Re: [Administrivia] On ruby and contrib/

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

> Do you think that the opinions of
> inactive community members and non-contributors are _more_ valuable
> than those of active contributors, or am I missing something?

I am not Dscho, but it probably is worth saying this anyway.

6d297f81373e (Status update on merge-recursive in C, 2006-07-08)
stole merge-recursive.c from git-merge-recursive.py with an explicit
purpose of making sure that those without a working Python can
perform such a core operation like "merge" with Git without extra
forking.

The person who worked on it, as long as he knows that the project
not just accepted the patch and kept using the code but also that
the project understood the rationale behind that change, does not
necessarily have a reason to appear every week to interject comments
in discussions on any part of the system, even to proposed changes
to merge-recursive.c, as long as the original thing the change meant
to address is not broken (e.g. removing merge-recursive.c and add it
as a merge strategy written in Python or Ruby might trigger "huh",
but ditching merge-recursive.c and replacing it with merge-replay.c
as long as it works would be a "meh" for him).

When otherwise silent old-timers feel a need to come during a
discussion that might affect the course of the project in a major
way, we should pay more attention, not less, to what they say (I am
not saying "we should blindly follow").  They can explain why some
things are as they are, why some changes that may look like a good
idea did not work out and how they failed, etc.

Certainly the opinions from them are no less valuable.