CL Community(?) Norms

Written on 2022-01-17 18:00:00 UTC

In case you haven't seen it, the ASDF maintainer is considering resigning. The reason is pretty straightforward: continued antagonization toward the ASDF team from a prominent CL developer (and maintainer of a number of widely used libraries) and the seeming acceptance of this by the CL community.

The only other forum I'm aware of that's discussing this is this Reddit thread. However, I found most of the conversation in that thread simultaneously depressing and wildly missing the point. So I decided to take advantage of this space to speak my thoughts clearly, plainly, and without interruption or other noise surrounding them.

Side note: if you know of some other place this is being discussed, I'd love to know. Bonus points if it's not a SOS's pool.

Full disclosure: I am an ASDF developer, but I was not a developer when most of the relevant events happened. I am u/daewok on the Reddit thread. Last, I think Robert has done a great job shepherding ASDF and don't want to see him resign, especially over this.

The Issue

The current flash point is this flexi-streams GitHub issue. However, the tensions have been building for quite a while.

Basically, ASDF 3.mumble improved upon an under-specified area of defining multiple systems per .asd file. The new method improved reliability, improved safety, and reduced user surprise. The cost is that a certain system naming convention needs to be followed. The naming convention is even backward compatible (if you adopt the new convention, it'll still work exactly as expected on older ASDF versions).

But even then, ASDF didn't even break extant naming schemes: all it does is signal a warning telling the user about the updated naming scheme. I personally would love it if, at some point, ASDF stops supporting anything other than the new scheme. But we are years away from considering that (ideally after everyone has adopted the new (and I can't emphasize this enough: backward compatible) naming scheme).

A mixture of ASDF and non-ASDF developers have submitted patches to projects to use the updated naming scheme. The fact that non-ASDF developers have gotten involved shows that the warning works. Most projects have accepted these patches. However, there was a notable holdout in the edicl-verse. Not only did this maintainer refuse to apply the trivial patches, they openly expressed their hope that as many people as possible would complain to the ASDF devs. This latter behavior is what Robert is unspeakably frustrated by and is what prompted his resignation consideration.

The Existing Discussion

Let me get this out of the way first: could Robert's initial interaction on the flexi-streams issue been better? Almost certainly. But I'm willing to cut him a little slack given that his previous interactions in other threads were collegial, I know he's been antagonized a lot over this issue and similar ones throughout the years, and were are (still) in the middle of a pandemic that's affecting everyone in different ways.

I think this antagonization of the volunteer team maintaining a widely used piece of CL infrastructure is something that very much needs to be discussed. Like I said in the intro, the Reddit thread is the only place I've really seen it discussed in any depth. And that's a shame, because the discussion there missed the point in two major ways.

First, there was a group of people that focused on the technical issues at hand. Basically things like: "should ASDF have made this change?", "the warning being signaled is unnecessary in this specific case!", "why is ASDF signaling warnings at all!?" Which, in addition to missing the point of Robert's email entirely, also managed to demonstrate that people have shockingly strong opinions on what they want the world to look like, but have made little to no effort to make it happen in a positive way. I can definitely say that the ASDF team would love it if more people were involved in developing and testing the shared resource that is ASDF!

Second, there was the group that believed that the maintainer had the absolute right to ignore/reject the patches and that ends the discussion. I give this group credit for at least discussing a non-technical aspect of this. And while they are correct that he could ignore the patches, it misses the more interesting questions of should he have rejected the patches and was his behavior in calling for as many complaints as possible to the ASDF team reasonable.

My thoughts

Frankly, I think the call to brigade the ASDF team was out of line and I definitely expect better from a prominent CL developer. Additionally, while I agree that he had the right to not merge the patches, I still think he should have and am upset that he didn't.

There were at least three ways to remove the warning. All three were offered at one point or another. All three were backward compatible (one maybe needed a bit of reader macro magic to be so). Two did not require changing the names of the systems.

I know this developer is competent enough to understand the improvements the new naming scheme brought, so why was he a stick in the mud about it? The technical arguments for the change were strong and a PR was waiting for approval, so the two most obvious explanations are that it was some personal vendetta or he wanted to punish the ASDF developers for not getting the issue correct on the first try and wanted to force us to continue to support a horribly broken feature.

Maybe it was something else, but in any case, it makes me upset that he would prioritize whatever that reason was over supporting another CL project that is attempting to make things easier and more reliable for nearly every CL developer.

That being said, there is one place where I think I disagree with Robert. He said that the CL community tacitly accepts this behavior. But I'm really starting to think that this can't be true because there really is no CL community to speak of.

fe[nl]ix's blog post on IDEs is probably what planted this idea in my head. I didn't believe (or want to believe) it at the time, but the more I've thought about it the more sense it makes. There is no big, happy CL community. Instead there's this diaspora of small communities that only tangentially interact with each other. So it's true that the edicl community tacitly (or explicitly) accepted this behavior. But there are other communities that find the behavior abhorrent. But because they're not the same community, and each community's resources (especially manpower) are finite, there's not much they could do about it. Heck, they may not have known the issue existed until Robert's email!

To be fair, one person in the Reddit thread pointed out there is no CL community. I down voted him at the time, but it was done out of anger and I have since turned it into an up vote. That broke my spirit a bit, but it needed to be done.

This realization is very sobering and distressing. One thing I've learned about myself is that I work the best when part of a supportive community and I am willing to make some personal sacrifices to help my community. I'm lucky enough to have such a community at the moment -- my research group. I've done a lot of work in CL that I didn't need to do for my own personal goals, but I found enjoyable because I was invested in helping others and improving our shared situation and ability to make progress.

However, I won't be a part of this research group forever. So what happens when I look to find a new community? Will I be forced to reside in multiple small, fractured communities? Or is it more likely that I'll drift away from CL forever?

So far, I have found the ASDF community, Robert in particular, to be supportive. But there's a decent chance he's going to resign. I've also found the Common Lisp Foundation folks to be extremely supportive and, like me, willing to take on small personal costs for the greater good. But their reach is somewhat limited (again, mostly due to the low manpower inherent in having many small communities).

But I want more. I want a broader CL community that supports one another, gives constructive feedback, uses each others' projects, and contributes code and issues. I want a community that is willing to make small individual sacrifices in order to improve everyone's situation. I want a community that realizes that because our language is frozen in time, we can devote more efforts to continuously improving our software, even if it means there are breaking changes (so long as those changes are communicated in advance :D). That last one is particularly important to me because, let's face it, most CL projects don't have a brilliant committee designing them and didn't get their interfaces perfect the first time.

So, how do we move forward? For the immediate issue, the edicl community has grown a little bit with the addition of new maintainers. At least some of those new maintainers care about this issue and are working to improve their system definitions.

But how to build a bigger, better CL community escapes me. I personally think the CLF has the best chance at being the seed crystal of such a community. They have a nonprofit set up, they are already providing shared infrastructure (such as Gitlab, project web site hosting (side note: there's some exciting news coming down the pipe soon on that front), mailing lists, and fundraising), and it seems to be run by level-headed folks that truly want to see CL succeed and a community grow. So I highly recommend that more people join that community by taking advantage of what they offer and floating any community building ideas you have on their fora or at their monthly meetings.

Beyond that, I think the best advice may be to try and broaden out any community you find yourself a part of. Give more people commit rights (after making sure they're trustworthy, of course). File issues and PRs instead of forking a project (and be responsive when you receive them!). Plan for project succession by hosting projects in a shared org instead of in your personal namespace. If you've got a single person project, consider hosting it on CLF's Gitlab so that if you drop off the face of the Earth an admin can step in and make sure someone else is able to continue working on it.

If we all grow our communities enough maybe they'll merge and we'll get our one big happy community. Then again, maybe not, but I think it's the best idea I've got at the moment.