Re: Social Committee proposal
On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:26:37 +0000, Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.iki.fi> said:
> On to, 2007-01-25 at 18:34 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> But the dev-ref is optional -- last time I read it, I did not find
>> it very useful tome, and I disagreed with a lot of its dictums, and
>> so I largely ignore it while building packages; I rely on my sense
>> of best practices. The tech ctte does not come down on me like a
>> tonne of bricks for not removing the . from my short descriptions.
> Nobody cares if you do things differently from what the dev-ref
> suggests. Heck, nobody cares if you violate the policy, either, as
> long as nothing breaks. (It's just that for the policy, usually
> something does break, if you violate it.)
> Likewise for a social policy: as long as there are no problems,
> nobody cares if you violate it. If the social policy were to say
> "don't swear", and you do swear, but everyone understands that you
> had a really, really bad day (you lost your job, your spouse wants a
> divorce, the tax people want to audit you, your car was stolen,
> *and* someone filed an RC bug against your package), and is willing
> to ignore your one-time transgression, then enforcing the policy
> against swearing just for the sake of enforcing the policy would be
> stupid.
> (I'm not saying "don't swear" would be a good rule, it's just an
> example here.)
But this is the problem. It is called selective
enforcement -- there are rules on the law books here in the US that
make no sense (you can't invite young white males to play billiards
or pool in Mobile, Alabama -- old men, women of any age, or young
black men are apparently fine). No one cares about such laws --
until the powers that be want to make an example/ harass someone
/throw the book at them, and suddenly they have a $2000 fine for
getting friends over for a pool game.
Selective enforcement can be chilling.
Also, your example has the negative implication, no matter how
you disclaim it, that the end result of a social policy is gonna make
me feel like I am in a disney movie.
No fucking way, man. No fucking way.
manoj
--
2180, U.S. History question: What 20th Century U.S. President was
almost impeached and what office did he later hold?
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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