Re: Jumped up developers [Re: stop the "manage with debconf" madness]
"Matt Ryan" <mryan@debian.org> writes:
> Unfortunately your choice is rather weak and doesn't back up your
> argument so I feel obliged to continue the thread a bit further
> (plus its giving my brain some exercise).
>
> [Oh yeah, the quotes are from some developer who's name I've
> promised not to use in my emails]
Is that necessary?
> > ...and telling Ben Collins to "take a Valium" after what appeared
> > to be a pretty even-handed message
>
> Unless he's a lunatic who has to take valium to keep some control I
> don't see what's wrong with that. Many people would use a similar
> analogy to indicate to someone they need to crank it down a notch or
> two.
It is insulting nonetheless. Certainly there are stronger insults, but
that Valium thing was not necessary. Furthermore, you have not engaged
in serious discussion about what the issue was. Hans Reiser accused
Debian as a whole of plagiarism and asked whether we support some
mysterious "de-crediting of Stallman and KDE" by RedHat, whatever that
is supposed to mean. As of yet, he has not even explicitly stated what
the exact license violation is, so we started guessing. Most probably
he means removal of 24 lines of listing of sponsors, advertising of
paid support etc. from the output of mkreiserfs and similar tools. In
my opinion this is not compatible with GPLv2 (which is claimed to be
the license of reiserfs), and thus the whole Reiser rant qualifies as
trolling, no matter whether he is an upstream author or not. Ben
Collins actually advised him on the recommended course of action,
i.e. filing a bug/contacting the maintainer.
> There are no ranks in Debian, no one gets paid (AFAIK) and so no
> view is more or less valid than another. I think a small minority of
> developers can easily get identified as pushing their own agendas if
> we did an informal poll on this list. Those are the one's I have
> issue with and will continue to say so. Most likely a strong feeling
> to respond to this message will promote you to the top of the list
> 8-)
I do not count myself as member of the cabal or an important member of
the project, maintaining only two chess engines. However, the debconf
issue has been discussed in the past, and it seems that some informal
consensus involved that debconf is not to be used as a registry. There
were some good arguments for that point of view, and a point of view
is not much worth if it is not backed up by arguments. The points
which stick from your emails are the insults, and that may be due to
my superficial reading, but it seems that others have the same
impression. (Matt Zimmerman did not even mention the point about "anal
retentives"...)
So, please calm down and discuss technical merits of debconf usage,
not personal motivations of some imagined developer cabal,
Lukas
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