Developer Behavior
Some Eray quotes, one paragraph of advice for Eray, and a possibly useful
idea at the end for everyone.
"Non-regulation is a false claim"
"His actions are simply not tolerable"
"I'd be greatly surprised if anybody told me that developers have the right
to swear publicly in an outburst of adolescent frenzy."
"waiting for DAM approval, whenever that is supposed to happen" (emphasis
on the "supposed to happen")
Your problem (our advantage?) is your lack of power to enforce your
demands. Yes, someone publicly used naughty words against you, you think
their actions are not tolerable, you think our communication styles are
regulated (or should be), you think we don't have the right of free speech.
That's all very nice of you to let us know what you think, thank you (?).
But you have no power over us. You can't fire the Xwindows maintainer,
because you don't send him a paycheck. You can't censor the mailling list
because you aren't the moderator (there isn't one). You attempt to
objectively state what happened, then in the same thought, shift to extreme
purely personal subjective opinions and wishes. You've decided in a
fascist manner for us, what actions are intolerable, what speech is
acceptable, what policies are false, and how you're "above the law" and
able to quote private emails freely although everyone else isn't "above the
law". You can't boss people around and tell them how to think if they are
volunteers in a freedom oriented group. I would advise you not to push for
some kind of formal code of conduct, because with your luck, the new code
would be modified into something like "Debian will tar and feather anyone
who annoys more than x% of the developers", and it would seem in a few
short days you've managed to offend everyone from the Account Manager team
to the X maintainer. Luckily for you, there are plenty of other people,
already in Debian, with poor social skills, so at least you can reasonably
request to be "grandfathered" in... My own experience in these manners is
I've posted some stupid emails, sometimes because I've got the unique
ability to "invent" a good idea long after someone else implemented it, or
else I've just been plain ole stupid and in a hurry. Regarding that, I
would say that true intelligence is learning from mistakes, which I'm
trying to do, and I suggest you do the same.
One possibly useful idea that could come out of this flamewar is an
"informal" code of conduct. The model I'm thinking of is the ARRL amateur
radio operator's code. It has about five sections, basically giving advice
on how not to be annoying as a ham radio operator. It's informal in that
if you ignore it, they can't kick you out of anything, yet if you're a jerk
and publically ignore it, noone will have anything to do with you.
Something like this might (I stress might) be useful for Debian. You could
even test people on their knowledge of the code in the new applicant
process.
Here's my start as an example of what I'm thinking of.
"Debian Developer Code of Conduct" by Vince
The goal of the Debian Code of Conduct is to improve the social skills of
Developers through a process of suggestion so that more effort can be
placed on working on code and less effort can be placed on flamewars. In
short, the code will try to tell you how to be a help, not an annoyance.
The code is not a demand, but a really strong suggestion of what actions
helps the project and what actions hurt the project.
1) A Debian Developer is a freedom oriented volunteer, yet will try to act
and communicate in the most formal and professional manner they can, as if
they represented a conservative bank, not as if they represented a bunch of
drunks fighting at the bar.
2) A Debian Developer will RTFM, isolate the problem as much as possible,
and include as much evidence as possible, before filing a bug
3) A Debian Developer will acknowledge the diversity of skill levels of his
fellow developers and will try to help other developers learn, rather than
flaming them for their ignorance.
4) A Debian Developer will understand that computer languages have priority
over traditional languages, flaming someone for poor english (or German or
whatever) is in even more annoying and non-productive than flaming someone
over poor code.
5) A Debian Developer will never knowingly run a production server on
"unstable" and will never encourage a non-developer to run "unstable".
6) ....
I have this feeling in about 1 hour someone's going to post a followup that
this idea was implemented way back in '92 and why don't I RTFM, but what
the heck, my excuse can always be that "great minds think alike", etc.
----- Forwarded by Vince Mulhollon/Brookfield/Norlight on 01/08/2001 09:29
AM -----
Eray Ozkural
(exa) To: Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org>, debian-devel@lists.debian.org
<erayo@cs.bilke cc: (bcc: Vince Mulhollon/Brookfield/Norlight)
nt.edu.tr> Fax to:
Sent by: Eray Subject: Re: Bug#81397: [authorization] fails silently for normal
Ozkural (exa) users, cannot start server
<exa@exa.homeip
.net>
01/07/2001
09:37 AM
On Sun, Jan 07, 2001 at 11:57:08PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> Debian does not try to regulate the behaviour of its maintainers,
> except where the quality of the distribution itself is involved.
> What are your contributions to Debian Eray?
Non-regulation is a false claim. Maintainers are regulated in many ways;
including being confronted with bozos like the xfree86 maintainer.
What makes you think I haven't made any contributions?
orion:science$ ls ~/devel/debian/ | grep -e .*deb
insight_5.0-2_i386.deb
overkill-data_0.13-1_all.deb
overkill_0.13-1_i386.deb
sather-browser_1.2.1-2_i386.deb
sather-doc_1.2.1-2_all.deb
sather-lwp_1.2.1-2_i386.deb
sather-mode_1.2.1-2_all.deb
sather_1.2.1-2_i386.deb
sourcenav-doc_4.5.2-1_all.deb
sourcenav_4.5.2-1_i386.deb
tix41-dev_4.1.0.7-5_i386.deb
tix41_4.1.0.7-5_i386.deb
orion:science$
For now these are the concrete contributions. Plus a lot of bug reports,
etc.
If the slow debian application process finalizes for me I'll be able to
do a lot more. [waiting for DAM approval, whenever that is supposed to
happen :(]
Thanks,
--
Eray (exa) Ozkural
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
e-mail: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo
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