[Bug 251117] [NEW PORT] www/palemoon: Open-source web browser

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=251117

--- Comment #105 from Olivier Certner <olivier.freebsd@free.fr> ---
(In reply to Matt A. Tobin from comment #99)
(In reply to Matt A. Tobin from comment #100)

Judging by the phrasing and the content, these extracts seem genuine. So it
seems we have been visited by the one and only Matt A. Tobin.

> Here is something from my IRC logs that may confirm the status of BSD in Pale
> Moon despite what Moonchild has been saying since I was kicked to the curb.

I'm sure Moonchild will appreciate that some of its private conversations are
aired without its knowledge or consent. As for "kicked to the curb", he has
publicly stated a very different point of view (basically, you've been the one
that kicked yourself out through rage quit with a sprinkle of sabotage). But as
we will see, I generally do not trust his point of view either now. And as a
matter of fact, I don't care much about who started what or whose "fault" it
is, and I'm certainly not going to cry over it.

Nonetheless, I suppose I should thank you a little bit because you're
confirming and even exceeding the impressions I already had that Moonchild's
overall behavior is uninformed, disingenuous and deceptive, and more
importantly, you're giving public proofs of that, so that he won't be able to
hide behind excuses such as your own behavior or fake attempts at "cooperation"
or bogus claims to wanting an open community. Perhaps this was your goal by
reporting your logs after all. In which case you're going to be well served.

> It does not show me in the best light but it happens to be true.

Your naïveté is almost charming. You're so gifted to find the right words.
Given all your outbursts and insults everywhere in the Pale Moon forums,
tickets and pull requests, rest assured that no small logs like these can stain
your already prominent reputation.

Don't worry, I don't intend to feed the troll much more, and I'll soon leave
you to your eructations.

However, before that, I can't let these logs out with so many false statements,
be they genuine misunderstandings or plain lies, because they give readers the
impression that I'm mostly responsible for the cooperation failure when you
(personally, and Moonchild above all) mostly are.

> <NewTobinParadigm> Moonchild: I am not at all willing to work
> with any BSD without a commitment from them to actually work
> with us.

This is exactly what I had been seeking from the start... except that I
expected in exchange a commitment on your side as well... oh, not much, but at
the very least no trying to discourage the effort and hoping to be fed with
useful technical guidance for your codebase and build infrastructure. You did
exactly the contrary, and in the rare cases where you (personally) tried to
provide some technical insights, they turned out to be irrelevant or wrong
*every single time*. Everyone can read for example just the start of the long
forum thread (https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=25625); I'll give
some more examples below (if people want more, they can just take the list of
links of comment #2 and start reading).

Moonchild showed himself a little bit more willing, but more often than not his
contributions turned out to be worthless. He didn't seem to know relatively
basic things on the C preprocessor (such as the value of undefined tokens in
tests). Another time, he suggested me to use Mozilla's C++ atomic templates (in
C code...) and numerous times had difficulty to grasp what I was saying about
clang (how it *is* compatible with GCC, and this is an explicit goal) and
libc++ headers, mixing the two. Finally, he showed not to be aware of the
runtime library dependencies of his own platform.

Additionally, Moonchild seemed indifferent to your own conduct. At least, he
didn't try to put me off initially. Later, I started to notice that he was more
the guerilla type of guy, with frequent sarcasms and rhetorical questions
implying he was skeptical on some things I was saying, as if I was trying to
hide something. I initially found that odd, and it's only later that I
understood this was in fact reflecting his own way of functioning, where he
would not speak out and leave me in the dark about his intentions, apparently
prospering on ambiguity. I came to this thought after what happened at start of
https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP/pulls/1778, where he was
going to commit a rather trivial one-line change by me that didn't need
specific Windows testing, but finally stopped when you popped up, gratuitously
ranted and decided to force me to setup a Windows environment right now,
although I did not have time at that moment. (Also, one of your puppets popped
up saying the patch was incorrect... and was blatantly wrong. You then used
this pretense not to test it. See the pattern?)

In any case, in retrospect, my effort was doomed to fail also due to your very
peculiar definition of a commitment. This means first and foremost for you
having the opportunity to rant and (try to) control me, through pointing out
perceived deficiencies which didn't exist or were very minor or through leaving
me in the unknown. Moreover, it seems you expected that I would do things
always your way and in the order you decided, undermining my own agenda of
giving a quick and perennial access to another browser to FreeBSD users, simply
because I did not intend to spend as much time as you do on this project (but I
was prepared to invest more time, see below). I had already spent my initial
share on figuring out how to make your jemalloc work, although that of FreeBSD
works equally well for Pale Moon and is configured very similarly (yeah, there
was a small risk to using it because of a hack to circumvent a limitation of
your JS machinery (some high virtual addresses should not be used), but this I
could have workarounded, if you had been more open to alternatives).

> <NewTobinParadigm> I also want to remove ALL BSD support from
> gre as it stands today and have THEM add BACK support in a more
> proper way ala SunOS.

I was never opposed to this idea, but rather opposed to be forced to cope with
the fallout of a sudden, uncoordinated removal. What I wanted was instead
incremental changes throughout, or at least temporary patches waiting for me to
have more time to tackle the whole task correctly.

But again, you (both of you) never seriously took into account my own
constraints and views.

> <NewTobinParadigm> In my opinion, OlCe1 has already proven to
> not be a serious contender for this endeavor. Someone else must
> lead this charge. Someone who is reasonable.

I have my very own idea about who is reasonable and who is not. And people just
have to look at the amount of bullshit you produced to see who's right. E.g.,
here: https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP/pulls/1731 . But in
reality, any other ticket or pull request will do as well, because this is your
almost constant attitude.

> <Moonchild> Oh I agree. I'm just still probing to see what's going on.
> <Moonchild> And he himself said he's not sure whether all the BSD code paths are even necessary, so that aligns exactly with what you would want.
> <Moonchild> But I'm not pouring all that out in one go. I have to know details from them.

Another example of disingenuous behavior.

> <NewTobinParadigm> I believe they once were .. 15 years ago.. in general i think that is true and our plans to prefer XP_UNIX except where it is necessary to get more specific is a good one for our general stability and code clarity
> <Moonchild> Yup
> <NewTobinParadigm> take the Tobin Factor out of the equation and it rings of actually being fair and proper to all unixes I think

This was exactly what I proposed to Moonchild, and never received any feedback,
except that, initially, he was insisting in highlighting the putative
peculiarities of _his_ platform (as if it has been _so_ different from all the
others, so unique; and it is, but only to some extent), and that the existing
FreeBSD-specific code was here for a reason. I'm discovering here that in fact
he was agreeing (or perhaps he changed his mind... again).

> <Moonchild> I'm just letting them know a compromise and BSD support in our tree is possible -- but haven't said anything about HOW that's going to be done.

To which I responded with ways to organize cooperation. Which you called
"socio-political" bullshit below.

> <NewTobinParadigm> except mac :P
> <NewTobinParadigm> which is fake-unix
> <Moonchild> Mac can fuck off
> <Moonchild> so can OpenBsd
> (snip)

So Tobin is not the exclusive producer of insults...

Amusingly, Moonchild has changed his mind once again
(https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=28174&p=226675#p226675).
Another testimony to its great vision and leadership. But I wouldn't bet this
can happen for OpenBSD...

> <Moonchild> NewTobinParadigm: I'm dropping FreeBSD on the floor. I'm really just done with it. Especially if the one that is supposed to liaise between a reluctant platform team and use is leveraging the OpenBSD BS that doesn't even apply to their platform or their team just to keep the opening to build the way they want anyway.

This is a complete misunderstandings of my last messages. Initially, I hadn't
thought to bring the OpenBSD drama on the table because I suspected the topic
could be inflammable (but boy, I underestimated how much it still appears to
be). What happened is that I was almost prompted to by Moonchild himself, with
some of its frequent rhetorical questions:

> I think in that case I taste more than a little paranoia from the ports 
> manager/triager in that bugthread too when it is assumed I'll just 
> change the redist license on a whim and withdraw branding from any and 
> all because I woke up with a bad mood or something (regardless of the 
> fact that such a thing would be challenging to do, legally speaking -- 
> and I do dare say I've got a little more legal expertise than most 
> involved here). Think about that for a moment. Why would I do that? How 
> would that help the project and its users? You think I have no sense of 
> commitment or discipline and still be driving this project 10+ years 
> later?

When I read those lines, I thought he could not be serious. This was clear
proof that he had not learnt from the past. His failure to recognize his own
behavior is a threat to any perennial collaboration, simply because he can mess
things up at any moment without really noticing. So, yeah, at this point, I had
to confront him.

This had absolutely nothing to do with "building it their way". I showed
multiple times that I was taking Moonchild's concerns seriously, although they
were more often than not quite nebulous, so I had to ask questions to
understand what his real motives were. And again, this had nothing to do with
me citing the OpenBSD drama.

> <NewTobinParadigm> or maybe one of the shitter bsds comes to call

An admirable way to try to drag people in.

> <NewTobinParadigm> i just think IF we ever were to allow BSD in the future it needs to be done from the perspective of what is needed now not the compromises from 10-15 years ago hacked and rehacked and never properly tested by core mozilla
> <NewTobinParadigm> Moonchild
> <Moonchild> Yes i agree
> <Moonchild> and he clearly stated that he wasn't going to do that anyway somewhere in his essay
> <Moonchild> so fuck it.

Another occurence of Moonchild not been able to read to save his life...

What I stated exactly is that I didn't know precisely the amount of work for
this task. I never said I did not want to do it, on the contrary, I had already
evoked almost exactly that (see above; Moonchild is contradicting himself).
What was implicit in my answer (perhaps it should have been made explicit) was
my reluctance of you removing all the support code at once according to your
own agenda (and not taking into account mine), possibly leaving me in the wild
and depriving users of new versions until I could fix the build again.

> <NewTobinParadigm> it is amazing how he went all out on the anti-Tobinism all without me saying a word since last year
> <NewTobinParadigm> shattered his own illusion without a word from me

I have memory. You're the one living in illusion. It's never too late to wake
up, even if there is plenty of evidence that it's likely going to be very hard
for you to.

> <Moonchild> the overly long post really pissed me off, by the way. it's cleverly written, and clearly Olce is a good conversationalist, but I can't rhyme it with what's needed to cooperate

Unless I'm mistaken, I get to choose how I spend my time. We are talking about
a few hours for the whole exchange and my main essay. Indeed, this was a
non-negligible effort on my part. Sure I could have read code and done tests
instead. But what would have been the point? What I was concerned about was
whether the cooperation could be perennial or not. There was no way I was going
to invest much more time into your platform without proper reassurance on that
front. And that time spent on the discussion and on the essay proved to be well
spent in this regard, although the outcome is sad.

> <Moonchild> if he can take a long time to compose what he did, he should also be willing to put in the legwork code-wise. unless that's actually not his forte in which case he can't do what he says he wants to

Again, you have a very small view of the world if you think your platform is
that big... I've navigated into code bases orders of magnitudes greater than
yours (yes, you read that correctly; ~100M to 1B lines). Another pretense it
seems.

> <Moonchild> so there are so many approaches to it that all come to the same conclusion, and I'm just dropping it. period.

Seems clear. Until the next change of mind.

> <NewTobinParadigm> target operating systems need to be maintained by those familiar with it
> <Moonchild> exactly
> <Moonchild> and I was very clear that was needed
> <Moonchild> which resulted in a barf of sociopolitical BS and semi-covered attacks on all of us.

Completely wrong again. You'll hardly find someone that familiar with FreeBSD.
But yes, I'm not a committer, and I'm not on the ports manager team, so can't
speak for them.

In my essay, I went on with:
- How we could work asynchronously, through the Pale Moon port, instead of the
synchronous way you appear to wanted and I could not provide (and in your own
repository, while being obstructive).
- How ports management work in FreeBSD, with input (and citations) of ports
management members and ports committers, so that you have a clear view of what
you can expect a priori (because you actually lacked in this matter,
understandably).
- How I could help to overcome obstacles, as I had already done up to that
point.
- How I was prepared to keep maintainership of the port for at least 2 years,
and dedicate some weeks full-time later this year, initially to clean-up the
FreeBSD build in your codebase, but then for other useful tasks (which could
have been revamping the FreeBSD port in your codebase).

So, the only real feedback from you is "socio-political BS". So much for the
consideration you have for others and their interests.

"semi-covered attacks"? Nothing was covered or ambiguous, contrary to what you
love to do. And the intent was not to attack, but rather to point out problems
and see how you'd cope with them.

> <NewTobinParadigm> you made an absolutely good play by including my contributor roll with my community interaction stepback it encouraged him to not only question it but attack harder
> <NewTobinParadigm> masterful
> <NewTobinParadigm> role*

I've always considered that the blind praising the one-eyed is among the best
laughs in life.

> <NewTobinParadigm> Probe Complete.

Indeed.

To wrap up, you've been mostly agressive and unhelpful from the start, were
absolutely unable to listen to most of my own concerns, to which you reacted as
if I was attacking you. Additionally, it appears clearly that Moonchild is as
much to blame as you, and probably more since he's the leader and showed
himself to be passively deceptive, which is even more vicious. Traits, by the
way, you may have yourself been the victim of.

Farewell, petulant children!

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