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

[Earl Miles]

Angela Byron wrote:
> 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.

This is a lovely thought; however, resistance to the idea of #drupal-dev makes 
it fairly difficult to actually change #drupal. The fact that various people 
are refusing to set foot in #drupal-dev shows me that any attempt to change 
#drupal is going to be met with resistance, as it has in the past.

So sure, you can ask us to change #drupal, but we haven't the power. Those of 
us who moved to #drupal-dev have done what we have the power to do. The -dev 
channel has been more focused and more useful since we moved there; people who 
were avoiding #drupal because it had become too big/loud/difficult to follow 
are willing to hang out in -dev again.

I'll be happy to spend time in #drupal again and help transform it, but I don't 
see how that can happen until the people who object to #drupal-dev's existence 
cease their objections. In general, the sign (to me) that such a thing has 
happened is when the more vocal opponents are willing to go into the channel.

I've been avoiding talking about this in public. The debate itself makes me 
angry; sometimes unreasonably so. Case in point: I went off on sepeck, 
undeservedly, the other night, for being somewhat snide about the channel. And 
people such as killes and Steven who've been around a LOT longer than I have 
are on the list of people who object to #drupal-dev. If transforming #drupal 
means fighting them, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to use #drupal-dev as 
a focused room for development, instead, for as long as there are people 
willing to go there.

I left #drupal as a way of drawing people over to the -dev channel. At this 
point, the only people who aren't there are 1) people who don't know about it, 
and 2) people who refuse to acknowledge it. The only way to fix 1) is to make a 
lot of noise about it. I've tried to avoid doing that. The way to fix 2) 
probably includes a long fight about justifications. I'm not interested in a 
fight. I'm interested in an environment where I can get things done.

I wrote about my objections to the atmosphere in #drupal as my seventh blog 
post on Angry Donuts: http://www.angrydonuts.com/drupal_and_user_experience -- 
in the year and a half that has passed since I wrote that post, my basic 
opinion has not changed. The arguments against -dev have not swayed me. The 
only reason -dev didn't exist earlier is that it takes a group of people to 
make the transition at once.

We cannot transform #drupal over the objections of the people who control 
#drupal. We can make #drupal-dev into the channel we want it to be; the people 
who control #drupal can decide to change it, or decide not to, or they can 
simply not decide and allow blame to shift to those who choose to hang out in 
#drupal-dev rather than #drupal.