There are a few things you can do when you're depressed. Some people take a walk, others drink, some look at old albums and a few jump out of buildings. Yesterday night (or like someone else pointed out: last night), I took a trip down memory lane. Trying to remember the happy times we had in the initial days of dotgnu. Looking back these were one of the best damned weeks of my FOSS programming, but while I was there - the suspense was killing. It is for weeks like these I keep hacking on dotgnu, one of these days we'll roll out libjit and it will be another Eureka! moment.
The public archives of these mails were missing from dotgnu, I'd got these backed up on a CD when I left home. ( update: I found them on gnu.org). There are quite a few more private mails with even more desperation in them, but I can't reveal them with a clear conscience.
To start off with on 27th Oct, Rhys decides to announce that he's going to go stop working on dotgnu & portable.net.
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 07:15:04 +1000 From: Rhys Weatherley <rweather@....com.au> Subject: [DotGNU]Rhys's Role To: developers@....info As some of you are aware from the recent IRC meetings, I have been re-examining my role in Portable.NET and DotGNU. This has created a flurry of so-called "crisis discussions". The only "crisis" is that I am slowly burning out, and need to take some time off to think about what I want to do next. My doing so does not "kill DotGNU" as some think. There is a strong community here, but you all have to understand that no one person can carry this on their shoulders alone. I will be putting out a new pnet/pnetlib release in the next couple of days, to act as a check-point on progress so far. After that, I will be reducing my coding role until I figure out what direction I personally want to go in next. Others in the group should see this as an opportunity to take responsibility for a large piece of DotGNU and then commit to seeing it through. Cheers, Rhys.
It gets all kinds of responses. A guy named Jonathan Springer gets hacking. Then the weekend warriors happened. I sent in some ideas.
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 19:48:44 +0530
From: Gopal V <gopalv82@....net>
Subject: [DotGNU]Forking pnetlib and moving on
To: DotGNU Mailing List <developers@....org>
Hi Everyone,
I've been thinking about our dependence on Rhys to hack the
compiler. DotGNU Pnet should be a community and the current state
of pnetlib has been unsatisfactory for me .. The coding standards
of pnetlib has made us straggle in comparison to mono or ocl....
As the lead developer, I find it very disappointing to reject
patches from well meaning developers for reasons of stylistic
content or code quality ..
Get Pnetlib building with CSCC
------------------------------
Let me get this straight, this is my ultimate and total
aim right now . I am going to solve the quibbles about pnetlib
not compiling with CSCC for once and for all times. How many
developers have we lost , who would have taken our side if
we had been building pnetlib with pnet.
This mail is almost `too little,too late` in content, but
hear it out , as it is the only chance we have of surviving the
impending crush ... We're almost to the top of the hill and the
climb's getting steeper.
Compiling pnetlib as an aim might seem to be too obvious ,
but it is not ... It is the only way I can get what I want . The
good or the obvious solution to the problem is fixing cscc ..
But unfortunately we lack the skill to proceed on it in a short
period. The bad solution is to modify pnetlib to make it work
with cscc . This might be bad , as we might decide to remove
to changes in the code at a later date.
....
I would like to call a meeting of all the good people of DotGNU
Portable.Net at 1900 hours UTC to discuss this idea...
I had been to the point of giving up on this , what with all my personal
problems. But I can't desert with a clean conscience ... and I NEVER
QUIT !!.
Forking might be an extreme measure, But It's time to get down and dirty..
Gopal
--
The difference between insanity and genius is measured by success
IRC flys with discussions on how to fix bugs and three or four people talking at the time. We aren't that hopeful on fixing the bugs. But I'd put in a year of solid work into that project, I was going to go down fighting. And suddenly it starts working, there are no errors during compilation, but the binary is invalid. But who cares - it WORKS !!!
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 20:05:28 +0530
From: Gopal V <gopalv82@....net>
Subject: [DotGNU]Pnetlib compiles and RUNS pnet/samples (was: Forking pnetlib
and moving on)
To: DotGNU Mailing List <developers@....org>
(- I'm writing this is in a half dream delirium , please
ignore the nonsense as needed -)
If memory serves me right, Gopal V wrote:
> Get Pnetlib building with CSCC
> ------------------------------
>
> Let me get this straight, this is my ultimate and total
> aim right now .
> ... We're almost to the top of the hill and the climb's getting steeper.
Since sending this mail I clocked 18 hours before my little box here ...
and I'm sure Jonathan Springer has done none less...
But this is official, folks
*drumroll*
"PNETLIB COMPILES WITH CSCC" !!....
And I'm not talking about "Just compiling it", I even managed to get
all the pnet/samples running just as it should !!!.
Sure there are errors all over the plce , but does that matter ?...
Not a bit .. pnetlib compiles !!! WOOOHOOOO ....
Wait a minute, I didn't fix cscc all the way ... But changing 5 lines
to compile 27,572 is a good bargain ... A lot of codegen bugs remain
still and we'll tackle them together ! ... So Who's moving in ?.
After that, me and springerjp we've fixed all the problems in the codegen and compiler to build pnetlib without any verification errors. With an appropriate anti-climax :)
Date: 01 Nov 2002 11:26:26 -0500 From: Nick Zigarovich <nick@....org> Subject: [DotGNU]pnetlib verification To: DotGNU Developers <developers@.....org> <t3rmin4t0r> hmm... my email provider seems to have DNS problems <t3rmin4t0r> "CSCC has compiled pnetlib without any verification errors" ... Hooray
If you didn't know, rhysw was here for two years after that. All goes on to prove that it is Darkest before dawn. That was one of the good days, when we worked hard and we won. It was worth a good fight and we gave it one - three years later, I'm still proud of that one day. I probably always will be.
This is why I hack. For the rush to know, feel and enjoy the fact that you made a difference. One of those beaches of code where you left your footprints till the next tide of rewrites wipes them away.
--The difference between insanity and genius is measured by success