Clearing things up

[Jeremy Huntwork]

Hello,

This is an off topic message. I apologize for its presence here, 
especially after Gerard's request to end it. However, I feel that since 
some drama took place here, it should also be resolved here. Please skip 
this post if you are uninvolved and uninterested.

Some years ago, when I was project leader of ALFS, I was looking at 
creating a C or C++ tool named 'alfs' that would become the official 
implementation. During those discussions George M. offered quite a bit 
of interesting and useful ideas that he has since put into his own 
project which you may have read about on this list and elsewhere.

During that time, I was trying very hard to get some public coding and 
participation going for the code. George discussed with me a number of 
principles of approach for parsing XML, and he showed me some of his own 
implementations. To get things going within the ALFS framework, I 
started coding my own parser, and some of the principles of approach and 
thought that George spoke to me about, I used in writing the code. No 
one's name was put on the code, but I was the one doing the commits, and 
  there was an open source license applied. George was upset that no 
credit was given him for the assistance he had provided. My take at the 
time was that I had written all the code, I had to design its structure 
and make it work and his help had been in technique, similar to 
information that you can learn via public resources. He had, after all, 
mentioned some of this technique in the mailing list. A huge 
misunderstanding and difference in viewpoint had taken place.

Obviously the approach and feel of the code would not have been the same 
without George's help, and I am both grateful to him for it and want it 
to be known that he influenced the alfs-POC parser to a large degree.

Unfortunately, as you may recall, I also got the CLFS developers upset 
with me when I added 64bit instructions to LFS. They felt that non-x86 
architectures was their department and that they should have been 
consulted. My take on it was that our goals were different, they are 
cross-compiling, we're building natively, and we're speaking to a 
different audience, the proof being that despite CLFS's existence a 
number of people were trying to build LFS on x86_64.

I used their book as a reference when first developing the idea. I 
thought I had made it known on the lists. But in the end, I didn't even 
use any commands or principles from CLFS, but borrowed some approaches, 
commands and syntax from DIY. Greg was aware of it, was accredited in 
the commits and on list and even helped refine the end result. From what 
I could tell, he was pleased to see some of his work being backported 
into LFS.

Unfortunately, CLFS members were still upset with me, and their opinion 
of me was apparently discussed frequently enough in #cross-lfs that 
George M. picked up on it. He felt that I was in the habit of stealing 
others ideas and claiming it as my own.

So consider that when, in recent posts, I listed in my suggestions for 
LFS ideas that he had been working on in his project privately, and just 
days before he was set to bring a release, he felt that once again he 
had been undercut by me and that I was making his ideas and hard work 
invalid by claiming them as my own.

I assure you all that my intentions were never so deliberate and 
underhanded. George had talked to me at least once about a year ago 
about his project, and it is very possible that he had mentioned ideas 
similar to what LFS is now considering, but I honestly don't remember.

My purpose in bringing this to the list is because I value peace and I 
want to set certain things straight. I also would like to see George's 
work viewed for its technical merit and not in light of recent threads.

I hope this is the last word on the subject, and again, I apologize for 
bringing up an off-topic subject.

I'm tired now. I'm going to take a break for a few days. I'd encourage 
someone to collect together ideas for LFS that have been presented thus 
far and make a solid proposal out of it.

--
JH