RFC: safe pattern matching for problematic encoding

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, 2012-06-07 at 17:31 +0200, Martin Geisler wrote:
> I've been really disappointed by the silence here since I expected
> people to point out that the angry tone is unacceptable.

I certainly didn't like writing it. On the other hand, it was sincere. I
am sincerely angry with you. I sincerely no long want to work with you
because of how you regularly troll me. When you stop trolling me, I will
stop being angry, no sooner.

Tell me, Martin, which of these do you honestly expect is the most
likely end result of continuing to bring up the same old Unicode debate?

a) I finally agree with you
b) I finally stop caring about doing it right and let you win
c) I finally lose the very last scintilla of patience I have for you
d) I finally make you the inaugural member of my kill-file
e) I finally give up and find a less stressful project to work on

Anyone who's been paying any attention knows it won't be (a) or (b). So
which of the remaining outcomes are you shooting for? I'm guessing
you're aiming for (d), just for the bragging rights.

Note that I don't consider the following an option:

f) I finally agree to disagree

..because as a core contributor, every time you say "hey, we should do
it this way", I feel obligated as project leader to follow up and say
"hey, no, sorry, we never ever will" so that users who don't know the
history here don't start asking when we're switching to Unicode. It's
like you're repeatedly lighting a little fire I need to come stamp out.

Here's the thing that perhaps you don't understand: being the project
leader puts you in a role of being the defacto bad guy. Someone has to
make decisions and some of those decisions are going to be "no". And
many of those "no" decisions are ones that each wave of newcomers will
question. So I spend lots of my time saying "no, compatiblity", "no,
known bad idea", "no, design choice", "no, performance" at newcomers,
and I _really don't enjoy it_. And because no one else enjoys it either,
I end up doing the bulk of it. Burnout++, every day.

Which means when someone like you who is not a newcomer and already
knows the answers but still wants to keep an argument going even though
it's already gone on for 7 YEARS and everything that can possibly be
said about it has already been said, and makes me play the bad guy even
more than I already need to, when you know full well it's going to make
me angry... it makes me angry. Burnout += 50.

Option (f) is available to YOU at any time, however. And you also have
the option of starting your own Mercurial fork, which I'd frankly prefer
to wasting another hour on this topic.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.