Re: Done

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 10:46:55AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> 	I sincerely hope that the sentiment in the argument above is
>  not widely held. Because of this sentiment, though,  I am reluctantly
>  beginning to come to the conclusion that there may be something of
>  substance in user complaints that debian developers are arrogantr,
>  novice unfriendly, and the distribution is one for steeped in
>  elitism. 

How far away is that, really, from holding the attitude you've often
professed that developers work primarily to produce the best system for
themselves, and that altruism is merely a biologically infeasible
delusion? ;-) In my experience, such as it is, people who are unwilling
or unable to follow up an inadequate package description and discover
what it does are statistically less likely to be collaborative users, on
the basis that only a limited proportion of novices end up
collaborating, and therefore a strict approach of enlightened
self-interest would seem to give their problems lower priority.

It seems a very small step behind enlightened self-interest to care only
about problems that directly affect your own use of the system, which
often leads to being unfriendly to novices. I prefer not to think about
things that way myself.

(I freely admit to caring *more* about problems that affect me, but I
wouldn't pay so much attention to bugs if that were my only motivation.)

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]