Re: Bug#88588: libpam-modules: pam-limits.so is broken
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Russell Coker wrote:
> >The question of whether you have maintained any Open Source software is
> > very relevant. People who are involved in Open Source software
> > development know what it's like to work hard without pay and then get
> > flamed by lamers who haven't got the ability to contribute.
>
> Who the hell paid the users to rebuild their systems after your lilo
> screwup thrashed them? That's the big problem with the "DD as martyr"
> idea: NOBODY in the chain is getting treated any better.
Nobody in the chain pulls as much weight, either. You might be right, that
DD's have serious advantages from a user-point of view, but the way I see it,
they are also rightly justified in having those advantages. I'm pretty new on
the mailingslists, so I'm not quite familiar with everybody here, but the
developers I have talked with all responded fairly quick, and they weren't
"abrasive".
Please remember, that some people have very little time to give to the Debian
Project, but manages to squeeze in a few hours anyway. They all contribute to
the "greater good" of Debian, but since the larger majority doesn't get paid
to be a DD 24hrs a day, they can't do /everything/ singlehandedly.
This is not me trying to "suck up" to anybody, since I as mentioned am not
familiar with that many people yet. I'm not taking sides, but as far as I can
see, it would be advantageousif the users read the bug-reports before filing
something. You said that Ben Collins was contributing to hiding problems, but
if there are 15 bug-reports on the same problem, instead of one or two with a
lot of other users having commented or contributed, you might get pretty
tired of reading through the same again and again, and as such might lose
some important detail in bug-report #13, or so.
I feel that we should be grateful that Free Software exists. I meet so many
ego-centrical people everyday, who thinks the whole idea of giving something
for free sounds ridiculous, so seeing that Debian, FSF, Linux, and everything
Free Software (and to some extent Open Source) is really happening is a minor
miracle, and a testimony to that not all humans are selfish, capitalistic
bastards :)
Now, I think I'm shooting myself in the foot for saying this, but the
bug-report this flamewar started from, was that a package in stable, testing,
or unstable? Anything not from stable, and the user was warned (if they had
read the documentation, that is). So is LILO, or some other package, breaks,
they were warned. Stick to stable, it has it's name for a purpose. Sure,
testing & unstable are more fun, I wouldn't live away from unstable (on my
workstation, that is), but I deal with my own problems and file bug-reports
in a sensible fashion as well..
> >and that IMHO people who don't do Open Source programming are not
> > qualified to judge my contributions to Debian).
>
> Now you're just being hypocritical. You make an entire post full of
> judgements and yet say that others may not judge you. Well, tough.
Speaking for others is a dumb thing, but I'll do it anyway - I don't think he
meant judging him, I think it was more a judging of his efforts and time put
into the Debian packaging and programming in general - if you haven't tried
maintaining a crucial package, or developed a program which gets at least a
moderate amount of feedback, you will have a difficult time realising just
how much you have to dedicate to reading mails, how many stupid people are
telling you that you aren't doing a good enough job, etcetera.
Now, I'll just stop ranting here. There are a lot more things I'd like to
comment on, but judging from the recent posts, I'd just do more harm than
good. No explanation to this, because that would also be flamebait :(
--Kenneth
--
Kenneth Vestergaard Schmidt <charon@debian.org> <kenneth@bitnisse.dk>
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