Hello,
so to put an end to this discussion (I think we have heard the opinions of everyone who this matters to), I would like to quickly recap and propose some actions we/I will now take.
So Marcel (aka gocart on the forums) has unfortunately contacted me privately because he doesn't want to discuss this on this mailing list for several reasons. He allowed me to publish the content of that conversation. I won't post the full text (it is in German any way), but pick some points that I found interesting.
The first of the reasons why he is not taking part in this conversation on this list is that there is a language barrier and secondly he finds this list "useless". The latter one of these left me quite puzzled. I expressed my disappointment about that and asked again that he would think about it but there has been no reply.
He agrees that there have to be rules when many people are working together, but he does not accept ours. Even having this debate about these rules is a waste of time to him. It actually is, but rules have to be set up and and they have to be challenged from time to time.
Upstreaming work is a matter of leaving it in a git repository until somebody takes over. He is refusing a discussion about his work.
Just to remind you: This was never about just him. There are other parallel projects. He is just the only person who voiced himself a little bit. The others didn't.
So I come to my personal conclusion that I will just leave the stuff as it is. I won't talk with these people as there is clearly no point. I won't feel a bit responsible for what they are doing there.
If someone wants to take their stuff and post it to the list in an orderly fashion that is something else. Maybe these people can agree that one member of the team is talking to the rest of the developers as a spokesman. I find that just silly, but there might be other ways.
For me, stuff happens on this list. Nowhere else. Period.
The other consequence I am taking is to rename the development area on the forums. My first idea was to just get rid of it, but I guess people will be posting their stuff in other sub-forums then. So it will just be renamed to clearly state that this is *not* the place where development happens so that nobody can complain that "the developers" don't reply to their posts. There is this list. There is Bugzilla. These are the places to go.
I hope that these changes will improve the situation. I am in no way trying to deter those contributors from contributing to this project. I am trying to do the opposite which is to steer them towards contributing their patches in a way that we can review them, improve them if necessary, and then merge them into the distribution so that IPFire becomes better. This process however needs to follow rules and it appears that we have to enforce those even more.
Feel free to comment on this, but please keep it short if you can because I want to focus on other things. Just in case someone is interested in the PMs from Marcel let me know and I will post them, too.
Best, -Michael