Re: DEP 17: Improve support for directory aliasing in dpkg
Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de> writes:
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 10:58:46AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
>> My gut feeling is that we are wasting prescious time of numerous
>> skilled Debian Developers to find ugly workarounds to something that
>> should be done in dpkg, but isnt being done because one dpkg maintainer
>> has decided to not go the way the project has decided to go.
> I find this mail of yours very disappointing and possibly even failing
> our Code of Conduct on multiple accounts.
I am unhappy to see the Code of Conduct used in this way.
Marc's message was not a personal attack. It did not assume bad faith, or
indeed make any statements about motives at all. He expressed his opinion
about project priorities and put it in the context of his personal
judgment of the facts of the situation as he sees them.
You may disagree with his summary of facts, or his opinion about or
evaluation of the current situation, or even the usefulness of him raising
this point due to lack of resources. It is certainly appropriate to raise
those disagreements in response, or even to ignore the message if you
don't think it's a constructive line of discussion. (In particular, I
think Marc assumes that a solution in dpkg would be more straightforward,
something that I think is debatable on technical grounds.)
But to say that this is possibly a violation of the Code of Conduct is to
say that this message doesn't meet the bar for civil discussion on our
lists, and I think it is unreasonable to expect anyone to be more civil or
even-handed than Marc was in his summary of behavior that he strongly
disagrees with. (And, to state the obvious, I don't believe that message
was a violation of our Code of Conduct.) Trying to set the bar higher
than this would have the effect of forbidding particular types of hard
conversations, which is not healthy for the project.
We have to be able to talk about interpersonal disagreements and problems
of alignment of motives and goals among the people working on the project.
Sometimes those discussions are going to be uncomfortable, but we can't
ignore them and never discuss them because they're uncomfortable. We are
a collection of humans working together collaboratively, which means there
will be tension and conflict and we have to deal with that, constructively
but honestly and forthrightly.
Part of working collaboratively with other people is that those people get
to criticize how you are doing your work, as long as they do so
respectfully and assuming good faith. Sometimes that includes saying that
one believes the actions of another developer are causing a misallocation
of project resources or time. Whether or not we end up agreeing that is
true, this is a valid topic for discussion, and sometimes it is feedback
that other developers need to hear so that they can do some introspection
and evaluate whether that may indeed be the case.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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