Comment by Spivak
5 years ago
I think there’s some emotional nuance here. After a certain point he basically said all of his technical justification and the request does boil down to “because I said so and I’m the author.” The Nix maintainers explicitly do not want to respect the author’s wishes (which is fine) but that makes the whole thing turn adversarial because “okay we won’t include it” wasn’t even something the maintainers considered for even a second. It was pretty level headed discussion until it was clear that their only motivation was getting to yes or enough justification to ignore him.
> It was pretty level headed discussion until it was clear that their only motivation was getting to yes or enough justification to ignore him.
No, they offered solutions and only gave up when the author refused to provide any actual objection other than that he didn't like it. "Doesn't want people to file bug reports because downstream broke something" is a reasonable objection, but it's also a fixable problem. "The only thing that will ever make me happy is you completely removing this package from your distro" is neither.
The only solution Franck gave is to not re-package for any emotional reason he had. The Nix developers gave their reasons why they need to re-package. Franck just ignored everything and gave no reasons to justify his request.
they have good reason to not not include it.
In totally agree but in the case where the Nix maintainers don’t think the author’s reasons are good enough (which happened) that’s where we’re left with “because I said so and I control the license.”
I would agree that the author's reasons aren't good enough, because when they proposed a solution that would mitigate the reason, he rejected it. That implies that there's far more to it than the reason given.