You (or they, depending on how you consider things) have a simple tool to solve the problem: let them fork and do what they want.
It sounds like I'm trivializing the issue but I"m not (see below). Take a kindly approach: "Clearly I have a disagreement as to the right way to proceed so let's stop arguing and both go down our respective paths." Don't worry about the obnoxious folks: be kind and take them at their word. If they pick up the ball, perhaps they will be proven right and you'll switch, perhaps they'll be proven wrong and that experiment won't have hurt your project, or perhaps they'll be proven trolls (by not picking up the ball), in which case you can saefly ignore them.
And when I say this is a simple tool: it took me months to arrange the first "legitimate" (in the sense that it was accepted as a mainstream activiy) open source fork, which was GCC back in 1997. Until then forking a project while done (often companies would hack something unsupportable into, say, gdb), was considered grossly dangerous. It took literally months of discussion to split egcs off from mainline gcc (and to become, in fact, mainline gcc). I had to write a really long, careful message (https://gcc.gnu.org/news/announcement.html) to justify it. Nowadays you can fork away with abandon. Take advantage of it.
Comments
You (or they, depending on how you consider things) have a simple tool to solve the problem: let them fork and do what they want.
It sounds like I'm trivializing the issue but I"m not (see below). Take a kindly approach: "Clearly I have a disagreement as to the right way to proceed so let's stop arguing and both go down our respective paths." Don't worry about the obnoxious folks: be kind and take them at their word. If they pick up the ball, perhaps they will be proven right and you'll switch, perhaps they'll be proven wrong and that experiment won't have hurt your project, or perhaps they'll be proven trolls (by not picking up the ball), in which case you can saefly ignore them.
And when I say this is a simple tool: it took me months to arrange the first "legitimate" (in the sense that it was accepted as a mainstream activiy) open source fork, which was GCC back in 1997. Until then forking a project while done (often companies would hack something unsupportable into, say, gdb), was considered grossly dangerous. It took literally months of discussion to split egcs off from mainline gcc (and to become, in fact, mainline gcc). I had to write a really long, careful message (https://gcc.gnu.org/news/announcement.html) to justify it. Nowadays you can fork away with abandon. Take advantage of it.