Re: Inappropriate content on planet.debian.org and need of evolution of documentation and CoC
Dear Gunnar,
Thank you for your fine words. The same goes for everybody else as
well. This is going to be a bit long-winded so please excuse.
I learnt English in school and there the teacher used to tell us, in
fact force us to write essays. The essays would be typically 1000-1500
words on topics like 'my holidays' , 'my pet' etc. These had to be at
the most in two or three paragraphs, for some reason she dis-liked
small paragraphs. Rightly or wrongly, that is what I learnt .
In college we didn't have the need except for a letter or two excusing
me for a day for something at home or the other.
When working in and with companies the idea was given/planted that all
work/intellectual property is there's so you can't talk anything about
the work you do, so apart from short note here and there there wasn't
much need of documentation.
Cut to 2003/4 and blogging was the in-thing in those days. I don't
remember the name, but there was a blogging service during that time,
very popular, but with the downside (to people in the know) that you
couldn't import or export the content. To be part of this new
charismatic group called 'bloggers' and 'agents of the fourth estate'
, 'crusaders of democracy' and whatever terms of endearment that were
being used to people feel like rockstars. While some people made lots
of money, others were content with being able to post their ideas
without censoring themselves. I hadn't know about Google's 'blogger'
till that point.
So re-using what I had learnt in school, I applied that and it was ok
for everybody else. Then in end 2007 or early 2008 that service for
some reason or the other was stopped. And because that content could
be imported or exported the content was lost. So searching a new home
for my musings, one of the pre-conditions this time around was that
content could be imported or exported and luckily blogger was the only
service at that point which was free and had this service.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/open-hardware/ - My
first blog post.
Blogger became my home and for the next 3-4 years after which I
started finding it limiting and realizing it's not free software .
Then cut to 2011 and I chaged to wordpress.com and I still continued
in my old style of writing. Over the years, there have been few and
far instances where people offered or asked me to write and I observed
that they would put a photograph or picture or two in the blog post. I
still didn't think much of that.
Around the same time, I had started covering foss events around the
city, the country wherever I was invited to and I started to quickly
ran out of web-space for photos. I used flickr and photobucket and
quickly ran out of the space allocated to free users. But as these
were just random musings and online web-shops quickly become expensive
the only thing was left to use community-oriented offerings such as
the gallery offerings offered by fosscommunity.in . The gallery
service worked great until one time it broke and all the content wiped
clean. IIRC, there was lot of spam.
Cut to 2016 and after South Africa trip, I had promised myself as well
as others on the debconf-discuss that I will share some of the
highlights of the trip. I found photos really capture the moment and
once you start describing a certain photo you relive the moment all
over again. For this purposes, I did get access to debconf gallery
page but its usage is only for debconf images.
https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/page/3/ - Debconf 16 musings
Then cut to 2017 and I started to devote some time to write about Debian .
https://itsfoss.com/author/shirish/
One of the first lessons I was taught the importance of having both
pictures and short paragraphs. I was told and agree that having
photographs are like a break in the clouds. I was told to also make
smaller paragraphs and both the pieces of advise helped me quite a bit
to mature a bit as a writer.
Now as far as me writing technical content about Debian on p.d.o. is
concerned, that's a laugh. I do not think that there is anything I
write technically which will be news either to Debian or/and DD's. In
fact, if people looked at the itsfoss.com articles they will find most
are beginner-friendly articles.
Somebody shared that ranting about Debian is fine. I disagree with
that. Two pet peeves, debian-installer is ugly and needs lot of work
(in design) and would be nice if wiki.debian.org got mediawiki instead
of the current solution.
Now while writing blog posts on both these topics are easy, the rants
will remain as they are. It would be useful and relevant ONLY if I
were to do something about it. As shared in Debconf, it's a do-ocracy
which is important rather than rants and raves . Neither of the two
have any easy fixes and would need both expertise and probably
hundreds of hours sinking in to have something worthwhile. I neither
have the expertise in either nor do have the amount of time required
so such posts wouldn't be useful.
Even getting debdelta into apt/aptitude is still-born apparently
because ftp masters don't like something in debdelta.
The only contribution the last couple of weeks I have done is #859473
, #858599 and #858561 . Unfortunately, none of them went anywhere. I
had filed few bugs about gtk+3.0 vis-a-vis mate , most of which are
fixed by upstream in mate 1.18 so unless Mike backports any patches
from 1.18 to 1.16 don't see anything happening therein.
https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/687
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/500
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-screensaver/issues/95
There is this though #785739 and #767120 but both need upstream work.
I'm not particularly worried whether my blog gets back into p.d.o. for
I will not stop blogging in either case. I do however take the points
of using <---more--> and seeing if there is a way in wordpress.com to
cover photographs/secret similar to how cheat-codes or certain
procedures in the game are kept secret in a forum and only if the user
selects to view the content, the content is shown.
Having said that, I know now its not alright to have anything even
remotedly talk about sex at p.d.o. at all.
Part of the reason of writing the blog-post is the way prostitutes are
looked upon and treated in my society on the side-lines of
untouchables, and prostitution like many places around the world, is
termed illegal. I do know that there are some 'progressive' European
nations where prostitution is not illegal but as somebody shared that
my posts are excessively personal, I guess they will come on my blog
but not on p.d.o.
I do find it both fascinating and confusing that people have varied
view-points. I know that is the reason why Debian remains strong.
My $0.02 .
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
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