On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 01:19:09PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
And thus we have a flamewar in public, as well as in private, and even
less gets done.
> AJ, do you now understand why telling people to do what Taral did
> doesn't actually work?
Yes, I believe I do. Absolutely *nothing* guarantees you you're going
to be thanked for your contributions, and nothing guarantees you your
contributions are going to be accepted, and even if they're _perfect_
nothing guarantees the problem you're working on will be solved. Often it
will. The probabilities that it won't tend to increase when a flamewar's
involved and everyone starts looking for reasons to be snippy.
If it'd been me, and I'd felt strongly enough in the first place to do
something about this, I'd've probably apologised for whatever I'd done
that was so annoying to James (whatever he took as "going behind his
back to get added to keyring-maint", presumably), and keep doing the
rest on the presumption that they're still good odds that it will help,
and no reason to think it'll actually hurt.
OTOH, I don't tend to start doing things after having things blow out
into a virtual lynching, so I haven't been in quite the same situation,
so I can't really say for sure. On the gripping hand, (and to continue
this trend) I do have a private mail from James from way back in mid '98,
so about five months after my new-maintainer application, that didn't
do much other than try to shoot the details or concept of testing down.
Perseverence certainly can pay off. [0]
> It would work if James were being cooperative, but he's *not* being
> cooperative, and he's apparently *not* behaving reasonably.
Don't you think you're being a little to quick to judge whether James is
being reasonable when (a) you don't actually know if Taral's contribution
would have actually been useful to anyone, and (b) you only have Taral's
account of what was going on?
Cheers,
aj
[0] Not everything from '98 turned out the way I might've wanted, though,
eg Bug#18733. :~(
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
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