Re: dotdee: a proposal for improving conffile management in Debian

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

The following contains guesses about human nature; please keep in mind
that these are just guesses I am very, very likely to be wrong.

Dustin Kirkland wrote:

> Hmm, well, neither of these itches are quite identical to our
> particular itch, and the proposed/pending/abandoned(?) solutions don't
> quite solve the problem I need to solve.  And I'd hate to spend time
> simplifying and polishing them entirely in vain.

Okay, but can you take inspiration from them?  I explained the
relationship a little more in a separate message.

I can promise to be very responsive re something like that patch if
you are willing to listen and work with me (and I imagine the same
might go for some other people).

It's petty of me, but the previous time I sent review on that series
I was ignored.  That's demotivating, so I stopped reviewing it.

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.dpkg.general/11100

I don't think that's Sean's fault --- all around, the process just
didn't go well because (I guess) of mismatched expectations:

 - Sean expected a show of good faith from the maintainer (e.g.,
   merging some new APIs that would make development of the later
   patches easier);

 - I expect that after I review a patch, the next iteration will
   either address the problems I pointed out or give some comments on
   the subject;

 - Guillem expected --- well, I don't know what Guillem expected, but
   in general his practice seems to be to wait for conversation to
   settle and pick up what looks good, giving input when things have
   gone in a wrong direction.  Which works well for Linux subsystem
   maintainers most of the time, but doesn't seem to have worked here.

> If the maintainers
> have a punch list of exactly what needs to be solved to get such
> solutions committed, I'd be glad to help out.

As I mentioned in another reply, I think that's a bad way to write
software.  Unforeseen problems can come up after writing a patch.

But I'm not the maintainer --- I'm just someone who wants dpkg's
conffile handling to be a little better.  So feel free to ignore me
if you're only interested in getting your code committed.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan