On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 01:52:11AM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> Hello world,
>
> As you all know there's been an expulsion process (following the
> procedure outlined in [1]) running, with Sven Luther as the
> nominee. We've finally reached a decision. *Please* read the full mail
> before you reply, as we will give detailed reasons why we decided the
> way we have. Take a minute (or hour) to think about your reply before
> you actually send it. (Something that could be done more often by all of
> us).
Joerg, James, NM-ctte, fellow Debian Developers, Debian Users, World at large, ...
You will find here my reply to your expulsion procedure, including mention of
the many irregularities and non-respect of the procedure, your non-respect for
the strong opposition of a vaste (75 to 7) majority of DDs in the discussion
on debian-private, and your total lack actually seeing the complete set of
responsabilities and this and trying to come to a fair ruling.
I wish you would either take back this decision, or be fair and extend it to
Frans Pop, Anthony Towns, and Steve McIntyre, who share in no small part the
responsability of more than one year of strife and infighting for which i was
summarily judged here.
Profundly hurt,
Sven Luther
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About the expulsion procedure :
===============================
Plan :
0) Summary
1) What the procedure does say
2) What happened
3) Supporters / Opposers of the expulsion
4) The content of the complaints
5) Conclusion
0) Summary, for the impatients
- ------------------------------
- The expulsion discussion on -private showed a overwhelmingtratio of 75 to
7 people opposed to the expulsion, the majority of them strongly opposed,
and various who said they would leave debian if the expulsion has gone
through. The DAMs did ignore most of those, chosing only to quote
non-attributed passages of the pro-expulsion in length.
- The expulsion procedure was shady at best, not reaching quorum, not being
dismissed after the 2 weeks of the initial request as per the procedure.
- both Anthony's original request of 3 months ban as well as the renewal of
interest in seconding the request on february 21 coincide with the end of
the DPL election and my DPL candidacy.
- i am not alone responsible of these events, and was under continuous
agression since fall 2005, principally by Frans Pop. Anthony Towns and
Steve McIntyre where acting as DPL and mediator, but where fully in favour
of Frans Pop since the begining, and thus share equal responsability in
the events reproached to me. As thus, all three of them should suffer the
same penalty as i am facing
1) What the procedure does say
- ------------------------------
First, the expulsion procedure was illegal, and as thus the final decision on
it is not valid. The procedure is described in :
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/08/msg00005.html
And lists in step 2 (expulsers search seconds) :
The time limit for this step is 2 weeks. If there are not Q supporters
after 2 weeks, this process ends.
And the following part of step 3 (informing the expulsee) :
If the nominator gets enough supporters we will write a mail to the
nominee about it, including the names and reasons of all
people involved.
Furthermore, on step 1 (nomination), it is written :
We reserve the right to reject any nomination if we think the nomination
will not survive the following process or is caused by animosity between
two developers, like simple packaging disagreements.
2) What happened
- ----------------
So, this are the rules set forward by the DAMs themselves, and now let's look
at what happened :
On January 3, Anthony Towns puts in a request for my expulsion to the DAMs.
So, this is the official step 1. It is clear that the expulsion request does
not fall under the cover of a technical abuse of debian ressources, but result
from a (largely gotten out of hand) animosity between two developers (namely
Frans Pop and myself), so the DAMs could have rejected the procedure at this
point, but let's look into this later.
The step 2 starts on January 3, and has a 2 week duration, which brings us to
january 17, at which time i should have been informed of the request, as per
step 3 cited above. This was not the case, instead :
On January 5 or 6, Joerg Jaspert contacted me per irc, and then phoned me,
telling me about the expulsion request (i have some mails requesting your
expulsion in my mailbox, and i need to do something about them), and we
discussed, and i was asked to talk only about technical issues on debian
lists, and no more try to solve the social mess which lead to this problem.
During the months of february, i posted only twice on debian lists, the
first time when i declared me as DPL candidate (and debian-vote had
explicitly been declared non-bannable during the thread in december), and a
second time, due to a mistake of my part in the week preceding FOSDEM, when
i was trying to organise for a TV for the booth.
On February 24, Joerg Jaspert, acting DAM in this issue, sent me an email
which never reached me. On February 25 afternoon, i had a quick talk with
James Troup at FOSDEM, the second DAM, who didn't say a word to me about
this. On January 26 evening i finally received the expulsion request mail.
So, apart from the lost occasion to solve this in RL on an occasion where many
Debian Developers where present, 54 days passed between the expulsion request
and the informing the expulsee step.
=> This is the first flagrant irregularity of the procedure.
So, i was distressed and hurt because even if i respected the two month ban,
before it was even ended, and while i made effort to bring hardware for the
debian booth, the expulsion was still going forward, despite me following the
recomendations of Joerg Jaspert.
So, now on to the content of the expulsion request :
Accordying to Jaspert's mail, Q was set to 16 :
Current Developer Count = 1016
Q ( sqrt(#devel) / 2 ) = 15.9373774505092
K min(5, Q ) = 5
Quorum (3 x Q ) = 47.8121323515277
This means 16. Step 2 had a timeline of 2 weeks, end was 21 February 2007.
All together we got 18 supporters, which means we are above Q and have to
go on.
Here, we see for the first time the date of February 21 included, and the 2
week timeline was explicitly mentioned, which would have put the begining of
the expulsion procedure on February 7. It is interesting to notice that i had
officially declared myself as DPL candidate on February 6, so it is now
evident that the expulsion request was a direct reaction to my DPL candidacy,
and this procedure a way to get ride of a candidate. Well, maybe there is
another explanation, but i fail to find one.
So, the expulsor was
Anthony Towns
and the supporters where :
Manoj Srivasta (srivasta@debian.org)
Michael Bank (mbanck@debian.org)
Martin Michlmayr (tbm@cyrius.com)
93sam@debian.org
fs@debian.org
John Goerzen (jgoerzen@complete.org)
Frans Pop (fjp@debian.org)
Andres Salomon (dilinger@debian.org)
Joey Hess (joeyh@debian.org)
liw@iki.fi
Geert Stappers (stappers@stappers.nl)
tolimar@debian.org
Jeroen von wolffelaar (jeroen@wolffelaar.nl)
tfheen@debian.org
micah@riseup.net
decklin@red-bean.com
(Thomas bushnell) tb@becket.net
Theodore Tso (tytso.mit.edu)
Well, first, a very strange way to name people by their email addresses, and
not their full name, but well. We have 18 supporters, so, barely 2 more than
the bare minimum.
There, a first suprise can be found, none except the expulsion request from
Anthony is dated, nor signed by their authors.
=> This may be a second irregularity, how can those non gpg-signed mails be
evidence ?
A second surprise follows immediately, the first mail is not Anthony's
expulsion request, but Andres Salomon's expulsion request from start of march
2006, which had been taken back by Andres himself before it could go further.
Furthermore, it contains various lies or innacuracies, but we will go into
this at a later point.
=> The supporter mail from Andres is not a response to Anthony's expulsion
request, but predates it by 10 months, and has been retired, so it cannot be
accepted accordying to the DAMs own procedure. There is a supporter mail
from Andres farther down, so his supporting is still valid.
Then follows Anthony's expulsion procedure, which he clearly was the result of
animosity due to an exchange i had with him during these days, and which asks
for a suspension of 3 months (which would coincidentally have ended around the
end of the 2007 DPL election, of which Anthony is candidate).
We have then a bunch of mails, without dates, and which show evidence of
dating being supporters of Andres Salomon's expulsion request from marsch 2006 :
Decklin Foster :
From: Decklin Foster <decklin@red-bean.com>
Subject: Re: removal of svenl from the project
To: Andres Salomon <dilinger@debian.org>
Cc: da-manager@debian.org
Thomas Bushnell :
From: Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>
Subject: Re: removal of svenl from the project
To: da-manager@debian.org
Cc: dilinger@debian.org
...
I second Andres request with respect to Sven Luther.
Theodore Ts'o :
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Subject: Re: removal of svenl from the project
To: Andres Salomon <dilinger@debian.org>
Cc: da-manager@debian.org
...
I hereby second Andres' expulsion request of Sven Luther. My reason
So, this makes 3 supporters who are not supporting Anthony's request, but
Andres request which was withdrawn, and are thus not valid. This brings the
supporter down to 15, which is one less than Q, and makes the procedure
irrecevable.
=> This is yet another blatant error in the procedure.
As said, there are no further dates on the other mails, appart from the one
from Michael Banck, which contains :
From: Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org>
Subject: Re: Sven Luther
To: da-manager@debian.org
On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 02:23:21PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
And suggests that Manoj Srivastava immediately replied to Anthony's original
proposal (the difference in dates can probably be accounted for timezones,
with Anthony in Australia, and Manoj in the USAs).
The other element, is a private irc discussion with Jeroen, where he told me
he supported the request on March 21.
I noticed this, and was deeply disturbed, and asked the DAMs about a
clarification concerning the dates, as well as a copy of the gpg-signed
supporter mails, complete with headers. I repeated this request on irc, and
others have later asked for the dates (Pierre Habouzit for example, but there
where others), and where greeted only by the silence of the DAMs.
=> This tends to prove that the DAMs have something to hide, and knew of the
irregularity of the procedure, and chose to ignore this fact.
So, on a purely procedurial basis, the expulsion request is not valid, and the
DAMs decision is thus invalid. This is particularly troubling seeing how Joerg
Jaspert chose to say :
From: Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org>
Subject: Info about "Procedure for the expulsion of Debian Developers"
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:35:19 +0100
Message-ID: <87mz2w9bmg.fsf@vorlon.ganneff.de>
...
ok, from following the huge amount of mails in -private, and the way
less large amount of mails to da-manager, it is obvious that not
everyone understands the procedure.
...
What the procedure gets us is a.) a way for every DD to ask the DAMs
to (maybe) use their right to expel someone and to know what happens
from there on, and b.) makes sure there is at least a minimum level of
support, by requiring that much (Q) supporters, and also c.) gives us
DAMs a good source of input for arguments for or against an expulsion,
by allowing both sides to send in their statements and to allow all
Developers to also do that.
So, it is clear that Joerg is adhering and even defending the procedure as
a way to judge on such issues, and it is thus even more troublesome that
the procedure is not followed.
Furthermore, Anthony Towns himself said on debian-private and in private mail :
For this particular case, I don't have an answer; like I said on -private,
I'd assumed the suspension request had folded for lack of support by
mid-January, and apart from my posts to -private which I assume you've
already seen, haven't had anything to do with it since then.
Which, coming from the original expulsor, further confirms the irregularity of the expulsion procedure.
Finally, the judgement of the DAMs take into account events that happened
after the 2 weeks discussion period, including an angry mail from Eirich,
which he posted in anger because i didn't reply to him anymore on irc, even
though i told him i was going to bed (i told him good night and went to bed).
=> This is a further breach of the procedure.
Finally, during the expulsion period, Micah did take back his support, thus
further diminishing the amount of original supporters.
3) Supporters / Opposers of the expulsion
- -----------------------------------------
Supporters : 7
Opposers : 75
4) The content of the complaints
- --------------------------------
Here again, there are various very troublesome points.
First, Anthony Towns, the expulsor, and Steve McIntyre, a supporter, are both
DPL candidates, Anthony is the DPL, and as thus was asked to mediate
on the dispute between myself and Frans Pop. This mediation was doomed to
failure from the start, since Anthony Towns was, for whatever reason, biased
and fully took position with Frans Pop, despite numerous evidence to the
contrary.
Anthony: "You first have to recognize that everything is your fault"
Anthony: "I acknowledge that i know nothing about mediation"
Anthony: "You deserve better than that for your contributions to Debian,
you deserve worse than it for the way you've treated Frans and
everyone else who's tried to help you over the past year and
beyond that."
Anthony: "Ultimately, it's because we tolerate such hate and hurt. You're
not remotely alone in being attacked in spite of your
contributions, but at least you're not getting called
'Satan himself'"
Anthony: "Ultimately, because we're a bunch of idiots who don't know how to
get along with each other."
So, here, Anthony does two things, he recognizes that he did a bad job at the
mediation, that he doesn't know anything about it, but also still considers
that Frans is fully right, and that i should fully accept that all the
problems where my fault, despite clear evidence otherwise.
So, we had a social problem, nothing new there, it happened because there was
a clash between individuals of strong personality, as is often the case, and
are often found in the free software community and in debian in particular.
I got involved into this because i was passionated about debian, wanted the
best technical solutions for it, and when i wanted to *DISCUSS* the problems
and potential technical solutions, i became the target of incessant attacks
from a small sub-group of debian. This really started with the vancouver
disaster in spring 2005, where many people participated in passionate debates
on debian-devel, and i was severly insulted, and it started again in fall
2005, where i had to deal with Manoj and Jonas, who suddenly became active at
the fringes of the kernel team, in order to get a solution out for the devfs
obsolescence and the initrd-tools dependency. During this time, i was faced
by the continual attacks and insults of Manoj (FUCK YOU) and jonas, but in
spite of that we managed, after i invested a lot of full time work and was
able to harness the effort of the whole team, in the same-day-upload of the
2.6.14 kernel, with generic support for various ramdisk-generators.
During the same time, i was under regular attack from Frans and Joey Hess,
because i wanted to prolong the work we had done with the passage to the
single source package kernel infrastructure, to allow us to do single or few
days uploads of a full new d-i, compared to the whole month or more it was
taking previously. Another clash was when i supervised Xavier Oswald's
internship, on a project to create a d-i technology based ghost like tool,
which would also have yielded a nicer graphical partitioner for d-i.
In both those cases, the d-i leadership opposed me because they feared to lose
control over d-i, and rejected ideas and improvement out of hand without going
into any argumentation, and going agressive when this was pointed out to them.
Despite this, I worked side by side with Frans at the extremadura d-i meeting,
and meet him on friendly terms at FOSDEM. I later went to the erkelenz event,
were i meet Jonas, and told him, about an RC bug which he had left open since
december "let's take a few minutes, investigate the issue, and fix the bug". I
had to hear him explain to me in a 30 minute discussion growing ever more
agitated that no, he should not even look into the problem, because he was
afraid it would break non-official kernels. This was a bit hallucinating to
me, since well, what does it cost to look into it ? So, i backed down, and
even went after Jonas when he left the room to have a few friendly words, so
we would part in good terms.
A month later or so, the RC bug was still not fixed, and the underlying
problem was still present, and nothing serious was done, except try hack over
hack to solve this. So, i decided to investigate, and quickly found the cause
in the source code itself. This resulted in four consecutive days, where i
tried to be positive and constructive, and bring the matter forward each
morning, but around the middle of the afternoon, it degenerated again. But i
made efforts four consecutive days, to no avail. In the end, the bug was fixed
accordying to my suggestions, but i was not cited in the changelog.
During that discussion, i happened to be so enraged that i said a few words
which where misplaced, and which Andrew Salomon immediately publicized on
debian-vote in the middle of the DPL election, and then asked for my
expulsion.
During this period, i also learned that my mother had terminal cancer, which
hit me particularly, because she lived on the other side of the world, and i
rarely saw her. This may give some hints, altough not excuse, why i reacted so
badly at that time, and ever since then.
So, let's go back to Andres claim of back then :
1) He said he tried to discuss with me at debconf'05 in helsinki, and that i
was angry and agressive. I have no remembrance of this, and all to the
contrary, i remember debconf'05 as one of the greatest moments of the kernel
team, where we even all went to dinner once together. I may have disagreed
with Andrew on technical basis, but i was at most passionate about my
solution, and not angry and agressive. Furthermore, nobody of the kernel
team said anything about this to me, back then, or later on.
2) He said that i proved agressive and insulting to users and the upstream
kernel maintainers. This is just a plain lie, altough i did rise the issue
of the non-free firmware on LKML, and some took it badly, but others have
said that my words of back then where mostly humble and correct. I *NEVER*
was rude to a user, even clueless newbies or otherwise, and always tried to
be helpful.
3) He had no objection to Manoj telling me to "FUCK YOU", but when i said
something similar or milder to jonas, he immediately went ballistic.
So, Andrew didn't say a word about my behaviour and how it affected him, and
never tried to discuss this with me, until he went for the expulsion, without
following the procedure.
Anyway, with the illness of my mother, and because i was being wronged and
hurt on the emails exchange, i decided to stop reading all mailing lists
except debian-powerpc, and even this one occasionally.
On the night of marsch 26 or so, after my mother almost died, without proper
medical care, all alone in a foreign country, in gloomy surrounding, i needed
to take my mind into something else, and went to read debian-powerpc. I
noticed that some users encountered a problem, which was due to a d-i buildd
problem on the powerpc buildd i hosted at home, half the world away. I made a
hasty guess at the cause, and forwarded the reply to debian-boot, which should
be hable to handle the issue. I got an immediately angry response from Frans
Pop, who had faced the same buildd problem earlier on x86, and had not
transmitted the info to other d-i buildd maintainers, to which after a short
exchange, i sent an email, where i *BEGGED* frans to be cool with me with
regard to the stressy situation i faced personnally. The next day, i was
receiving more agression from Frans, and was harrased until i wrote the
infamous "i will no more be the lead d-i powerpc porter" mail. On which he
jumped and immediately tried to find replacement for me (Colin Watson agreed
to use his powerbook as d-i buildd, even though he had no time, and a
notebook is not the adequate solution for this). I wished him good luck, and
listed all the issues i was aware off, and went of to arrange for oxygen, for
an acompanying doctor, and for medical support at the miami airport, all that
without any help from the insurances. The trip back was ghastly, and my mother
died the day after she returned to france, but at least she could see her
mother, and part of the family again (she missed my two younger brothers
though).
So, after the funeral, and some time to recovery, i turned my attention again
to debian, and looked at what i could use to get me working again, noticed
that the d-i powerpc daily builds had been broken since weeks during my
absence, and decided to investigate and fix it. I then discovered that Frans
and the d-i leadership had not only removed me as powerpc lead porter, had not
done a good job at handling the port and let it be broken, but also removed my
d-i svn access, which in see had no reason to be. And this without telling me.
Anther round of flames and agression from both sides followed, and i decidd
early on that the other side was not acting reasonably on this, and went for
the DPL as mediator. A bit later I was assigned Steve McIntyre as mediator,
and an exchange continued. But after a few days or weeks, there was nothing
happening, and the mediators did bring nothing back from the other party, and
uniquely tried to make me talk to get me to accept the issue.
I even made a reasonable compromise proposal :
- I get svn ci right back, but only work on those areas nobody else is
interested in, like the prep or apus ports (broken back then).
- I don't post on debian-boot, and don't try to discuss technical things,
and in general don't bother the d-i leadership in any way.
This was a proposal that seemed reasonable (even Steve Langasek commented such
when asked), but was at first not even acknowledged by the mediators. I
insisted some, but to no avail, either because Frans rejected it out of the
hand, or the mediators didn't judge it worthy to pursue, to this time i don't
know for sure.
Then some time passed, without movement or news, and when i asked what was
going on, Anthony suddenly had decided that i was wrong in everything and that
frans should be the judge of my good behaviour, and review all my d-i
contributions. This was a receipt for disaster, if ever i saw one, but it was
the final judgement of the DPL, so ...
I had trouble coming to gripes with it, but after some time, i decided to play
with the rules. This ended in patches being ignored in the BTS, me loosing
changes due to svn/BTS/package synchro problems, and more, with Frans even
blaming me about not providing patches i had lost because of this state, and
proving agressive and insulting against me without provocation in bug reports.
But as said, what else was expected from such a setup.
After a few months of trying this, it was no more acceptable, and i was out of
my mind trying to see what else i could do, and during this time two things
happened :
- i was asked to prove the points i reproached to frans.
- i asked for help on irc, and was proposed to try it not with email, but on
a blog or on the wiki.
Given these two facts, i decided, not to dwell on the past, but to prove my
positive and constructive contribution to debian, which you can all still see
on the wiki. I listed all my (20 or 30) patches i submitted accordying to the
rules set by the DPL, and which where applied, or not yet.
(http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/FransPopAndOthersVs.SvenLutherIssue/SvenLuther)
I ended with :
An last a personal message to Frans, remember when we where in Extremadura,
we had a good time, and we worked side by side. I seriously lament that it
all degenerated like it did. I certainly have my part of responsability in
this, but i passed though times, as you know. Let's put pride and arrogance
and remembrance of past hurts aside, and let's again work on d-i all
together, as it should be.
To this followed a nasty episode which almost broke me down, where chealer
disspaeared the wiki page, and played a ugly game with me, but was promptly
but to his place. The pages evolved, and where immediately followed by odious
responses from Holger Levensen and Geert Stappers (taken away in shame since
then), and an agressive note from Joey Hess, where he threatened to stop all
d-i contribution if i was allowed back. Later Frans Pop, when asked about the
wiki page on irc, said :
01:15 <fjp> Yes, I agree it is going on too long. But start acknowledging
that you are the base cause of the whole situation and no joeyh, not aj, not
vorlon, not me.
01:18 <fjp> My honest opinion of it: the biggest load of self-satisfied and
self-centered crap I've ever seen
Since then, i have made numerous proposals of reconciliation, which where all
rejected in the same tone, upto being told to "FUCK YOU".
(I was also told by frans during this time that he was provoking me on
purpose, which put a bit more light to the mail from eddy petrisor earlier on
on debian-boot, where he expressed himself disgusted on how frans had provoked
me and pushed me to extremes. Clearly some conversation happend of which i was
not aware off inside the d-i team. Interesting to notice that later on when
eddy petrisor made some critic of the usability of the g-i partitioner, he was
threatened to follow the same way as myself if i didn't behave).
During this time, another event happened, namely the non-free firmware issue.
Within the kernel team, we where trying to handle this, in the followup of
when i contacted broadcom over the tg3 licence back in 2005, and Frederik
Schueler and myself and a few others where preparing a proposal, slowly as we
where quite busy then. This was in the context of various kernel team members
menacing to leave debian if the firmware was removed, and John and Thomas
being for their removal, and Manoj threatening to fork the kernel tree, and in
general feeling superior because he used to be kernel maintainer back in the
90s, well, being Manoj as we all know him.
At this time, when we informed Steve Langasek about our work, he decided to go
solo, with a proposal, which despite my warnings, managed, in a repetition of
the vancouver proposal, to bring a huge outcry and flamewar, including Steve
Langasek accusing Manoj of vote manipulation, over the presence or absence of
rationale in the actual vote text. Despite this,
managed to speak with all parties in this, both John and Thomas and Maks and
Kyle and others, and kind of got them all to agree that we could not solve the
non-free firmware issue for etch, but where going to work on this later on.
The proposal Frederik had coined was not perfect, but got enough seconds, and
i asked for it to be put to vote. During this time, Anthony Town, as DPL,
asked me to recall my call to vote, in order to find a largely consensual GR,
in the already mined situation. I did try to do so, and the resulting proposal
was indeed consensual, and would have allowed to be a base for negoatiation
with hardware vendors, like we did with tg3 and broadcom, and still release
etch in time, without the 6 additional months of work needed by the d-i team
to properly handle the non-free firmware (ironically, this was in august, and
we could just as well have done this correctly, and avoided the flamewar, and
would still have been ready for the release :). But Manoj proposed a better
wording to Frederik's proposal, which under the cover of esthetic changes
subtly changed its wording to mean the opposite of what was intented, and then
hurried the election in order to stop the consensual proposal to go out, and
resulted in a vote that the RMs said they would not respect before the vote is
even ended.
So, this was a case, where i participated heavily in the discussion, but under
considerable stress, and if i flamed a bit, and was bitter at the end over the
result, this is only understandable, and things would maybe have worked out
better if Steve Langasek had not decided his solo play. At the same time
Debian was under another ugly flamewar over paying or not the RMs, in which
ugly words and menaces where exchanged, and in which i had no party, apart
from a single contribution if my memory serves me well.
So, forward again, end of november, the situation with d-i was still messy, i
was still being agressed and provoked by frans, and i was still over-reacting
and posting in return, even though i often made positive contributions and
more proposals of reconciliation, including a proposal to frans to meet in
live at FOSDEM and solve this in person, which was not replied.
At that time Fabio, agreed to mediate again, and i had big hopes in this. At
that time i had forgotten any hope of getting svn ci access again, and only
wanted that frans stoped bashing me in bug reports, and in general being
agressive with me, and that we meet at FOSDEM to solve the issue. Anthony
Towns didn't properly delegate Fabio as mediator, as he was asked, and Frans
did say he would only abide by the mediation if it suited him. I on the
contrary said that i would abide by the mediation no matter what.
There passed a few weeks which where vastly improven, but suddenly after
christmas, Fabio ruled that i was the cause of all this (citing a single
exchange on irc with Manoj, over some bug report against kernel-package), and
that i should be banned. A discussion followed, on which i was asked to see a
psychiatrist, and which then lead to interesting sub-discussions about how to
solve social problems in debian, including the formation of a social comittee,
in which i participated. Frans did at that time say he had taken "good new
year resolution" and would want to know nothing of me, and Anthony Towns
repeteadly asked me to hold to the ban, which i did in january, except for 3
cases :
- a discussion with a user who had problems booting debian on PReP machine,s
whic i had started before fabio posted.
- when i posted my intention to be DPL, which triggered the expulsion
procedure renewal.
- a mistake i made when trying to arrange a TV for the FOSDEM debian booth.
One interesting thing in Anthony's request for my suspension still :
- in the mediation he proposed, i was explictly allowed to do NMUs of d-i
packages i maintained.
- me doing this lead to two agressions from Frans, where the NEW handling
software was modified to stop me from making d-i uploads.
- Anthony cites this as example of my bad behaviour, while this is something
he himself proposed, and said the would support me in it.
On January 6, Joerg Jaspert called me, and after FOSDEM the expulsion
procedure started, even before the ban ended. During the discussion period of
two weeks, i behaved mostly correctly, despite the agressive and ofen
insulting attacks against me from the expulsion supporters, on the contrary,
Frans, and a few others of the expulsers, replied with very agressive and
hateful replies. During the expulsion period, an overwhelming amount of DDs
voiced their opposition to the expulsion. After the discussion period was
over, we stayed for over 10 days without any news from the DAMs, with the
emotional stress this imposed on me, upto the final expulsion.
5) Conclusion
In conclusion to all this, there are various things that become evident :
- The expulsion procedure was not respected, and full of shadowy parts. It
was not handled in transparency, and there is no proof that this is
something else than the will of the DAMs (and i know Joerg spoke against
the expulsion).
- A vast majority of DDs where opposed to the expulsion (75) as opposed to
the 18 seconders and only 7 people who further supported them during the
discussion, and at least one of the supporters regretted his original
support and took it back.
- I was under constant agression from a very small sub-group of DDs, who are
known for their own vocal attitude and strong character, and happen to be
very near the ruling body of debian (or cabal or whatever you want to call
it). The fact that i was under personal stress did not help me there, nor
the fact that i was mostly isolated, since most people disliking their
behaviour stayed silent.
- Frans Pop shares as much responsability for these events than me, he
rejected all compromise proposals, acted very badly himself in these
events, yet never acknowledged that he may have maybe a part of fault, and
despite having said he didn't want to have anything to do with me in
january, he was apparently foremost in those searching for seconds for the
expulsion.
- Anthony Towns and to a lesser degree Steve McIntyre, share full
responsability for these events, by refusing to take their responsability
seriously, and because they didn't even try to mediate, and where from the
begining fully in favour of Frans Pop, and are so yet to this day.
- The decision did nothing to address the real problem, and did not even
stop its symptom. The only result was to humiliate me more and punish me
for my "bad" behaviour. As thus it was a bad decision. Furthermore it
declared i had reverted to the old mode because i participated in a
conversation while the decision was over-due, without even checking the
content of those mails, and it accepted further accusation without
(Eirich mail) without even further investigation about its veracity and
circunstances
So, all in all, i was unjustly and illegally expulsed, for a behaviour whose
cause is shared between me, and others. To be fair, the punishment should be
applied to all involved, and i thus ask that an equal sentence should be
applied to Frans Pop, Anthony Towns, and Steve McIntyre.
Profundly hurt,
Sven Luther
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