I agree with everything Erik de Castro Lopo says below. I would miss your work on Csound and your helpful comments on the Csound lists. 

It has consistently been my position, for which I have actively worked and lobbied, for there to be one canonical Csound project, and this is still very much my position. 

Here is a question for you, Istvan: let us imagine that you had continued to develop your "unofficial" 4.23 version of Csound, instead of joining the Csound 5 project. Let us also imagine that I and others had worked on Csound 5 as we do today. Which version would be the more widely useful for the larger number of musicians? I have no doubt that your version would have fewer bugs and would evolve quickly, but I also believe that the Csound 5 version would have more features appealing to more different kinds of musician. If you return to Csound 5 development, there is no need to make such a choice.

Best,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
>From: Erik de Castro Lopo 
>Sent: May 19, 2006 7:04 AM
>To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
>Subject: Re: [Csnd] [Cs-dev] Max number of outlets in a UDO ?
>
>Istvan Varga wrote:
>
>> It appears that I am now locked out from canonical Csound CVS access, but
>
>Istvan, you stated that you wouldn't be working on Csound any more. 
>Given that statement, isn't it reasonable that your CVS write access 
>was removed?
>
>However, if you do indeed intend to return to development then I'm
>sure your CVS write access will be reinstated.
>
>> I am creating an alternate "unofficial" project that can be used for
>> releasing such improvements and new features if there is enough interest.
>
>That seems like such a pity. Why not work with the rest of the developers
>to improve csound for everyone.
>
>Cheers,
>Erik
>-- 
>+-----------------------------------------------------------+
>  Erik de Castro Lopo
>+-----------------------------------------------------------+
>"Perl as a language has less a design than a thousand special features
>flying in close formation."
>-- From the c2 wiki
>-- 
>Send bugs reports to this list.
>To unsubscribe, send email to csound-unsubscribe@lists.bath.ac.uk

Istvan Varga wrote:

> Whoever has removed my Csound developer accont probably had
> a reason for doing so.

You said you were stopping development. That is a more than adequate
reason for your account to be disabled. If you are now stating that
you are returning that is also more then enough reason for it
to be re-instated.

> On the other hand, it is attractive (particularly in the case of a project
> done as a hobby for no actual gain) to be able to edit, reformat,
> reorganize,

On projects where you are the sole developer then this fine. However
on projects with more than one developer this is more difficult and 
requires care and good communication.

One of the problems here is CVS. CVS is very poor at tracking changes
across file renames and moves. There are other revision control
systems like GNU Arch, Git, Bzr and Mercurial which are much better
at the distributed style development we are attempting here. I have
personally used Arch, Bzr and SVN and I find both Arch and Bzr
significantly better than CVS or SVN. Unfortunately, as far as I am 
aware *none* of these more advanced systems play well with windows.

> The choice between being "unofficial" or having a lot of frustration is not
> easy. As I already registered a project, unless it is rejected, I may just
> as well use it until enough reasons are found for not doing so.

I haven't been on these Csound lists all that long, but the main
problem I see is one of a lack of communication.

I would like to propose that we all try to increase the communication 
and find a way around the problems and frustrations. I'm sure that
for every problem that we face there is a solution.

Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"The trouble with Muslims is not that they try to make us
think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they
think!" -- paraphrased from H.L. Mencken on Puritans