the only experience of a GNU projject community I have is #guix
As for #guile I never met personally anyone
But I thin I'm beginning to grasp what people mean whhen they say that #gnu is a toxic community
I'm beginning to think that I should stop suggesting people to use GNU tools and engaging with their communities
Even when they treat you well and answer your questions, they still manage to make you feel like an idiot
as fo Guix, e few months back we had a problem on the guix mailing list. Someone was hostile to a non gender binary community member
The mantainer were adamant in enforcing the behavioral code.
And the culprit was a quite prolific contributor. He hasn't been since then
Also another contributor went away, because he felt the Guix environment was "radical"
He is a contributor to other GNU projects now
Like child abusing clerics, if you were hostile to minorities in a GNU group, you can always move to another one
Now, coming to Guile.
The guile community is toxic
In a couple of occasions I have been reprimanded
A a way smaller number off occasions I have been helped
You might argue that the reprimands were deserved
I won't go into that
I juust want to make a few notes
Guile is a failure
It completely missed its aim to extend the Emacs model to all GNU software and even to non GNU software at that
The only meaningful Guile based project is Guix
And the Guix founder is the former Guile mantainer
The guile community is asphyctic
The collection of guile based projects is ridicule.
Nothing meaningful is made with Guile
Because Guile is NOT for everybody
Guile is the reign of smugness and elitarism
It's interesting to contrast the "failure" you discuss above with the message from Andy on his post "a brief history of Guile" https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-guile
I think big bold goals are good for people and projects, but I don't think such negativity around success, or lack thereof is good for people or projects.
Chris,
negativity is not good
But if there's something wrong, tha unsettles me, I think I hahve a right to express it
I tried hard to stay positive
But the quality of the interaction on the Guile channels is low and has been so for a very long time.
That's how I see it. Sorry
Umm, I not sure I even feel the same way about negativity. I think it can be good, and is pretty essential.
Imbalance is where problems can really grow from, and at the moment the core Guile community seems so small to me that imbalance is easy to come by.
I too feel quite negatively about Guile sometimes, but it's important to balance that out with the good that has come of it, Guix for one thing.
Maybe the community will continue growing.
If it does, hopefully that will bring with it some more diversity and balance to the project.
I really hope so !
In fact this is the reason why I make my concerns public
If I had no hope I would just sneak away siilently and maybe move to Racket
But I feel the amount of emotional labour that Guile requires is unfair
and I also agree that Guix is something good that came out of Guile
In fact I wouldn't be so concerned about Guile if I wasn't affectionated towards Guix
But Chris, I have my pain points
I hope this argument will bring some thought to the Guile community
I coud write a blog post about this
Last time I did I was assaulted on the irc channel...🙄
thank you Arun, I appreciate your encouragement
In my case, other people there tried to convince me, with gentler ways, that my assailant was right 😕
Because when you cultivate jerks, your community becomes a gathering of jerks
and guile is obviously way deep in this quagmire
but I won't stop blogging
I already started a new blog post about this
It will take some days because I have to collect some sources and citations and I' m a bit flushed, these days
But I will publish it, sooner or later
And it will make waves, I think
I won't be diplomatic this time
@catonano @arunisaac I do think that Guile's maintainers all do want it to be a friendly community. Wingo, Ludovic, and Mark all care about having a good community as far as I can tell. But maybe there was a failure here.
Perhaps a good next step would be to ask the Guile community to adopt the same code of conduct that Guix has? I would enthusiastically support that endeavor.
that's a good idea
And thank you for your support
But admittedly I also think that a tiny bit of public exposure will be a good incentive to these people to mend their ways
Mantainers aren't gonna be always there
thank you for chiming in Chris
I appreciate that
You too Arun !
It's important to collect at least some acnowledgement
❤️
@catonano @cwebber @arunisaac I'm sorry you had a bad experience in IRC. The guile-user mailing list seemed to be a civil place to me.
I have some grudges about the mailing list too
I'll explain my grudes in my blog post too
I just found one of my sources: a talkk in the Libreplanet 2018 titled: ""the dark side of Free Software communites"
@catonano @cwebber @arunisaac I missed the talk at LibrePlanet, and I am yet to watch the whole thing. Will watch later. Thanks!
@cbaines @arunisaac
anyway, thanks for stopping by 🙂