldn't want to copy
every little detail just because it "must be perfect" because MS wrote
it. This leads me to the constant IDA/ASM digging in MS binaries, I
don't think it's good for the project to copy every little detail based
on unnecessary reverse engineering. Testing and thinking about things a
little longer is a good method to being able to implement many things,
of course not all, especially completely undocumented interfaces. And
just because MS did something a specific way doesn't mean they're god
and that it's perfect. Also the frequent "Cutler adoration" on IRC is
*very* annoying to me, he is *not* god.

This are my 2 cents, I don't want anyone to take it personally,
especially Alex. I just won't consider ReactOS a clean-room
implementation anymore if this trend continues, which would make me
leave due to legal issues.

- Thomas

P.S.: I do *not* oppose reverse engineering per se, there are situations
where it's necessary (in order to accomplish compatibility)