[R-sig-Geo] rgdal release candidate 1.5-9 rev. 1000 ready for testing

[Patrick Schratz]

Edzer,

I appreciate your message and agree with everything.

In addition I want to clarify that the Twitter post does not solely 
result out of / refer to the recent messages of today.
It summarizes observations of mine over a longer period from many 
different people and today's discussion might simply have caused this 
overflow (of emotions).
That’s why I did not add any names or other details, to say that again 
explicitly.
Maybe I should have kept it in my head, though.

Happy coding everyone,
Patrick

On 6 Jun 2020, at 22:31, Edzer Pebesma wrote:

> On 6/6/20 9:15 PM, Patrick Schratz wrote:
>> Since I use and contribute to R (6 years for now) I was always on the
>> side of "help everyone", "things can get better/easier", "don't 
>> create
>> your own island solutions". However, I was hitting some (in my view, 
>> not
>> understandable) "walls" recently and I am not sure if I want to 
>> continue
>> with this attitude.
>
> Dear Patrick,
>
> We should keep in mind that the system requirements of the R spatial
> packages is quite likely the most complicated there is on CRAN, that 
> it
> has a long legacy, and that GDAL/PROJ came very dynamic recently, and
> that many people (though not enough) are involved.
>
> I think that you're learning that working with people is much harder
> than working with technology.
>
> I highly appreciate the contributions you made to CI for R packages 
> [*],
> and the way you helped making it work for sf; this helps robust
> development and finding bugs early. However, the moment something 
> breaks
> in the CI setup, I have no clue what to do and have to ask your help. 
> If
> I wouldn't get that help a couple of times, I would drop the whole 
> thing
> and throw it out of the window. For people using sf this is the same:
> they have no clue how it works; if it doesn't work a couple of times 
> and
> help doesn't come quickly, they throw it out of the window and look 
> for
> something else that does work.
>
> What you have to realize is that what looks simple for you (e.g. CI)
> looks incredibly complicated for other people, for the simple reason
> that they have been doing very different things for the last 6 years,
> and have neither time nor ambition to make up for that. Convincing
> others to change something by arguing the change is "simple and makes
> things better" often does not work because the receiver has a 
> different
> perception of "simple" and is not convinced that the status quo is not
> good enough, or is convinced the change brings a lot of work and/or
> added complexity. I don't think it helps to get emotional publicly in
> such a case and move to twitter [&], nor to become disappointed in the 
> R
> project. If you'd move to another project, you'll find yourself again
> confronted with people, and discover that communication is always 
> difficult.
>
> [*] see e.g. https://github.com/ropensci/tic
> [&] https://twitter.com/pjs_228/status/1269301044481339392
> -- 
> Edzer Pebesma
> Institute for Geoinformatics
> Heisenbergstrasse 2, 48149 Muenster, Germany
> Phone: +49 251 8333081
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