> ...the division that would be caused by a fork...
You still haven't explained what the problem with this "division" is. Why will this be different than the rails/merb fork? Honest question: are you afraid of division or of your friends losing control of the project?
> There is no denying that Eric+Ryan have had personal conflicts with Loren...
As well as just about anybody else who has tried to work with them.
> However, Evan Phoenix...
Evan is a great and brilliant guy, but let's be honest here. He's another personal friend of the current maintainers and (former?) Seattle.rb member. We need fresh blood.
Merb was never a fork of Rails. It was a separate project, initially created to address a particular shortcoming of Rails (file uploads, IIRC), and grew into a competing implementation that solved a lot of the same problems that Rails did in a simpler, more elegant way. The Rails core team realized that Merb did a lot of things better and absorbed most of that goodness.
SlimGems isn't Merb. It's not new, it's not doing anything better. The only thing it has going for it is "Hey, it's not being run by these same assholes." Well, that doesn't help me much. SlimGems isn't going to ship with Ruby 1.9.3, and it doesn't solve any problems that RubyGems doesn't solve. Loren could be making a better RubyGems, but instead he's making an older RubyGems.
Well, the other thing it has going for it is that it works. So far I've had no problems with SlimGems on the half dozen or so projects I've tried it with. The same cannot be said for RubyGems 1.8 and most of the releases since 1.3.7.
To qualify my friendship with Ryan and Eric, it consists of meeting them at conferences once in a while and having some positive conversations with them. That said, I am absolutely biased here, I like them despite their flaws in the way they manage projects and their tendency to easily get embroiled in unnecessary personal conflicts.
I left a more detailed comment on your blog, but I don't think we need to have a meta-personal conflict, so I'll leave this rest here.
What's hostile about proving points with code?
> ...the division that would be caused by a fork...
You still haven't explained what the problem with this "division" is. Why will this be different than the rails/merb fork? Honest question: are you afraid of division or of your friends losing control of the project?
> There is no denying that Eric+Ryan have had personal conflicts with Loren...
As well as just about anybody else who has tried to work with them.
> However, Evan Phoenix...
Evan is a great and brilliant guy, but let's be honest here. He's another personal friend of the current maintainers and (former?) Seattle.rb member. We need fresh blood.