[Debtags-devel] Ignored messages

[Thaddeus H. Black]

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Enrico writes:

> They're there in the mailbox marked "I should look
> into that and answer to that".

I have such a mailbox, too---called "~/Mail/mb2" for no
particular reason.  Occasionally mail gets stranded in
"~/Mail/mb2" a long time.  It's hard to keep up with
everything, sometimes.  I think that Enrico still has
one or two old mails from me in his "I should look into
that and answer to that" mailbox, but this is okay.
Enrico is busy.  If my mail were urgent, I would have
said so.

If my own experience with Enrico here over the past year
interests you, I would observe that

  (a) Enrico tries unusually hard to satisfy disparate
  conflicting contributing interests;
     =20
  (b) however, like any good leader, Enrico keeps in
  his head a mental technical model of our Debtags
  project, and he takes seriously his responsibility
  to preserve the project's basic overall technical
  integrity, within the model's framework.

These two practices conflict, of course.  Balancing the
two can be rather stressful.  Sometimes you or I
inadvertently suggest something that does not quite fit
the mental technical model, leaving Enrico either to
change the model or to adapt or refuse the suggestion.
This is not easy.  It is tempting to suggest that Enrico
write the model all out now on paper for the rest of us
to read, but mental technical models simply do not work
that way.

With regard to Benjamin's specific suggestion, it seems
to me that we are kind of stalled until sarge actually
releases.  Completing the vocabulary and using it to tag
the sarge archive will be much easier once sarge has
become a stable target---for the same reason that it is
easier to land a golf shot on the green on a still day
than on a windy one.  There is probably not really much
more we can do in this area until the wind dies and
sarge releases, yet until then it is difficult to
respond sensibly to specific vocabulary/tagging
suggestions.  Now is a good time for coding; after the
release will be the big time for tagging and vocabulary
building.

--=20
Thaddeus H. Black
508 Nellie's Cave Road
Blacksburg, Virginia 24060, USA
+1 540 961 0920, t@b-tk.org

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