Why is Node being forked?
As of October 9th I learned that Node is being forked!
I asked someone close to this, "what is the reason for the fork?"
It turns out that some contributors* are forking because Node is currently run by a Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), and these contributors are interested in running it by committee.
Here is a video on the subject, where these contributors discuss the effort:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNW_tu2QnpA (37 mins; re-uploaded)
Interesting notes from the video:
- they are considering hiring a full-time person to triage bugs on Node
- they wish they could share bug-closing and bug-management abilities on the joyent/node Github (but Github itself does not make this easy without giving direct commit access),
- For the near-term, they are considering spending 3 hours per week doing bug triage.
Here are the leaders of this, with their names and their rank as a contributor to node:
#2Isaac Schlueter (and former BDFL)#3Ben Noordhuis [Mikeal pointed out that I forgot Ben, thank you Mikeal!]#4Bert Belder#5Fedor Indutny#7Trevor Norris#27Mikeal Rogers
As a bystander to this, I hope that when the dust settles, Node's stability and progress have not been adversely affected. I know for a fact that all of these people have better things to do than forking node (running their businesses for example). I have no doubt that this whole thing is a big headache for everyone, and hopefully the headache goes away soon (they would not be forking if they didn't have good reasons).
Have a good day,
David Trejo
More information
Here a video of the previous meeting (25 mins; re-uploaded): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5PtRHjUO1U
Here is a link to the node fork: https://github.com/node-forward/node
