Re: [Summary] Discourse for Debian
<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 12:45:13PM +0100, Neil McGovern wrote:
>> If there is sufficient pushback, I'll delete the instance, move on with
>> my life, and conclude that no one in Debian can possibly try and
>> innovate or do new things unless it is either:
>> * 100% optional for people, or
>> * made completely compatable with the old way of doing things
> Oh, now. This wasn't necessary.
I think it was. The amount of hostility with which Neil is being met for
even trying something new is kind of staggering, and if I were him, I
would be equally upset.
It's way easier to say no than to try to build something new. I wish
people would take that into account and try to engage with what someone is
attempting to accomplish and respect the effort that they're putting into
trying to make Debian better, even if they don't think this effort will
succeed. For example, a whole lot of people have piled on to declare
things that they consider misfeatures in Discourse to be "completely
unacceptable" or other wording of that type, and very few of those people
have asked the obvious question of whether these are things we could
simply turn off, and what would be lost by doing so.
It's easy for the negativity to feel highly asymmetric, and to quickly
reach the conclusion that Debian is not a useful environment for
attempting to accomplish anything new because it's so much easier for
people to block things than it is for people to build new things.
A lot of strenuous objections are equally effective when phrased as
questions about capabilities and configuration options, and are much
easier and less stressful to engage with in that form.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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