[development] #drupal / #drupal-dev split considered harmful

[Angela Byron]

A couple weeks ago, a few developers started going into #drupal-dev  
instead of #drupal and started a campaign to get people to split off.  
I guess the reasoning for this was because they disagreed with  
newbies who didn't read the topic getting 'support?' in their face  
when they join our "official" channel. I personally think it is a  
feature, and not a bug, that our main channel is contribution-focused  
rather than support-focused, but that is largely irrelevant to the  
topic at hand.

The problem is that the people who started this 'fork' have not been  
present in #drupal, actively taking part in support requests from  
newbies, thus changing the 'mood' of the channel by their own words  
in actions. Instead, the main channel's merely been abandoned by  
several very prominent contributors, a large portion of the  
development community doesn't even realize there's a separate  
channel, development discussion in general is now splintered between  
the channels, and newbies are still getting 'support?' in #drupal.

The climate in the 'official' channel right now is more that of a  
ghost town of join/part messages, except for random musings about the  
infrastructure and, of course, 'support?'. This gives the exact  
opposite impression to new Drupal users than the channel did before  
the split -- a vibrant community of developers sharing issues or  
patches to review, talking about new modules they're developing, etc.

So please, #drupal-dev goers, either finish what you started by  
actively working in #drupal to make it more newbie-friendly, or  
abandon the experiment. So far, this feels like a net loss for the  
community.

-Angie