[I apologise for my bad english.] Ladies and gentlemen, to make the flamewar on debian-devel about the status of Qt3 packages in Debian GNU/Linux die, I am posting this report in order to inform you about what's going on right now. (1) Technical things First, i want to apology for providing packages that not fulfilled peoples wishes in the past. But to my own defense, i also want to point out that there haven't been many significant changes from my first upload (which was 2:3.0.5-1) and the first set of redesigned packages (3:3.1.1-1), which obviously were the reason for the big flamewar we all could observe in last days. In order to get the disaster fixed, i did not participate (as, by the way, many people requested), in the thing you call flamewar. It was rather my goal to provide fixed packages as soon as possible to make all Qt3 coders happy again. As a result of these ambitions, i am pleasured to announce qt-x11-free_3.1.1-2pre3v1, which is a product of strong cooperation between Ralf Nolden, Ivan E. Moore II and myself. These packages appear to fix all the things Ralf requested. Additionally, they fix 11 bugs in the BTS. We are convinced that these packages are a good base for Qt3 development under Debian GNU/Linux and encourage everybody to test them out and to give as much feedback as possible. In order to test the new packages, simply add the following to your sources.list: # Qt3 beta deb http://people.debian.org/~alexander/debian/ ./ deb-src http://people.debian.org/~alexander/debian/ ./ After `apt-get update` and `apt-get dist-upgrade`, the new packages will be installed on your system. (2) Non-Technical things Now, this is a bit harder to explain than point (1) was, so I am simply going to describe what i think about the issue. I am convinced that most people, when thinking of Debian, identify the project with freedom. This is an important point since the past has shown us that freedom is one of the key conditions that must be there in order to establish any kind of society. The problem I see is that most people apply the term "freedom" to software only but not to the persons behind the project. This ends up in people being harrassed all the time for not doing things that person XYZ wants to see. Sadly many users outside there seem to think that Debian Developers are not allowed to have a private life besides Debian. This becomes more and more obvious, especially if one sees the mails a DD gets if RC-Bugs are not fixed within a day. Nobody calls into question that Debian Maintainers have to do their work in a conscientious and diligent manner, but due to their granted freedom, they also have the right on a private life, a life which has got nothing to do with Debian (You could also call it 'freetime'). In my opinion, this applies to every person being involved in the project, no matter if the person is DAM, ftpmaster or packager of a 5kb big application. In my opinion, to esteem this right is the duty of everybody who thinks that freedom is important. I think that if the trend described below does not die, this problem will in short time become one of the hardest problems debian ever had to face. Less and less competent people will want to join the project if they see that the work they do is not being appreciated and that the only feedback they get is harassment if there is something not correct. While considering this, another question comes to my mind: Is it really necessary to flock together against somebody on a public mainlinglist, ending in requestion him to be sacked? Is it necessary to show the whole world how harsh one can be? Is this the way a project which has to have a social structure can work? As last point, I want to call the benefit of flamewars like the one against me in question. Just have a look at the tree of the thread Ralf started some days ago. What did it bring to us? We got some new packages finally, but we would also have had those if the flamewar never existed at all since it was beyond any question for me to fix the packages like Ralf suggested. Besides, we have a part of the thread which finally end up in a discussion on a completely different topic, we have some kilobytes of wasted traffic and I wonder if the social skills of some people are really that bad. If you want to add something productive to my thoughts, you are free to do. If you feel like flaming me after reading this mail, you are free to do that as well. But please keep in mind that I will not support any attempts to start another flamewar. Yours sincerely, -- .''`. Name: Martin Loschwitz : :' : E-Mail: madkiss@madkiss.org `. `'` www: http://www.madkiss.org/ `- Use Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org
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