Re: Resignation
On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 02:29:10AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > > > Why is quitting worthy of jeering then?
> > > FWIW, the main reasons I can see for this resignation would be either:
> > > (i) you honestly believe that if the argument does not go your way, you
> > > will be sufficiently unhappy working in the project that it is better
> > > for your state of mind to quit,
> > > (ii) persuasion is failing and you wish to push people to your side of the
> > > argument through other means (i.e., through the loss of your significant
> > > contribution),
> > Had he said that e.g. he will refuse to use kde debs because of that bug,
> > or that he will up the severity of the bug to RC, or something like that,
>
> The bug doesn't match the criteria for any of the RC severities. Setting
> it one of them would have been utterly inappropriate, and a misuse of the
> BTS. Also, the issue wasn't limited to KDE, but covered the new installer
> (ie, the topic of the thread), and a host of other packages, [0].
Well, anyway, just about any action would have been more useful than
quitting the whole goddamn project.
> > I would have understood it as (i). Instead, quitting altogether certainly
> > looks more like (ii) or worse, and I find such an act worthy of derision.
>
> It's always entertaining when folks don't want to give others the benefit
> of the doubt, then try to imagine that they have any chance of knowing
> the state of their mind so they can claim that there isn't really any
> doubt anyway.
Umm, where have I stated that I know his state of mind? You quoted it right
there, I said that it _looks more like_ <something> (that is, to the one who
looks, i.e. myself), and that I consider such an _act_ as <something>.
I don't really care for what Herbert Xu's state of mind is, I judge him
by his actions, and he sure acted rather prominently in this event.
> For reference, the time between Herbert indicating he'd quit over this
> issue [1], 'til he actually did quit [2] was under a day, with the only
> discussion between that time being on clarification of the project's
> stance on the issue (namely, that numerous packages use the ISO standard
> except for the case of Taiwan) [3]. After his resignation, he explicitly
> discouraged folks from considering his position as pressure to change
> other folks' stance on the issue [4]. Neither of which are the mark of
> someone trying to use their contribution to the project as leverage to get
> other folks to do what they want.
No, he didn't do that, he merely made a remark that his opinion is
"no longer relevant as it is already too late for [him] to back out of
this process". That is, he already made up his mind and couldn't be
persuaded otherwise even if Denis Barbier changed the software to do
what he (Herbert Xu) said. It's nice to be consistent, sure, but I prefer
not being unreasonable over being consistent.
I think that this is much worse that trying to apply leverage to a
discussion with the weight of one's contributions, that's just a bluff
tactic employed in an argument. This, on the other hand, is actually
sacrificing all those contributions for the purpose of making a point,
and one that I don't consider to be actually worth making, let alone worth
sacrificing for.
When someone does a "... or I quit!" post, that's more of a funny thing
(though of course far from commendable), but when someone actually does
it, then that's plain fucked up.
And as if the whole idea of quitting Debian for tangential daily-political
reasons wasn't bad enough, he also had to make it clear that he wouldn't
allow himself to be reasoned with any further because they offended his holy
cow or something and the game was over.
Anyway, I'm starting to repeat myself. If you think that people with such an
attitude should be given the benefit of the doubt (?), that's just great,
but I choose to openly condemn it, and silly sarcasms such as...
> But hey, he's probably just stupid as well as immoral and risible, and
> that's why his evil plans didn't work out. All the more reason to point
> and laugh, right?
...don't bother me at all.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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