Dakons blog

This is a good chance to start sort of a blog battle with Paul about oracles, their sense, and more oracles. A too good chance to miss ;)

But, let's talk about names first. There are things that are called a certain way because there is a common practice on how to call them. But there is a German proverb stating "all generalisations are wrong" (Alle Verallgemeinerungen sind falsch.). You can't know that you are wrong on exceptions to the rules without some deeper knowledge of this specific exception, e. g. being told of the exception. Like me, who has the blessing of two given names from which the second one is the one I'm usually called. Noone ever says "Rolf" to me. At least not if any reaction from me is planned. So it's either "Rolf Eike", which is either some official things happening or my mother getting angry with me, or just Eike (in basically all other situations). Sometimes it's also "oh my god", but there usually one of the other names would fit, too ;).

The same thing about that little program I ocassionally hack on. I prefer to call it KGpg instead of KGPG. Hanging around in several IRC networks for some 10 years made me thing about all uppercase things as screamings so KGPG looks a bit rude. Well, in this case the program will not care. And Google will still find the reference. Better than calling me the wrong name. Or that other guy that uses my name and works on KDE. Shame on him ;) So maybe it's even a good idea to refer to me as Dakon.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not hurt in anyway about using the wrong name. It's just me feeling strange to read about me in something and not being me because of that strange name. You couldn't have known this from e. g. reading my blog, you must have looked on the bottom of my mails or just asked. My new employer was confused about this, too. So nothing I can't live with or that I'm not used to.

Ok, so what does the oracle of KGpg really tells us? Well, that there are 7 people that touched the same files. If that is collaboration, yes, then we collaborated. But in most cases I think about collaboration as something that goes a bit deeper, e.g. that there was some consensus about what we did or not. Burkhard found a and I agreed that his fix was right so he did it. For all other changes there has been no exchange whatsoever between me and the other commiters. That doesn't mean that there things are wrong or bad or that they should have asked me, it's just not what I would call collaboration. Indeed I mislike most of the commits, but only because I don't like the ugly kdelibs coding style. It just has way too many spaces at all the wrong places. But since I never got around to reformat all files of KGpg this doesn't hurt either. And their commits followed a common practice and they didn't knew about the exception. So at the end this all is about exceptions in one or the other way. Maybe just my interpretation of collaboration is just an exception of what Paul had in mind.