pride.
ownership.
hard work, running to _years_, not just "weeks" or "months".
being replaced.
after you were told you would be immortal.
these are all thorny issues, to be sure.
good luck in getting them sorted out,
and i mean that with all sincerity...
but c'mon. certainly we don't have to twist all of that
into the message that jim is trying to send here, and
it strikes me as disingenuous to try to make it sound
so simplistic, especially because things _are_ thorny.
and heck, i don't even read jim's posts any more,
because he never seemed to be able to decide --
at least when he was having any dialog with _me_
-- which side of the fence that he wanted to be on.
but even _i_ can figure out the simple dynamic here,
because jim has told us what it is, many times now...
"huck finn" sat around from the earliest of p.g. days.
wouldn't surprise me if it was in the first 100 titles...
it probably wasn't a _bad_ version, but it certainly
wasn't an exemplar of what would be a _good_ one.
if memory serves, ron burkey did that one, and he
always did a decent job, but that was the early time.
yet -- despite the popularity of that book, and the
ever-present never-ending threads here on updates
-- the book never did get improved. it just sat there.
(like almost all of the early ones have just sat there.)
so finally jim did it. he said he had a change-log that
showed literally hundreds of changes, i seem to recall.
never looked at it, but i have no reason to doubt that.
jim provided p.g. the update, but instead of having it
_replace_ the early version, jim's update was shuffled
back to a huge number that all the new texts receive...
now, again, i'm not taking a stand about whether that
is a good thing to do, or a bad thing, right, or wrong,
but the fact of the matter is that that means that the
"new and improved version" is going to suffer because
it doesn't have any downloads, whereas the "old" one
has a ton of 'em, and people search by download-count.
again, thorny issues, no easy answers, all acknowledged.
but we can still surely admit that this is a problem too,
when we have a _better_ text that's being ignored while
a _less-good_ text continues to be downloaded by users.
and lest there be any doubt, i'll bet dollars to doughnuts
that jim's "new" file is indeed superior to the "old" one...
so let's talk about the problem, and not try to _distort_
motivations of the other people in this discussion, ok?
especially you, don, because you have complained (and
_rightly_so_, i'll add) when people do this to you on d.p.
i don't really care how you guys work it out, _especially_
since even if you _can_ come to some kind of conclusion,
it won't matter, because the whitewashers have the power,
and they've already made it clear how they're gonna do it,
no matter what you might "decide", so you're just wasting
your time. but if you're going to put stuff in front of me,
and expect me to read it, you will have to up your game...
-bowerbird
