On Sat, Aug 04, 2001 at 07:12:32AM +0100, David Starner wrote:
> >> It would be a question of honour, now wouldn't it.
> > No, it wouldn't. Not even slightly.
> > You have _no_ right to demand I do anything with my free time, or anyone
> > else. Unless you're their boss, you don't even have any right to demand
> > anything of people specifically paid to work on Debian.
> If you volunteer to do a job, then you should do it.
I've not volunteered to do any "job". At the moment, I'm maintaining a
bunch of packages, and trying to coordinate the release, and various other
Debian related things. Tomorrow I might not be. I'm not going to promise
to spend the rest of my life doing this; I'm not even going to promise
I'm going to spend the rest of the week doing this. I'm not even going to
offer you a week or even a day's notice of when I get sick of this. If I
get fed up with Debian gradually, I'm not even going to promise you zero
day's notice: it may well take a month or more's inactivity before I even
realise I'm fed up with Debian and that you can all go screw yourselves.
If you and others can't accept that, well, I'm outta here. I'm not going
to take being called dishonourable and a liar and a bade developer and
whatever else, because I had the gall to try improving Debian.
But apart from idiots who think they have any right to expect anything
from anyone but themselves, I'm inclined to think Debian's interesting
and worthwhile.
> If you volunteer to do a job and don't do it, the job doesn't get done.
Well, let's look at, say, Release Managing. It's a "job", right? You
might remember how we started potato's release with Richard Braakman
doing a great job. Eventually, he got sick of it, and spent more time on
work and so forth. It took him 'til after potato's release to realise
he wasn't really going to come back to his previous level of activity,
and retire gracefully. Luckily, I happened to be interested in seeing
how release managing worked to get "testing" implemented properly, so
things managed to get done anyway. Should I have avoided doing anything
'til Richard realised he wasn't really interested in working on it? Should
we have paused in the release and spent some time publically castigating
Richard for all the excellent work he's done? Or should we have done
what I did and just got on with getting the job done?
> > How _dare_ you question the honour of anyone who's given of their free
> > time to help out Debian?
> Because volunteering doesn't make one perfect, or honorable? Because some
> people volunteer for the title or the control or other selfish reasons, and
> people who forget that responsiblity comes along with them can cause more
> damage than good?
Really?
Name one. Seriously. Name one person who's got a title within Debian who's
doing it for selfish reasons, or because of some crazed power fetish.
Then sigh again about ad hominem attacks, for me.
> > Is your heart truly so blackened with arrogance
> > and selfish greed?
> Sigh. Ad hominen attacks. How is questioning the honor of a Debian developer
> "greedy"?
Insisting volunteers work on things that you want them to and they don't
is greedy and selfish. Thinking you have any control whatsoever on what
volunteers do is arrogance. Demeaning the volunteers who've built the
system you're using, without asking anything at all from you for that
use... Well, a blackened heart barely approaches a fair description.
Quite seriously: do you think I've made a commitment to continue doing
the things I'm doing now, or have done in the past? I can assure you I
haven't. Do you really need or want a demonstration?
If Debian's really become more about obligations and demands and formal
procedures than a bunch of folks helping each other out however they
see fit to achieve a common goal...
BTW, how is questioning the honour of a Debian developer not an ad
hominem attack?
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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