On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 03:21:04AM -0800, ben wrote: > On Wednesday 20 February 2002 01:16 am, Daniel Stone wrote: > > While I appreciate your support, sometimes I think you overplay the > > maintainers' stocks a little bit. :) > > > > When we take on a package, we take on the responsibility of maintaining > > it ... given, we might not be able to do an absolute perfect job, but we > > did say we'd do a job, and so we should always endeavour to do it, when > > reasonable. > > > given that the product of your willingness to take on those responsibilities > results in a pure win for those of us who reap the benefit, it just plain > pisses me off when some arrogant asshole tries to assert an obligation on > your (collective) part solely in order to assauge his solely personal > interests at the expense of according appreciation where it's deserved. as > someone who accrues the benefit of your work, at absolutely no cost to > myself, it seems to me that the least i can do, in return, is to bring that > fool's attention to the idea that his attitude is pitiable. I don't mind people passively doing nothing, but active demands and hostility are always shithouse. Good: "Hi, I notice you haven't got KDE3b2 debs yet. Is there a reason for this, or do you just need help, and what with?". Bad: "Where are the KDE3b2 debs? I need them!!". > along with that, i'd like to add that you may not be aware of the fact that > there are a whole big lot of people out here who are, really, just plain > users, who don't necessarily have any other ambition than to run a small home > or office system that might even do nothing other than give us the freedom to > revel in our (debian-enabled) supremely functional independence of ms'ed up > operating systems. from your humble response, it kinda sounds like not enough > of us have been showing up to say thanks. that's really all that this is > about. I don't mind that users don't really say thanks, I don't even mind if developers and debian-kde people say thanks or not ... it's always appreciated, but not essential. The best thing people can do is offer to help. That's the best thanks a maintainer can ever get. > kde is primarily a single user oriented environment, and, as far as i know, > none of the maintainers have commited themselves to any responsibility beyond > that, such as to specifically accommodate enterprise or even development > oriented interests--not that you neglect those users, either. but, > consequently, the majority of those who gain by your efforts are the regular > folks who have made--given the context of their origin as discouraged > windon't users--a comparable effort in risking all that was familar, however > repugnant, to embrace a system where, rightly, there is no-one to blame but > oneself in the event of any of the common usage problems that might arise. > nonetheless, you guys continually cover our asses, getting us, as solidly as > you can, back up when we thought that we were down. that, to my mind, > deserves far more appreciation than scorn. My focuses (focii? foca?) are: a) end-user, b) development. As someone who writes KDE apps myself (mainly in-house, sadly), Of course, if something breaks, then that becomes the first priority - squashing important bugs. An example was the libpng fiasco, which broke everything: that became our first priority over everything (in KDE, not in life). > if that's too much, sorry. Don't apologise. You'll grow old and bitter very quickly. :) -d -- Daniel Stone <daniel@sfarc.net> <Joy> BTW, guys, imagine you were newbies ;) and read www.debian.org/distrib/ <Joy> tell me if anything bugs your newbie self <asuffield> Joy: bash: www.debian.org/distrib/: No such file or directory <Joy> not THAT kind of newbie. :)
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