On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 05:29:41PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Well, the alternative is of course that you knew about the bug, and knew > that it'd break for everyone as soon as they installed your package, > and just couldn't be bothered fixing it. "The alternative"? Your world is either-or? You never need switch statements or "else if"s because your world is all "if-then-else"? What happened was, I tested the new versions of the conffiles on my home box as a guinea pig test in response to the initial filing of 113878, and lost track of which version of the conffiles I had installed (the ones from the package, or the ones I had used for testing). I know it's a lot to ask people to read the logs of #113878. > But not testing a package that you upload to unstable isn't that big > a concern. Fortunately, a lack of concern that isn't warranted in this case, but I understand people's need to attribute this incident to malice rather than stupidity (or confusion, if one wishes to be charitable, which -- let's admit -- no one apparently does). > Funnily enough, I don't actually read and analyse every bug report that > gets filed to ensure that it's the appropriate severity. Normally this > works pretty well (especially, IMO, since "important" got forked into > "serious"), as evidenced by the rarity of flamewars like this. You didn't experience the bug yourself, then? Just curious. > > Given that, I conclude > > that the matter was left to my discretion. > > Which, indeed it was. The problem is, you got it wrong. And what should my punishment be, O God of Earth and Altar? I assume you have something in mind more severe than accusations generated by random iteration over a list of logical fallacies. > And that's wrong too: talking about the decision now, saying that it > was wrong, and saying why it's wrong, helps us work out what we should > do in future. Or at least, it does for other people who aren't too busy > trying to blame everyone else. Perhaps you missed the bits where: 1) I announced the presence of the bugs to mailing lists; 2) Prepped a pre-release version of XFree86 that people can use at the XSF until -8 proper is ready; 3) said "Since it's my package, I take full responsibility for the fuckup." As before, I realize it's much more personally satisfying to attribute this incident to failure of character in preference to any other explanation. > > Alternatively, I could never downgrade any bugs that are filed against > > X, and it would be promptly removed from the distribution due to bugs I > > can't fix. (See most of the "important" bugs against xserver-xfree86.) > > And that would be "false dichotomy". You're the one who divides situations of arbitrary complexity into binary states. In my world-view, there are often many more than two explanations for events; more than two possible courses of action available to us in most circumstances; and so forth. Really, you have a most astounding capacity for injecting your own meanings into other people's words. This isn't the first time I've noted it. Perhaps you wouldn't find so many "logical fallacies" in other people's statements if you made an honest effort to understand them first. If you don't know what someone means, ask. Not everybody plays to perfection the role you have constructed for them in your mind. -- G. Branden Robinson | If a man ate a pound of pasta and a Debian GNU/Linux | pound of antipasto, would they branden@debian.org | cancel out, leaving him still http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | hungry? -- Scott Adams
Attachment:
pgpIg8pi7Fo5S.pgp
Description: PGP signature