[jsd1982]

If I were in Russ's shoes and I had told someone as politely as I could that their solution exhibits what I consider showstopper issues, I wouldn't expect to have to clarify that I find that solution entirely unacceptable and flawed from its very design. There's no issue in the clarity of communication when the term 'showstopper' is thrown around.

Russ said he was going to go and build a tool to understand the problem better. In no way does that imply that any lessons he learns from the implementation must be communicated back to the dep committee. But for the sake of argument, let's say that did happen. Then what? Does Russ practically force the dep committee to implement vgo out of the remains of dep? Why would he do that when he just spent a month or two implementing vgo from scratch? Why bother going back to a problematic group that doesn't believe their core issues are showstoppers? If that difference of perspective exists and they're not willing to debate that, to say nothing of the fact that they feel that they should be on the receiving end of the burden of proof, what more can be gained from them from Russ's perspective?

[h8liu]

hmm.. I was not aware that Russ used the word "showstopper" until recently in his tweets, and even if he literally used the word in the past, the word of the meaning was not delivered, reading from the post here.

That said, the dep people also made a similar mistake on not clearly confirming with Go core team that they had a chance to integrate dep into the official toolchain eventually. They wanted dep to be the thing, and they really thought that they were on the right track.. poor folks..

If Russ managed to influence the "problematic" group to do what he wants, rather than doing it by himself, he could give these people a meaningful place in the Go community. That is the gain. If that is worthy or not (comparing with discarding 2-month work on Russ's own time) depends on your own perspectives, and I am not sure what Russ thought or thinks. No matter how, it will affect how the community grows in the future.

So this goes back to the root issue about how the Go core team view its Google-external language community (or even more fundamentally, if they will be rewarded/recognized by Google if they did a good job on making the community happy). Specifically, do they want to carry the responsibility to deliver messages to the community clearly, at least to some certain extent? Opinionated is fine and firing users (e.g. users who think generics is a must) is fine, sometimes even preferred, but hurting people that were willing to follow and contribute might not be the best way to go.