Re: Bug#365010: Xserver G5 usb keyboard not loaded ...
On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 03:21:12PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 12:40:48AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 03:34:30PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > > On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 10:46:24PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > > The maintainer is held responsible (and frans and joeyh have not stepped down
> > > > from reminding me of this in the past) of the build failure, while a
> > > > contributor is free commit fixes, without necessarily being the one to blame
> > > > for every problem of the port.
>
> > > And whereas when the alpha daily builds are broken and require build env
> > > updates to get them working again I simply fix them at my earliest
> > > opportunity, you invariably used this as an excuse to accuse the rest of the
>
> > I don't remember it such, i remember frans accusing me of negligence and
> > misconduct because i did give a (maybe a bit uninformed) advice to a powerpc
> > user.
>
> You had quite strong words for Frans, accusing him (and other d-i folk) of
> breaking your daily builds. They didn't do anything of the sort; *I* broke
> the daily builds, because there was a libnewt soname bump and udebs needed
> to be rebuilt against the new soname, which broke the daily builds until
> libnewt0.52 was installed in the build env because this was before we had
> support for udeb shlibs. That didn't stop you from accusing Frans of first
> breaking the build and then picking on you.
I didn't accuse Frans, i did accuse the d-i folk in general. English has this
poor feature of not distinguishing between the polite you, the singular you
and the plural you, maybe we should switch to a more advanced language instead
:)
Now, putting things in context, some user complained about brokeness on
debian-powerpc. I know that appart from me, nobody is reading debian-powerpc
from the d-i team, so i told Shaymal that he should post on debian-boot
instead, or better file a bug report directly, since i was hardly available to
do real work, and to do the bridge between debian-powerpc and d-i at that
time. I was away in el salvador at the time, my mother had just passed a
severe respipratory crisis a few hours before, and i had gone to read
debian-powerpc in order to change my mind a bit, and being me, i could not
help trying to be helpful to users, even though i didn't really take the time
to investigate fully, and may have made a mistake, but given my situation, you
have to admit that this is understandable, no ?
As a result, i got an immediate response from Frans, not only telling me i was
wrong, and that the i failed miserably to keep the daily builds going, but
also adding that little bashing paragraph, the kind that frans has been giving
to me with various degrees of subtletly since over 8 month now or so, and
which yourself agreed yesterday was not correct.
Given this, two things happened. I wrote Frans a personal mail asking him for
comprehension, and kind of explaining my personal situation, which i don't
really feel he has acted upon, and second i was pretty much feedup that even
in the situation i found myself, there was nobody who would take care of
either fixing this issue, or at least inform the users that it was a known
problem, that i was currently unavailable for severe personal reasons, and it
would be fixed soon.
Seeing things in that light, and given of what Frans did know at that time, is
there still any doubt left that the removal of my commit access was nothing
more that an unfeeling attempt to get ride of me, and that the resignation
letter is nothing but an excuse ? I was also told a bit before this events (on
irc and i saddly don't kep logs) that some people didn't really want (after
the expulsion event) for me to make the effort to come back to debian, and
would be happy to be ride of me. I wasn't told who those people are, but given
these events, one can guess.
Now, the critic i have is of another kind, and one i have done repeteadly in
the past, and for which the d-i team had marked me as someone to bash at will.
The problem here is very speaking, As you say, something happened, so the
build broke. The build breaking is listed on joeyh's web page, but depending
on folk, browsing a web page daily is a poor substitute for email
notification, and i guess we all agree on this, or we would be using bugzilla
over our BTS :). So, it broke, some folk noticed this, and fixed their daily
builds (joeyh or whoever maintains the x86 daily build among them), but nobody
informed the other daily build maintainers, so each one would have to discover
the issue alone, investigate the problem and do the fix. This i believe is not
efficient, and i said so, and something which is mirrored in the way the
kernel .udebs are handled, and i have said so in the past, tried to start a
discussion to get more efficiency into this, and proposed some possible
solutions. At the same time, Joey was repeteadly blaming the lazy porters for
for the d-i state and stuff like that.
This exact issue, is why i believe that some of the d-i team have marked me as
someone to eliminate or whatever, this is the technical reason i spoke about,
and altough i may have not been the most clever in handling this, you can look
over the email archive and see it for yourself.
> > > It's unfortunate that even your resignation as d-i porter doesn't spare the
> > > rest of the d-i team from having their time wasted by threads like this.
>
> > Oh, thanks. so you also believe that the removal of my d-i commit rights was
> > warranted.
>
> As discussed on IRC, yes, I believe the d-i repo admins have the authority
> to remove the d-i commit rights of committers who have resigned, or
> committers that they believe are abusive, or committers who have idled out,
> and probably the authority to remove commit rights for other reasons I'm not
> thinking of right now.
The question is different though. Do you believe that an alioth project admin
has the right to use personal opinion in order to do actions which potentially
hurt the project, and given the above, as well as the personal mail i
forwarded you, do you really believe that this action is warranted in this
case.
Do you believe also that there are different categories of DDs ? Some with
more rights than others ? This is indeed a very serious question, as when i
joined, it was clear that every DD was equal.
> > Could you please explain this in the open, and not in this cabal like
> > fasion ?
>
> > (22:36:45)< vorlon> fjp: can you speak to why svenl's commit access to d-i was
> > revoked? I vaguely remember a clean-up of unused d-i accounts, but I thought
> > that only covered accounts that had been unused for some time.
> > (22:37:07)< fjp> vorlon: I'd prefer /msg
>
> No, it's up to fjp to decide if he wants to say more than he already has;
> though I think at the time I made that comment on IRC, he had already posted
> a reply to this thread, which simply had not reached my inbox yet.
Ok, fine, i will let the issue in the hand of the DPL and his delegate on this
matter. All i ask is for bystander to be honest with themselves given the
facts i exposed here and elsewhere. I have the feeling that this was not the
case upto now though. And some would have reacted differently if the persons
involved where other folk.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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