<sigh> I absolutely *hate* being forced to defend myself against this crap and as a general rule, don't. But mob rule is one step too far. There is a small group of people in this project who have spent the past several years trashing me in every forum they can. They've been putting around this notion that I generally write flames, trolls, put-downs, whatever you want to call it. As a rule I ignore them, because I don't consider such behaviour deserving of a response. Since they're going unchallenged, there's an unfortunate tendency for people to believe them and repeat the stories. By and large, I find that the Debian project is good at rising above this stuff, but when you get a mob of people together they can behave quite irrationally. So for what I believe is the first time ever in public, I'm forced to respond. My response isn't going to be to blame these people; I just included those paragraphs for background information. My response is simply this: it's lies. I challenge anybody who thinks otherwise to present evidence. I sign almost all my outgoing mails; this should be easy, if it were true. Find mails from me that "are little more than provocations, put-downs, and trolls". Not ones where people have interpreted it that way and I've either told them they're wrong or ignored them. Ones where it's actually true. Post references to this thread. See how many you *actually* get, out of the number of mails I send. I'll give you some numbers to start with - here is a rough count (not including Ccs) of the mails I've sent to Debian lists this year: asuffield@cyclone:~/Mail$ grep -c "^To: debian.*@lists.debian.org" sent-2005* sent-200501:78 sent-200502:42 sent-200503:86 sent-200504:48 sent-200505:34 sent-200506:54 sent-200507:23 sent-200508:39 I acknowledge that I occasionally write mails which can be sharp and pointy, but generally it's just in response to similarly sharp mails. It's hardly uncommon in Debian; I've made a quick review of my sent mail in the past few months, and the mail I've seen on the lists in that time frame, and I don't think my percentage is any worse than anybody else (and it's better than many). Neither is the number of large threads I've spawned (I found two, and I went back two years). The only difference is that other people don't have rumours being spread about them. I'm not going to try and take action against the ones truly responsible for this. Nor will I support anybody else who thinks they should; the best response to such people is to ignore them. And I can't stop you from making a knee-jerk response. All I'm going to say is: think for yourself, and consider the sources of what you think you know. How accurate is it *really*? What do you find when you look at the things which actually happened? On the other hand, if you think that what Debian needs is vigilante rule where people are not offered a chance to defend themselves, and accusations are taken as proof, go ahead; you'll get exactly what you created. Make sure it's what you wanted. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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