Re: Removing bzip2 support from apt due to rustification
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> On Sat, Jun 8, 2019 at 10:09 AM Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Please let us have internal conversations without using them to
>> prematurely pick fights with external maintainers.
> It definitely wasn't my intention to pick a fight.
Yeah, I didn't think that part was intentional since it seemed contrary to
everything I know about you, but that is the effect of pulling them into a
discussion that's negative about their work.
> I strongly disagree with hiding upstream problems from upstream
> developers. I wonder why our first reaction should be to have internal
> discussions instead of upstream discussions. To me that also seems rude,
> especially as we promised to communicate with upstream as part of the
> Social Contract.
It's a human psychology thing, I think, and it's specifically about the
critical or negative threads.
While it's a common maxim that you should only say positive things about
people and you should never say something that you wouldn't say to
someone's face, it's pretty unrealistic with real people in real
situations that we're going to achieve this 100% of the time. Asking
everything anyone says in debian-devel be phrased in such a way that it
would be a productive thing to relay directly to an upstream project is
asking a lot. It might be a lovely utopia if we all lived up to that
ideal, but, well, we won't.
I think it's helpful to give people a bit of space to acknowledge that the
first thing we say out of frustration or surprise or dismay may not be the
thoughtful and constructive thing we *want* to say. There's a lot of
initial noise in reactions.
This isn't just for us; it's also for the upstreams involved. It can be
demoralizing and frustrating to be pulled into negative discussions about
something you care about, and people have limited capacity to react
gracefully to such things. Part of the goal is to be respectful of that
energy. They will pick and choose what they read and what they choose to
react to in order to manage their energy, and in turn we, when reaching
out with constructive criticisms, will (or at least should) put more
effort into phrasing than we might when complaining about something to our
fellow project members.
I completely agree with you that if we have some piece of concrete
feedback for upstream, we should send that to upstream, particularly
before we act our beliefs or understandings. It all may be a
misunderstanding, or we may be able to convince them to do something
differently, and this should be a collaboration and partnership. I'm just
saying let's not do that as a raw feed of discussions that weren't written
with them as the intended audience. The effort we put into reframing our
consensus or discussion into something more readily consumable by upstream
than a complaint thread is important and increases the chances that
discussion will go well.
We're not hiding anything -- the archives are public and if they really
want to read it all, they can. We're creating social space for
politeness, which is, in part, maintaining the mutual grace of not
immediately telling other people everything negative that we think about
their work, only the things that are important and that survive some
further reflection.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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