Bug#841294: Overrule maitainer of "global" to package a new upstream version
On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 11:58:02AM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> I'm purposedly not answering to the rest of your email, as I think the TC now
> has enough information to issue a decision.
It's ok, you purposely not answering things I asked you to comment on,
which didn't support your personal agenda, had already stopped being
a surprise some time ago.
So I'm going to save the people on the ctte who haven't yet trawled
through this quagmire to sort the facts from the misdirection and
abuse, from wasting their precious time like I apparently have. And
I'm going to cut my losses here and not waste any more of my time on
it either.
I promised Phil and Sam, that if an effort was made to come to a
consensus on the technical questions, that I'd respect it, even if
that consensus wasn't formed around my own preferences.
And I likewise promised them, that if I thought what was being suggested
was ignorantly insane, that I'd just walk away without a fight.
So congratulations. You officially bounded across the threshold of insane
when, even given the context of what Vincent would have happily signed
blindly and uploaded, you were happy to offer him the responsibility of
being the maintainer of this with your TC hat on. This would be the same
Vincent who has never looked at this code, has never contributed anything
to it, who couldn't even muster the effort to understand the problems
himself or file proper bugs about them - and instead delegated that to the
TC, the same way he delegated doing the work to Punit, and delegated a lot
of plainly false accusations toward me. And who couldn't even follow the
simple instructions here: https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte
without taking short cuts and ignoring the parts of that process which do
require some minimal extra effort to be put in.
Obviously an excellent candidate to maintain a package with hard problems!
Everything becomes easy if your ability to ignore things is strong enough.
You then had the gall to angrily insist that while you thought he might
be a better maintainer than me, it was still my responsibility to do the
work to fix all the obvious things that others had missed in their fork
(which he hadn't contributed anything to either). I'm afraid that's not
how encouraging volunteers to contribute their time for you works ...
sorry if this is news to you.
As you yourself noted, global is an unimportant package, and realistically
pretty much every part of it has been obsoleted for a long time now, by
alternatives that are better maintained upstream, that take real issues
more seriously, and that are more usefully functional.
I've never been shy about stepping up to take on 'hard' packages, whether
they are hard because of the code, or hard due to 'difficult' upstreams,
or some other reason. And nobody ever thanks the people who do that, but
I was fine with that too. But I'm not fine with the culture of arrogant
entitlement that some groups of users seem to be infected with, "you gave
me your work for free, now you owe me!". And I'm not fine with being
abused and slandered by people who themselves have contributed absolutely
nothing toward helping improve the things they are complaining about.
I stayed engaged with this process against my better judgement, because I,
like many others, had high hopes that ending Ian's reign of terror on the
TC was a huge opportunity for a new culture of mediated cooperation and
consensus to emerge. And regardless of what was decided about global,
this seemed like a good opportunity to demonstrate and cultivate that as
an example for others.
But it's now quite clear that experiment has failed quite dismally too.
Maybe because Vincent is your mate. Maybe because Ian was living up to his
reputation to cause infinite pain to anyone who ever disagreed with him.
Maybe because it is just easier, and less potentially embarrassing, to punt
on hard problems than to have a solution of your own to put on the table.
Maybe because of something else entirely - but that's your problem to debug
and solve now. It doesn't matter what the outcome of what you're proposing
to vote on would be, you were asked by a package maintainer to offer advice,
and the best you could offer was "we'll let somebody other than us take the
blame for whatever unfolds with this".
It is a 'vote' that frankly I'd even be embarrassed to 'win'. I'm exhausted
and demoralised by this being just another long road to nowhere. Not because
some people disagreed with me - I don't mind that, that's how you learn
things. But because the increasingly ill-named technical committee has once
again refused to stick its collective necks out to actually offer technical
advice when explicitly asked to. We chopped some heads off the hydra, but
it's apparently still just the same old beast, trudging the same old trails.
Only some different people get to pad their CVs with extra job titles.
Explaining things in careful detail has had every appearance of being a
complete waste of my time whichever way this might have ended up. The only
problem you've engaged with is making it be someone else's problem again.
So I give up. Maybe that means the terrorists with their simpler mantras
have won, and the cheering and firing into the air can begin.
But at least I've learned not to make that mistake again.
Anyone who doesn't understand:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2016/12/msg00062.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/11/msg00458.html
will be doomed to repeat it. Again.
I really do wish we'd all learn that. One day.
Personally, I'm going to take the remaining time I'd have wasted on this
and put it to good use improving my own infrastructure to maintain a set
of local packages for private use by myself and inside our company. If
this is the future of maintaining hard packages, then I'd much rather
just do that completely privately, and not contribute that work somewhere
that will just attract ungrateful people to rudely bitch at me about it.
I'll join the people who've taken the soft option to only maintain easy
packages in the distro archives, with nice polite users and upstreams
who are a genuine joy to work with. Which aren't still in CVS.
I'm feeling marginally better about this knowing that Wookey has put up
his hand to offer to be on point, even though he doesn't actually use it.
He really has been the only person who actually put in the effort to make
researched and actionable bug reports, and showed a willingness to
cooperate and fix things, even despite having an obvious prejudice for an
option different to what I preferred. That's how real respect is earned.
If he'd done that earlier, or before this became yet-another adversarial
melee in the ctte arena, maybe this would have all gone much differently
and more pleasantly - but you can't uncrash a trainwreck.
So I've now orphaned this package, and he has my blessing and sympathy
for being responsible for whatever happens with it from here. I haven't
filed a WNPP bug for that as we don't need to offer it to someone random.
Wookey: if you want the complete git history, right back to the very first
package in 1999, you can grab it from the Vcs-Git URL in the sid package.
I'm not going to go Full Bruce and rage delete it, but eventually I should
decruft alioth and remove it from there, so if you want it you should
probably clone it somewhere that works for you.
Good luck!
Ron
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