Re: Being part of a community and behaving
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery writes ("Re: Being part of a community and behaving"):
>> We waited two years, during which positions hardened, people got
>> angrier and angrier, and there were increasing demands to force the
>> issue. Serious question: how much longer were we realistically going
>> to wait with zero sign of forward progress?
> The correct reaction to people not adopting your software is to make
> your software better, not to conduct an aggressive marketing campaign
> aimed at persuading upstreams to built it in as a dependency, nor to
> overrun distro mailing lists with advocacy messages.
The traffic on Debian mailing lists that I'm talking about was and is from
people inside the Debian project who believe, as a matter of technical
judgement, that systemd is better, and want their favorite distribution to
use it for exactly the same reasons that you wanted your favorite
distribution to use upstart. I find it really quite irritating, and
disturbing, that you are belittling other people's right to hold and
advocate an opinion that differs from yours, and trying to dismiss the
opinions that they have arrived at with just as much thought and care as
you as some sort of artificial, underhanded, or deceptive campaign.
Please consider the possibility, just for a moment, that what you see as a
"marketing campaign" is simple enthusiasm of technical people for a
technical project that they find delightful and enjoyable to use, and that
they would like to see broadly adopted because it solves problems for
them.
But putting that aside for the moment, I'm talking about what *Debian*
should do. Regardless of what theories you have about what systemd
upstream may or may not do, we, as a project, don't have control over
that, nor should we. We only have control over our own behavior. So the
fact remains: there was a heated, antagonistic project argument over two
courses of direction, and every attempt to find some way to maneuver
around that ran into fundamental conflicts of either technical judgement
or foundational principles. So what should we, as a project, do in that
situation?
Please, when trying to answer this question, try to extend to all sides of
this debate the respect of believing they hold their opinions as deeply as
you hold yours. For example, I consider the GR that you are currently
proposing to be such a monumental violation of fundamental principles of
Debian that, should it pass, I will have to seriously consider whether or
not I want to continue to be part of this project. I realize that this
stance is probably baffling to you; please understand that I find your
stance equally baffling. That is *exactly* the problem: we are at
loggerheads, and yet the project still needs to make a decision. Because
not making a decision is *also* a decision that will *also* make some
people feel fundamentally unwelcome, or like Debian is acting contrary to
the principles they thought they joined the project for.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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