Re: Shouldn't we have more ftp masters ?
On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 09:47:18AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> -kernel dropped, we've wasted their time enough on this.
>
> On Fri, Jun 02, 2006 at 01:33:19PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > So, because people are angry with me because of my email communication
> > methods, any of my arguments should be dismissed without thought as you did ?
> > You do notice that this leaves me only one recourse, so this is hardly the
> > smartest thing to do on your part.
>
> I've repeatedly listed three recourses you have -- reduce the number of
> NEW packages you make, upload the NEW packages to experimental early
> so the delays don't matter, or, if the NEW stuff is important enough
> to warrant special treatment and the other options aren't suitable,
> which is unlikely but possible, work with the ftpmaster team to work
> out another solution.
The recourse i mentioned was not about NEW handling, but about trying to get a
reply out of you you seem uneasy to produce though, more incomprehension ...
> I presume your "one recourse" is to vote against me next election or
> something. I'm afraid you're overestimating how important being DPL is
> to me, if you think that's a real threat though.
Well, at the begining of this new mess, all i asked was a reply to a question,
which flowed logically from the context of that time, and your own reply. I
never asked for my ideas to be immediately implemented, but they are food for
thought for the issue of NEW handling.
Actually, i did vote against you as DPL, not because i read your plateform,
but because i thought that someone who was on the tech comittee and did a
reply as you did on the yaird/jonas issue, which was clearly clueless had no
business applying for DPL.
Now, once you where elected i reread your plateform, and all the paragraph
which comes under vitality is something i fully agree with, which i have myself
advocated for years, and which i believe would be to the best benefit of
debian, and as thus, judging from this your plateform, i thought maybe i
should have voted for you.
But then, in a few of the decisions you took, possibly because i was involved,
you didn't stand true to it, and fallback into conformism and immobilism,
which is a real sadness, so my question was also there to try to discuss other
ways to advance things, which you, being both DPL and ftp-master, and thus
probably allergic to any, even constructive, critic against the ftp-masters
are not well armed to dwell with.
So, anyway, i made that post, to get your opinion on this, to open the
discussion, which your post clearly lead the way into, to think about NEW
ideas, and see where it brings us.
But what do i get, a non-reply (well you replied, but you refused to go into
the discussion, and ended it with an authoritative 'it is so and will never
change, go away' kind of response), and a longish quasi-flamewar which will
get me accused again of bad mailing list behaviour.
> > > Sven, the only thing that will satisfy you is complete compliance with
> > > your demands -- [...]
> > Well, you could try it and give a reply.
>
> You've had multiple replies. You're not satisfied with them -- which
> is fine -- but pretending that you haven't had any response ever is
> just denial.
See my comments above about the replies. I am in no way demanding something of
you, and making a tantrum because you don't go my way, as you suggest. I am
instead over-disapointed, in the fact that you even refuse to hold a
discussion on this subject, which clearly are of importance to many DDs, or it
would not be mentioned ever so often all the way since i first became a DD all
those years back.
I agree that situation has been made better with the involvement of new
ftp-assistants, but if you remember, that was also something which followed us
having exactly the same argument about NEW processing, and you adamantly
claiming to the world that there was nothing wrong with NEW. And a few month
after that, o joy, there where finally new ftp assistants to help out :)
> > So, i ask you now a direct question. You said something in your DPL plateform,
> > which you clearly reject now, or refuse to answer any question concerning how
> > this applies to a real world case ? So, the question is :
> >
> > Anthony, did you deliberately lie in your DPL elections like any good
> > politician in order to be elected, or where you not aware that your own
> > actions and position would contradict this point of your plateform ?
>
> Sven, vitality doesn't mean "Sven gets what he wants, the way he wants
> it", it means things happen. It doesn't even mean "things happen in the
It also mean that when people have a problem with some part of debian, then it
can be discussed, and not shut down as some kind of taboue, because the mighty
ftp-master and the new DPL have decided it is a bad idea.
How can progress be made, if even thinking about NEW ideas is killed in the
egg, and strongly discouraged ?
> areas I care about" -- whether the I is Sven Luther, Anthony Towns, or
> anyone else. Vitality includes things like getting Xorg 7.0 into etch
> in a timely manner, participating in events like the Google Summer of
> Code and the Java relicensing. And it doesn't include obsessing over
> the same disagreements for years.
Maybe, but vitality could also mean a NEW plan for NEW processing,
experimenting NEW ideas there, in order to make the migration into the archive
faster and need less work for those tasks that even though they are not really
automated, are in fact automated in the mind of those ftp-masters handling
them.
I want to give you another example of vitality for your reflexion, and this is
the linux-2.6 2.6.14-1 release. For years, debian had been known as having
out-dated kernels, you cannot deny that. Even 'severly outdated' ones by many.
With the advent of the new kernel team, and the unification of linux-2.6
packages, this has progressed some, but we really made a step forward during
the 2.6.14 release, by almost reaching a 'same-day-as-upstream' upload, and a
release which built for all arches except m68k, which is special in this, as
upstream work was needed. This i believe was a master accomplishment, and one
much more worthy of being cited as 'vitality', and i hope you don't dare deny
that. Now this didn't happen alone, i personally leaded this effort, helped in
this by the rest of the kernel team, and it cost me almost two weeks of
effort and coordination. Two full-day weeks even, as i put aside all my RL
work to get that lone fact happen. Nor was i alone in that effort, the rest of
the kernel team was in it too, as we tracked each of the -rc releases in
experimental, kept the ccache fed for those even on the slower arches,
monitored configuration option changes, and so on. And we did it, altough i
would say we almost did it, since we uploaded the same day 2.6.14 was released
upstream, but we missed dinstall because of NEW, not only for 2.6.14, but also
for 2.6.15, despite having personally asked an ftp-master to try to do NEW the
day of the upload. Sure, getting NEW done the same day was the cherry on the
icing, but it was also important to crown the effort and rush needed to reach
our goal of less-than-24-hours-from-upstream-release-to-inclusion-in-unstable.
(Actually, it would have been less than 12 hours if NEW had not failed). And
2.6.14 saw the deprecating of initrd-tools, and the new ramdisk policy which
cost me a serious flamewar involving Manoj and jonas to get stuff to advance.
So, what is your comment on this as 'vitality', and you cannot deny that we
did the right thing there. This was a case of name change due to new kernel
version and thus inevitable, we did the work in experimental, and prepared the
way as you suggested, we even contacted an ftp-master for accelerated NEW to
happen, but still we failed to achieve our goal, because the ftp-masters
didn't see it as important enough.
So, waiting-for-NEW is a frustrating state, and is something which is
de-motivating for doing work and actually doing the 'vitality' part of it, and
by refusing to even think or speak about it like you do (and have always
done), is thus a threat to vitality.
> > Or, you could give a true answer to what i am asking.
>
> Have you had a lot of luck with getting people to do what you want by calling
> them liars and politicians in the past?
Well, the facts stay the facts, and yourself by your action or lack of those
give it more truth than anything i could say. My credibility is in the gutter
anyway, so ...
That said, it is sometimes needed to use shoke-methods to get someone to
actually get out of his denial-to-reply state.
> > > Complaining on the lists, and saying that NEW checking isn't needed for
> > > your packages might be fun, but isn't going to be effective.
> > My packages, right, i hope the rest of the kernel team doesn't feel offended
> > by the way you fully ignore them :)
> > Now, if i where to rennounce my position as a member of the kernel team, would
> > htis change your opinion on this ?
>
> The only request I've heard from other people who've worked on the kernel
> team this year has been for you to be removed from the project because
Err, notice that Andres was hardly active since somewhen before fall last
year, when he left in frustration over the kernel/security disaster, and the
immobilism involved by the no-decision on this last september or so. See his
blog for details.
> you've proven impossible to work with. I don't expect to stop ignoring
Please speak with Bastian and Frederik, which are undoubtly the most active
kernel team members right now. Speak also with all those involved in the above
mentioned 2.6.14 effort, and then come back and say this again. I here claim
that this is nothing but lies and diffamation, a continuous part, concient or
not, to discredit me, and make me a sub-DD not to be thrusted, a process in
which you have participated in.
> that request particularly soon, though I guess you could persuade me
> otherwise, if you liked.
All i ask is that we can have an open discussion about this, which is
something you refused to do as long as i remember.
> How much longer do you want to continue this idiotic one-up-manship
> before you're willing to try a different approach of working with people?
And how long are you going to continue this idiotic anti-sven and
let's-not-even-speak-about-NEW-and-ftp-masters before you're willingto try a
different approach, and actually openly discuss these issues, instead of
trying to supress them ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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