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Re: Debian needs more buildds. It has offers. They aren't being accepted.



On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 01:34:13PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> How do you change someones mind that isn't listening?

I suspect this is a rhetorical question on Goswin's behalf, but there might
be other people who'd actually be interested in an answer.

Normally, not listening isn't the problem. Normally the problem is that
people listen fine, but just disagree with the conclusions. That's no
big deal; Debian's not a one person project, and despite all we have in
common, people can disagree, whether because we're not all geniuses and
sometimes make mistakes or aren't fully informed, or because we might make
different tradeoffs. Sometimes you can't resolve these disagreements,
and just have to accept it, and put the issue off for a while until
there's more information and one of you have cause to change your mind.

If waiting isn't good enough, then you pretty much have to prove that
you can make sure that whatever flaws the other guy's worried about
don't actually happen in practice: which means setting up your own copy
of whatever it is you want changed, making the changes yourself and
making sure it keeps working, and making sure it stays running long
enough to be a realistic demo. If you don't know what the flaws are,
you might have to guess. Fix the problems you can think of, ask friends
or random people what problems they can think of, and fix them too,
and when you're done, ask whoever you're trying to convince if they can
think of anymore problems, and fix those, too.

If someone's really not listening to you, you need to do all of the above,
and aim to convince one or more people who will be listened to that your
ideas are so great they're worth advocating.

The best way to get people not to listen to you is to have stupid ideas,
then never shut up about them.

> > *shrug* My experience differs, and given it includes getting a bunch
> > of things done that, eg, Ryan and James have objected to in the past,
> > I think that counts for something.
> My experience with James is that I can't get him to react in any
> way. 

Then you're obviously doing the wrong thing.

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.

             Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we could.
           http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004

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