Dear Sven,
So, where do I stand in this expulsion thingy?
So far I've resisted mailing on this thread. My general feelings were very
well worded by Adeodato Simó. However, my name being brought up in your
reply to Joey kind of forces me.
I don't actually think that expulsion is the correct action in this case
(even though I was one of the initiators of the previous request), so I
will not support it. That said, I understand what drove Andres to doing
it very well.
I would very much hope that instead of feeling abused and misunderstood,
the comments in this thread and the fact that some people _do_ think your
behavior is bad enough to warrant expulsion will make you take a good
hard look at your own behavior.
It would also be very nice if you could change your habits regarding:
- feeling personally insulted when people disagree with you
- dragging in old grievances on unrelated issues
- repeating yourself over and over and over and over in the same thread
(let alone in unrelated threads)
- replying to each and every message in a thread where you feel in some
way personally involved
- always replying "to all" instead of just the mailing list, even when
repeatedly asked not to do so (you could even manually trim the address
list, but I guess that would take to much time with the volume of mail
you send - see previous item)
I think it would probably also be a good idea if you concentrated your
involvement into areas you actually enjoy working on.
It seems to me that you don't actually enjoy kernel and d-i powerpc work,
but rather see it as an obligation because your business in part depends
on Debian supporting powerpc.
Below is a nice flame from me in reply to your reply to Joey. Please don't
bother answering if you're not prepared to accept a large part of the
blame for this expulsion process.
After all, how come so many people involved in this thread all work
happily together but all have problems working with you? Ah, but of
course, the problem must lie with them, it could never lie with you,
right?
Cheers,
FJP
P.S. I was very sorry to hear about your mother. My sympathy for the
difficult time ahead.
On Wednesday 15 March 2006 20:51, Sven Luther wrote:
> Notice that i left almost if not all debian-boot involvement some time
> ago because of that, and that the problems you mention where mostly
Ah, so that is basically why powerpc support in d-i is in the state it is.
I actually consider powerpc the worst supported port in d-i at the moment
[0]. And that is not because "we broke things that were working perfectly
during the Sarge release", but because you, as the main powerpc d-i
porter and our main contact with the powerpc community, have failed to
keep up with development and to run occasional tests and to get the rest
of the powerpc community behind you to solve issues.
Instead you wait until just before a release and then try to get untested
changes uploaded because "of course we cannot release while powerpc
support is broken".
I really do wonder why you build the daily d-i images if you don't try
them occasionally.
> caused by Frans commenting on things i said on debian-kernel, and not
> really directed at him, and he taked offense.
They were directed against debian-installer and were mostly a repeat of
the complaint (in an unrelated thread) that the way d-i handles kernel
udebs is totally broken.
So I felt that, as d-i release manager, it was my job to ask you to not
repeatedly bash d-i over an issue that had been discussed extensively
before and which ended unresolved because you were unwilling to consider
some of the objections to your grand plan, which basically consisted of
hijacking the kernel udebs. My asking you to stop resulted in you feeling
personally insulted which resulted in a nice flamewar.
It is absolutely no fun to hear that something you spend a lot of time on
is continually being described as "fucked" (kernel udebs, partman) and
when you're blamed for accidental breakage (which happens mostly because
of the complexity of d-i and not through malice and is often fairly
easily fixed if only the people involved are willing to do it right,
which luckily most are).
> Notice also that i am still expecting excuses on how you threated me in
> april last year, when i almost was brought to leave the project due to
> the abuse i got at the time, but i really am not expecting them
> anymore.
Why can't you just forget about it instead? You keep bringing this up
every two months or so. How does that help?
Your habit of dredging up old grievances is one of the things that makes
you a pain to work with.
It's just like what you do with smileys: you seem to think that you can
abuse someone and that putting a smiley after it as an afterthought will
make it OK. Well, it does not.
> Ever since i have questioned my involvement in debian, and
> after 8 years of participation, i have to say that issues got worse and
What does that mean? Does being involved in the project longer make it OK
to abuse people on mailinglists and IRC? Or do you want a badge of honor?
> worse the last year since a few of you guys used me as scapegoat to
> vent all their frustration on the delayed sarge release.
That's a nice example of you holding a grudge, isn't it?
> So, i don't expect anything better from you, or manoj, or jonas. I
/me feels excluded :-(
> notice thought that i have worked fine with Frans in extremadura, and
Yes, we did work together well in Extremadura. But that is mainly because
I decided in advance that I would avoid any subject there that we had
disagreements on in the past and focus instead on the subject of the
meeting, which was the graphical version of the installer.
I also think it is probably easier to work with you in real life than it
is when using mailing lists and IRC for communication.
What you are probably not aware of is that we were very close to kicking
you out of the d-i team just before Extremadura. In the end I decided not
to go through with that mainly because of that meeting and because one of
us promised to talk with you at a recent Linux event in France.
> haven't really caused any kind of trouble to the debian-boot team you
> mention since some month now.
Well, actually you have. I have been seriously considering talking to
other d-i members about kicking you out again since [1], which really
shows you at your childish best:
- refusal to test changes because it is inconvenient for you [2]
- blaming others for deliberately breaking "your" pet architecture instead
of accepting that the major changes that have happened in d-i may
require minor adaptations for ports
- holding a grudge and bringing back old disagreements whenever people
do not agree with you on totally unrelated subjects.
> I did raise a few technical issues that are of the responsability of
> the debian-boot team to solve with regard to the kernel issue, but upto
> now nothing has happened there, and i fear that with me left, they may
> simply be forgotten, altough i hope someone else will take them over.
The main reason they may not get solved is that both are in an area where
you keep pushing _your_ solution to the issues while:
- dismissing objections and reservations from others as irrelevant
- limiting yourself to outlining broad ideas, refusing to consider
specific use cases that are not covered by them and to work out
solutions for those
- proposing a totally unrealistic timeframe
- implementing one side of it, forcing that into the archive and then
leaving others to clean up the mess that's created (well, that's what
I expect would have happened on these issues)
- being so annoying about the issues is general that people get severely
demotivated to work on them at all
[0] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2006/03/msg00346.html
[2] The right reply to [1] would have been: "OK, but I cannot test this by
including partman in the initrd because the initrd would get too large
(of course _after_ at least trying that), so is there an alternative
method to test?". To which the reply would have been: sure there is...
--
< svenl> oh shit, the missing usb bits are from kernel-wedge, me really
hates this whole .udeb module crap.
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