On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 10:07:40AM +0200, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
> >> Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> > Unfortunately transparency requires having the time and desire to deal
> > with the mindless flamage that always results...
> That's fair. I sympathize with the argument "I don't have time to do
> this right now and I won't do something that will later require more
> time from me which could be better spent doing this and that". But
> then again, ftpmaster should also sympathize with the maintainer who
> spent time packaging something. If ftpmaster has a problem with a new
> package, then say so: "That license doesn't look free to me". Ignoring
> enquiries made after a reasonable ammount of time is wasting both
> ftpmaster's time and the maintianer's.
Uh, the whole point of ignoring enquiries is that it wastes far less of
the ignorer's time than responding to them. It'd be nice if this were
otherwise, but it isn't. Take a look at this thread: Joey Hess gives
the reason why he wouldn't accept it, and is then followed up by:
Joel Baker: "I do not think that exclusion by compliance with
unstated FTP Master policy is an acceptable method of
selecting packages."
Steve Langasek: "Ah -- and stalling unpopular ideas in incoming
without even the courtesy of a straightforward rejection
does not [make us look like noncooperative fools]?"
Branden Robinson: "[...] instead we have arbitrary decrees,
shrouded in some silly attempt at mystique. It's
amateurish."
Jeroen Dekkers: "Who cares that we look like noncooperative fools
[...]"
Joseph Carter: "It seems that far too much requires the blessing of
a select person or group of people to get done in this
project."
Michael Piefel: "Joey, you don't want a fork? You don't need a
translation? Good for you. Jason, it's not high on your
priorities list? Well, it wouldn't, would it. Anthony,
you don't want to release it? But not all of us are
native speakers of English, and some of us prefer
translated messages."
It's very easy to say "We should be more transparent! Yay for being
upfront and honest!", but, quite frankly it's *way* too time consuming
in practice. To take another example, back in potato's freeze when I
was culling the release critical bug list, I started off taking a fair
degree of care to include an explanation and to Cc the submitter so
they knew what was going on. About half the time it resulted in angry
messages from said submitter insisting that I was being stupid or lazy
or didn't care about good quality packages or whatever. After a couple
of exchanges of messages, it's usually possible to convince them that
you do know what you're talking about, but it just takes up way too much
time. These days, I just don't bother to Cc anyone.
And quite frankly, the only reason this package was ever uploaded in
the first place is because the submitter and everyone else who cares
couldn't manage to reach a consensus with Jason about what to do --
that doesn't bode well for a productive discussion after a REJECT message.
Besides this, people have been using the lack of many public messages from
Jason as an excuse for not bothering to do anything but criticise. Which
is all very well, and even has some merit, but you _really_ shouldn't
be so surprised about that either. Take a look back to the recent
"discussion" about more efficient downloading of Packages.gz files
in the "Debian's problems, Debian's future" thread for example. There
was actually some intelligent technical content in that and a fairly
impressive argument for making a change. But you'll be hard pressed to
find it because it's hiding amongst two or three times its weight in
general pointlessness. And you won't find any indication of what to
do next because it's just too hard to keep -devel threads rationally
focussed on a technical topic.
If you really want to encourage transparency and open discussion, the
response to bringing this issue up on this list should be a bunch of
people looking at the patches and making sure that they're completely
mergable into apt, and posting any changes that ought to be made
for further analysis. Yes, no one's done anything remotely like this.
Until that attitude gets fixed -- until this list and others get back to
focussing on developing useful high quality code, rather than bickering
about bureaucracy or trying to convince everyone that some patently
ridiculously newbie daydream is worth breaking every existing system --
don't expect people to willingly poke their heads up and tell you what's
going on.
And, quite seriously, if you're doing something useful, and you're doing
it at all sensibly and not being too whiny about it, it's remarkably
easy to get things actually done in Debian.
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.
``BAM! Science triumphs again!''
-- http://www.angryflower.com/vegeta.gif
Attachment:
pgpryHccYZsmq.pgp
Description: PGP signature