Re: Tone-of-voice used by sponsors

[Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr>]

Jens Peter Secher wrote:
> Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org> writes:
> 
>> if you insist on keeping the useless stuff, i consider the package as to
>> ugly according to my mesures of beauty, and hence i'm not sponsoring it.
> 
> I think it would be better if you toned down this
> do-as-I-say-or-I-wont-sponsor-you attitude.  As others have mentioned,
> some of the nitpicking is really your personal preferences, and not
> really something that makes a new Developer much better at the tasks
> involved in maintaining a package.
> 
> Anyways, as new Developers get more comfortable with the debhelper
> parts, the superfluous comments seem to vanish.  That is my experience.
> 
> Cheers,

If I may give my view of sponsored...

Daniel has been a very good sponsor with me so far, he helped me a lot
to understand many things, he was fast, and was patient enough with my
mistakes. He don't put lot's of emotions on his messages, he just write
what he thinks is good, without any bla bla.

As he does really A LOT of sponsorship, and seem to request some quality
in many things (indentation on the maintainer script, copyright and
everything), and repeat again and again all the time the same things. So
the fact that he don't want to spend time in explaining is
understandable. I'd be like him, and I understand well his view, it's
"do as I say, and don't loose my time" even if he might not say this way
or somebody would soon flame him. But I think this last sentence is the
true explanation, that's the only way to be efficient: sponsor a lot of
people and keep quality.

I agree on the fact that if somebody is not happy, he can try to go and
see somebody that cares less about a package being beautiful to Daniel's
eyes, or take care more on messages. On my case, I do appreciate a lot
the quality standard that he imposed to me. I agree Daniel's tone is not
the best, as it's a bit as cold as a compiler message (error X line Y),
but that's efficient. Also, as said Daniel he always adds explanations
when we ask.

Thomas