Re: rudeness in general
[Steve Greenland]
> Guess what? This is not a paid support forum, or a commercial
> organization. This is a *community*. Communities have cultures,
> traditions, in-jokes, etc. You can either choose to be part of that
> community, and learn to be part of the culture, or you can go join a
> different community.
Being part of a community or not being paid is not a valid excuse for
being rude to others. I happen to be part of this community too, and
I do not treasure being rude as a positive side of the debian
community.
> One of the *long* traditions of the hacking community is a low
> tolerance for the *willfully* helpless. The only requirement for
> joining our community is competence. This doesn't mean you have to
> know everything, only that you show the ability to learn and not
> waste other people's time repeating information that is widely
> available elsewhere. This is sometimes interpeted as rudeness;
> alternatively, I think it's rude to expect someone else to read
> manpages to you.
I agree that sometimes messages are mis-interpreted as rude because of
the low communication skills of the message writer, but do not believe
this should stop us from trying to avoid being rude to each other.
> One of the responses to this has been to set up alternative
> communities where friendliness and patience are valued
> more. Debian-devel is not one of those alternatives.
I can't claim to speak for debian-devel as a whole (as I get the
impression you are doing above), but I can speak for myself, and I do
value friendliness and patience on debian-devel as well as all the
other debian forums. So in my view, we should have it as a goal to be
friendly and not hostile when writing on the list. This goes for both
readers and writers. There are seveal people where english isn't
their native language, and we tend to choose strange expressions or
say things that can be misunderstood. There is a difference between
not trying to be rude and failing, and trying to be rude and
succeeding, and this community would be better off if we avoid the
second class of comments.
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