Re: CoC / procedural abuse
Ean Schuessler <ean@brainfood.com> writes:
> ----- "Charles Plessy" <plessy@debian.org> wrote:
>> I guess that the story is simpler than this: time-limited bans do not
>> seem to be supported natively in Debian's mailing list engine
>> (SmartList), so if one wants to see our listmasters use time-limited
>> bans more often, then somebody has to spend time to implement this
>> function.
> http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?at
Pointing people at scheduling software that does not, itself, understand
the configuration syntax, know how to remove bans, or is integrated into
the ban workflow is not helpful. You can assume everyone reading this
already knows how at works; that's not the problem.
In order to help a team in Debian one has to approach them, talk to them a
bit and understand the problem and the current methods used (while being
mindful of the fact that they're busy), and then implement something that
works for them. Not just lob suggestions from the sidelines that they've
generally already thought of but haven't had time to act on.
And yes, this is hard, and it means a lot of little stuff doesn't get
done, but that's a problem in every environment I've ever seen: work,
volunteer, open source, whatever. Small tasks are only easy when you've
already invested the effort into being part of the team and understanding
their workflow, or when that team has already found the time to put a lot
of pre-work into making the small tasks easy for non-members; until then,
they require more work to do properly or you just make more work for the
team in the long run.
The actual code may be extremely simple, only two or three lines. It's
getting the right lines in the right place in a way that works for the
people who are doing the day-to-day work that's the hard part.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: