Re: Please unban S. Luther from debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org
I wrote:
Hi Julien,
Mike Hore <mike_hore@aapt.net.au> wrote:
Yes -- I've only been reading the list for 6 months or so and to me
this action looks quite arbitrary and extreme -- IMHO of course --
some background would be very welcome. List regulars say things like
"we all know" and "it's obvious" -- but to me at least it isn't.
Read the archives for debian-project, debian-vote and debian-devel for
the past 18 months. Then it'll be obvious for you too.
OK, though that will obviously take a bit of time. I won't comment
further until I've taken that time.
OK, thanks Julien for pointing me to the archives -- I took most of
yesterday afternoon to go through them and now what happened is indeed
pretty obvious to me.
I can now clearly see that Sven has been treated very unfairly. Several
have asked me privately to post a summary, which I'll attempt -- but I
realize this is annoying to some, so I REALLY want this to be my last
word on the subject of the past history. I'm not going to participate
in a debate on it -- the archives are there for all to read. This is
just my take on what I've read there, coming as a complete outsider.
Also my memory might be faulty -- I wasn't expecting to do a summary so
I didn't take notes. Some will probably want to take issue with me --
that's fine, but do it off-list please, and I may not always have time
to respond. I really don't want to have to go into it again.
OK, here we go. About 18 months ago Sven had a severe personal crisis
-- his mother had terminal cancer and had to be relocated urgently from
El Salvador to France. Sven had to organize this himself. She died
soon after. Sven also became a father again around that time.
With all this going on, Sven understandably asked to take a
break from the d-i team. There was apparently some personal animosity
already. Anyway somebody took Sven's request as a resignation, and his
svn commit access to the d-i repository was revoked (for the more
non-technical, he couldn't directly contribute changes to the official
installer any more). Maybe this was a misunderstanding, maybe not. It
certainly wasn't what Sven had intended. Whatever, it was surely a
terrible situation to arise since Sven was *the* powerpc d-i team member.
Once Sven was back in circulation, he asked to have this situation
remedied. The DPL of the time, Anthony Towns, accepted that it might
have been a misunderstanding, and apparently tried hard to resolve the
issue, but concluded that the rest of the d-i team were unwilling to
have Sven's access reinstated, so it wouldn't be. (By this stage I was
appalled, and could hardly believe what I was reading!)
Most of the subsequent trouble seems to have escalated from there.
Sven's major "crime" has been to send numerous messages about the issue,
and generally do it on the mailing lists since he wants everything to be
out in the open. This has irritated many who see all this sort of stuff
as being off-topic. Flame wars occurred, and this led to Sven being
banned from the lists. Was he unfairly singled out? It was his issue,
yes, but to me the worst flames weren't his. Some said he kept bringing
it up, but see my comment on this below.
Even after all this had happened to him, he refused to do a fork, but
looked for reconciliation. But that went nowhere.
He was briefly reinstated to the lists around the beginning of the year,
with some conditions attached. He also declared himself a candidate for
DPL, as is his right, but this also inflamed the irritation and I think
some saw it as breaking the conditions. He also accidentally posted a
message he intended as private email (like we all do occasionally).
Apparently for these reasons he was banned again, and still is.
(end of summary)
I find it incredible that people can't cut a bit of slack for someone
like Sven. He is *the* developer of the powerpc installer, which is a
magnificent piece of work. I've tried several others in the last couple
of years, and the debian one was a dream. I had all sorts of problems
with Ubuntu, and even when I got it installed, the fans on my G5 ran at
full speed, and even though a fix had been posted for 12 months it
hadn't made it into the installer. Then Ubuntu dropped the powerpc so I
tried Debian, and it was just so different. Now I know it was due to
Sven. We NEED people like that!! He's been accused repeatedly of
whining, but all I can see is that he's been stymied in his attempts to
work on the installer by being blocked from the d-i project. So the
subject naturally keeps coming up. Maybe he talks a bit much about it,
but most of what he says is that he's looking for a way back. To me
that's not whining.
Anyway that's all I want to comment on, about the past. What about the
future? I've got a reply from one of the listmasters that the ban won't
be removed, so it looks like this is final, and there's no way back. Do
we have any other powerpc developer who could do the installer? I doubt
it very much. I'm a powerpc developer, but not in Linux, and I'm trying
to retire (ha!)
Sven is still considering a fork, and with what I've seen, I think that
might be the only way forward.
Over to you, folks...
Cheers, Mike.
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Mike Hore mike_hore@aapt.net.au
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